Afghanistan: Taliban Replace Ministry for Women with One Restricting Their Rights

Kabul: Afghanistan's new Taliban rulers set up a ministry for the “propagation of virtue and the prevention of vice" in the building that once housed the Women's Affairs Ministry, escorting out World Bank staffers Saturday as part of the forced move.

It's the latest troubling sign that the Taliban are restricting women's rights as they settle into government, just a month since they overran the capital of Kabul. In their first period of rule in the 1990s, the Taliban had denied girls and women the right to education and barred them from public life. 

Separately, three explosions targeted Taliban vehicles in the eastern provincial capital of Jalalabad on Saturday, killing three people and wounding 20, witnesses said. There was no immediate claim of responsibility, but Islamic State militants, headquartered in the area, are enemies of the Taliban. 

The Taliban are facing major economic and security problems as they attempt to govern, and a growing challenge by IS insurgents would further stretch their resources. 

In Kabul, a new sign was up outside the women's affairs ministry, announcing it was now the “Ministry for Preaching and Guidance and the Propagation of Virtue and the Prevention of Vice.” 

Staff of the World Bank's $100 million Women's Economic Empowerment and Rural Development Programme, which was run out of the Women's Affairs Ministry, were escorted off the grounds on Saturday, said programme member Sharif Akhtar, who was among those being removed. 

Mabouba Suraj, who heads the Afghan Women's Network, said she was astounded by the flurry of orders released by the Taliban-run government restricting women and girls. 

Meanwhile, the Taliban-run education ministry asked boys from grades 7-12 back to school on Saturday along with their male teachers but there was no mention of girls in those grades returning to school. Previously, the Taliban's minister of higher education had said girls would be given equal access to education, albeit in gender-segregated settings. 

"It is becoming really, really troublesome. ... Is this the stage where the girls are going to be forgotten?” Suraj said.

 “I know they don't believe in giving explanations, but explanations are very important.” 

 Suraj speculated that the contradictory statements perhaps reflect divisions within the Taliban as they seek to consolidate their power, with the more pragmatic within the movement losing out to hard-liners among them, at least for now.

Statements from the Taliban leadership often reflect a willingness to engage with the world, open public spaces to women and girls and protect Afghanistan's minorities. But orders to its rank and file on the ground are contradictory. Instead restrictions, particularly on women, have been implemented. 

Suraj, an Afghan American who returned to Afghanistan in 2003 to promote women's rights and education, said many of her fellow activists have left the country. 

She said she stayed in an effort to engage with the Taliban and find a middle ground, but until now has not been able to get the Taliban leadership to meet with activists who have remained in the country to talk with women about the way forward. 

“We have to talk. We have to find a middle ground,” she said. 

Also on Saturday, an international flight by Pakistan's national carrier left Kabul's airport with 322 passengers on board and a flight by Iran's Mahan Air departed with 187 passengers on board, an airport official said. 

The official, who spoke on condition of anonymity because he wasn't authorised to speak to the media, said the two flights departed Saturday morning. The identities and nationalities of those on board were not immediately known. 

The international flights were the latest to depart Kabul in the past week as technical teams from Qatar and Turkey have worked to get the airport up to standard for international commercial aircraft.

A Qatar Airways flight on Friday took more Americans out of Afghanistan, according to Washington's peace envoy, the third such airlift by the Mideast carrier since the Taliban takeover and the frantic US troop pullout from the country.