Taliban Impose Head-to-Toe Coverings for Women

KABUL, Afghanistan — The Taliban authorities decreed Saturday that Afghan girls should cowl themselves from head to toe, increasing a sequence of onerous restrictions on girls that dictate practically each facet of public life.

The decree, by the Ministry for the Promotion of Advantage and Prevention of Vice, drew condemnation from girls’s rights advocates and the United Nations, which described it as one other bald betrayal of Taliban pledges to respect gender equality.

The ministry recommended the burqa as the popular garment for overlaying a girl’s face, hair and physique. But it surely didn’t mandate sporting the garment so long as girls in any other case cowl themselves with a hijab.

The total-body burqa, lengthy emblematic of patriarchal management of girls’s public apparel in Afghanistan, was described by the ministry as “the great and full hijab” — a garment with varied variations that cowl a girl’s hair and far or all of her face and physique.

For the reason that Taliban seized management of Afghanistan in August, Afghan girls have been subjected to a cascade of bulletins proscribing their employment, schooling, journey, deportment and different points of public life. Many had assumed that the return of a burqa-style physique overlaying was the inevitable subsequent step.

The burqa, which leaves solely a girl’s palms and toes seen and features a stitched facial netting for imaginative and prescient, was required by the Taliban when it dominated most of Afghanistan from 1996 to 2001.

The ministry’s definition of “hijab” Saturday described a garment that “shouldn’t be too quick or too tight,” the ministry announcement mentioned. The intent was to obscure the outlines of a girl’s physique, the ministry mentioned.

The United Nations mission in Afghanistan mentioned the Taliban decree would create new strains within the militant group’s efforts to achieve worldwide recognition because the nation’s professional authorities.

In a press release posted on its web site, the mission mentioned the decree “contradicts quite a few assurances relating to respect for and safety of all Afghans’ human rights, together with these of girls and women, that had been offered to the worldwide neighborhood by Taliban representatives throughout discussions and negotiations over the previous decade.”

Shabana Shabdeez, 24, a girls’s activist in Kabul, mentioned she would refuse to cowl herself, “even when they kill me.” She added, “Girls are born free. It’s their primary human proper to stroll round freely.”

In public bulletins relating to girls in latest months, the federal government has typically delivered vaguely worded proclamations left open to interpretation. Cautious of Western condemnation because the Taliban authorities seeks diplomatic recognition and humanitarian assist, many bulletins have appeared to depend on inference and intimidation.

However the ministry, which is liable for imposing the federal government’s interpretation of Islamic legislation, was fairly particular Saturday about punishments for the male head of household of girls who fail to stick to the most recent decree.

At a three-hour information convention dominated by pronouncements selling the non secular virtues of the burqa, ministry officers and Islamic non secular figures dictated a sequence of escalating punishments — together with jail time for male household heads who repeatedly disregarded warnings from authorities officers relating to girls’s apparel.

If a girl didn’t put on the prescribed hijab in public, ministry officers would go to her residence and advise the male head of the household to require her to conform, the ministry announcement mentioned.

Failure to conform would lead to a summons to the ministry, the officers mentioned. If the person nonetheless didn’t observe the rules, he could be jailed for 3 days.

If the jail sentence didn’t compel adherence, the person could be compelled to look earlier than a non secular court docket for additional punishment, ministry officers mentioned.

Male authorities workers whose wives or daughters fail to cowl themselves in public could be topic to suspension or dismissal, the announcement mentioned. And the comparatively few girls nonetheless permitted to carry jobs — equivalent to nurses, medical doctors and academics — might be fired if they didn’t adjust to the laws.

“We wish our sisters to stay with dignity and security,” mentioned Mohammad Khalid Hanafi, the performing vice and advantage minister.

Shir Mohammad, a vice and advantage official, mentioned in a press release that “all dignified Afghan girls” ought to cowl themselves from head to toe. “These girls who usually are not too previous or too younger should cowl their face, besides the eyes,” he added.

For the reason that Taliban takeover in August, extra girls in Kabul seem to have begun sporting burqas. However the majority of girls on the streets of the capital have continued to put on much less encompassing variations of hijabs, with many overlaying solely their hair and leaving most or all of their faces nonetheless seen.

Even beneath the earlier, Western-backed authorities, many ladies — particularly in rural areas and small cities — continued to put on burqas. The historical past of the garment dates again generations in Afghanistan, and is a product of conservative Afghan tradition that lengthy preceded the emergence of the Taliban within the Nineties.

At Saturday’s information convention, non secular audio system delivered dissertations on the Islamic historical past of the hijab and its advantages in accordance with Islamic legislation and apply.

The ministry instructed officers throughout Afghanistan to place up posters in bazaars and different public places with directions and pictures of accredited clothes for ladies. In latest months, small posters have appeared in Kabul depicting head-to-toe hijabs, together with burqas, as correct public apparel for ladies.

On Saturday, ministry officers mentioned the “ruling, significance and advantages of the hijab” ought to be mentioned in mosques and distributed by the information media.

In September, the Taliban transformed the earlier authorities’s Ministry of Girls’s Affairs to the workplace for the Vice and Advantage ministry. Underneath the Taliban authorities of the Nineties, girls who didn’t put on a burqa in public had been typically crushed by vice and advantage non secular police, who additionally delivered warnings to male kinfolk.

Additionally Saturday, a spokesman for an Afghan opposition group that has mounted an insurgency towards the Taliban authorities repeated earlier claims that it had “liberated” three districts within the northern province of Panjshir. Requested whether or not the Nationwide Resistance Entrance, because the motion calls itself, had seized authorities district facilities, the spokesman replied by textual content message, “They had been besieged within the district workplaces,” referring to Taliban officers.

The Taliban authorities spokesman, Zabihullah Mujahid, mentioned on Twitter that “no army incident has taken place” in Panjshir or every other close by areas. Nationwide Resistance Entrance claims “weren’t true, nobody ought to be apprehensive,” Mr. Mujahid wrote.

He added that 1000’s of Islamic Emirate fighters had been in Panjshir and stopping any army advances by the entrance.

The Nationwide Resistance Entrance, or N.R.F., was fashioned by a number of leaders or supporters of Afghanistan’s Western-backed authorities earlier than it collapsed final summer time. It’s a part of a resistance that consists of a smattering of armed fighters unfold throughout the mountains of northern Afghanistan, in accordance with interviews with greater than a dozen resistance fighters and leaders.

The N.R.F. has an estimated a number of hundred fighters, a lot of them low-ranking officers within the former authorities’s safety forces. It’s led by Ahmad Massoud, the son of the deceased Northern Alliance chief Ahmad Shah Massoud. Mr. Massoud left Afghanistan after the Taliban seized energy and has directed the N.R.F. from overseas.

Yaqoob Akbary and Thomas Gibbons-Neff contributed reporting.