Since August 2021, the Taliban has launched a ruthless and determined war against Afghan women and girls. As the population grapples with severe humanitarian crises, a lack of education, and the absence of healthcare and other public services, the Taliban prioritizes the systematic regulation and suppression of women’s rights across Afghanistan.
The Taliban’s policies, frequent issuance of oppressive edicts, and aggressive policing of women in public spaces reveal an alarming and obsessive focus on controlling women and stripping them of their rights. During the Taliban’s first regime (1996-2001), Afghan women and girls endured egregious human rights violations that drew global condemnation. The current regime has escalated this oppression, imposing even more draconian restrictions on women’s education, employment, and mobility, with an unwavering commitment to erasing women from public life entirely.
A Terrorist Regime Resurgent
The Taliban remains a regime rooted in terrorism. It has established an exclusive government dominated by poorly educated religious clerics, reviving the Islamic Emirate of the late 1990s and reimposing brutal edicts—particularly targeting women, as well as ethnic and religious minorities. Breaking its promise of universal amnesty, the Taliban continues to detain, kidnap, imprison, interrogate, torture, and execute former officials, women, and civil society activists. Many who have vanished are presumed murdered, their fates unknown to anguished families.
Evidence from Human Rights Watch and The New York Times documents the execution of over 500 former government officials, security personnel, human rights defenders, journalists, artists, and academics. Kabul News reports that the Taliban Ministry of Interior arrested 5,000 individuals in June 2022 alone, underscoring the scale of this repression.
Heroic Resistance Amid Peril
Despite the risks, heroic women persist in resisting through peaceful protests, though their lives hang in the balance. Activists who dare to demonstrate publicly face routine arrests and dire warnings of danger, with some brutally murdered in their own homes.
The Only Regime to Ban Education for Women
The Taliban stands alone as the world’s only regime to deprive women and girls of education. With each new rule, it systematically eliminates women from all facets of public life, enforcing a form of gender apartheid. Women have been forcibly removed from their jobs, devastating family incomes and exacerbating the humanitarian crisis.
Human Tragedy Unfolds
Families, desperate to survive Afghanistan’s worsening crisis, resort to extreme measures, including selling daughters under 10 years old into forced marriages. In a nation where healthcare access has always been limited due to shortages of supplies and personnel, women are barred from seeking medical care without a “mahram” (male chaperone), leading to a surge in maternal deaths during pregnancy and childbirth.
Imprisonment in the Home
Women are mandated to cover themselves head-to-toe in public and remain confined to their homes unless accompanied by a mahram. Public spaces—amusement and nature parks, gyms, beauty salons, and more—are either segregated by gender or entirely off-limits to women under Taliban orders.
Edicts of Oppression and Domestic Violence
Per a Taliban edict, women may only leave home in cases of “necessity,” with men in the family held responsible for enforcing this rule, often fostering domestic violence. If a woman ventures out without a mahram, the male relative faces warnings, summons by local Taliban authorities, and imprisonment for repeated violations. The first Taliban regime frequently beat, flogged, and even killed women for breaching such edicts—a violent practice that persists under the current regime.
A Ministry Turned Into a Tool of Repression
The Taliban shuttered the Ministry for Women’s Affairs, replacing it with the Ministry for the Promotion of Virtue and Prevention of Vice—a de facto morality police. This agency relentlessly issues harsh, misogynistic edicts to obliterate women’s rights. The Afghanistan Independent Human Rights Commission has been abolished, leaving women without a voice.
The World’s Most Dangerous Place for Women
Today, Afghanistan stands as one of the most dangerous countries in the world for women and girls
