The Ministry of Morale believes that women should cover their faces or wear a burqa. (Representative)
Kabul:
The Taliban’s Morale Ministry has fired more than 280 security force members for failing to grow beards and arrested more than 13,000 people in Afghanistan over the past year for “immoral acts,” officials said Tuesday.
The Ministry of Prevention of Vice and Reproduction of Virtue said in its annual operational update that about half of detainees had been released after 24 hours. The type of alleged offenses or the gender of the detainees was not broken down.
Mohibullah Mokhlis, director of planning and legislation at the ministry, told a news conference that officials had destroyed 21,328 musical instruments in the past year and stopped thousands of computer operators from selling “immoral and unethical” films in markets.
It had identified 281 members of the security forces for not having beards and they had been dismissed, he said, in accordance with their interpretation of Islamic law.
The Morale Ministry, which took over the disbanded Women’s Ministry building in Kabul after the Taliban took over in 2021, has been criticized by human rights groups and the United Nations for restricting women and hampering freedom of expression.
The United Nations Mission in Afghanistan has reported cases in which Morale Ministry officials stopped and detained women, sometimes for a few hours, because they did not conform to their interpretation of Islamic dress.
The Taliban have called the detention allegations “baseless” and say the rules apply their interpretation of Islamic law and Afghan customs.
The Morale Ministry did not provide figures on monitoring women’s clothing or traveling without a male guardian, which authorities have also banned for longer distances. It said a new plan was being worked on to ensure Islamic dress rules were enforced, overseen by the supreme spiritual leader based in the southern city of Kandahar.
“Based on the directives of the Supreme Leader, the draft plan for observing the hijab for women (Islamic clothing) has been formulated and approved,” Mokhlis said.
The Morale Ministry has previously said women should cover their faces or wear a wrap-around burqa and that enforcement would constitute an “encouragement” in which women’s male relatives would be targeted rather than women directly.
Most Afghan women in the conservative country covered their hair in public before the Taliban takeover, but some, especially in Kabul, did not usually cover their faces or wear a burqa.
Mokhlis said they had prevented just over 200 cases of the sale of women and more than 2,600 cases of violence against women.
(Except for the headline, this story has not been edited by NDTV staff and is published from a syndicated feed.)
