A shocking new research on the prevalence of violence against women in Afghanistan reveals that the cases of more than 300 women being killed by men since the Taliban took over in 2021 following the withdrawal of the US-led military coalition from the country are just the “the tip of the iceberg” when it comes to the true scale of gender-based violence in Afghanistan.
Beauty salons, which once provided Afghan women with safe space following the Taliban takeover of Afghanistan in 2021 after American-led coalition forces pulled out of the country, were outlawed since 2023, forcing many beauticians and their clients underground.
Amidst mounting reports of sexual violence being inflicted on women and girls held in detention in Afghanistan, video evidence of a female Afghan human rights activist being tortured and sexually abused by armed members of the Taliban has surfaced, believed to be the first direct evidence of such crimes occurring in the country since the Taliban took over in 2021.
As many countries in Central and Western Asia, such as Iran and Afghanistan, have made it mandatory to wear hijab and other forms of Islamic headscarves, Tajikistan, where 96% of its population identifies as Muslim, took the opposite direction and passed a law banning the use of hijab, calling it an “alien garment” as the ex-Soviet country seeks to build a secular national identity.
The United Nations has condemned the Taliban after the ultraconservative administration publicly flogged more than 60 people, including more than a dozen women, in the northern Afghanistani province of Sari Pul.
The Supreme Leader of the Taliban has vowed to start stoning women to death in public as he announced the fight against Western democracy will continue, further marking the Taliban’s quick return to harsh punishments in public after an American-led withdrawal of Afghanistan in 2021 and the Taliban's subsequent return to power following the departure.
For the first time since the Taliban returned to power in Afghanistan following the withdrawal of US-led coalition forces in 2021, the Islamic fundamentalist group officially confirmed that they have arrested women in the country’s capital, Kabul, for wearing “bad hijab.”
Afghanistan has seen a rising surge of women taking their own lives or trying to do so since the Taliban took over the country in 2021 and made attempts to reduce women’s role in public life, showing desperation among Afghan women to escape a regime that constantly deprives them of rights and freedoms.
A spokesperson for a key ministry in Afghanistan’s Taliban government declared on August 17th that Afghan women would lose their value if men could see their faces uncovered in public. He also claimed that many religious scholars agree that women should cover their faces when outside their homes.
