Credit: Getty Images.

In case anyone thought the situation could not get any worse for women in Afghanistan: It has.

Since the United States and allied forces left Afghanistan in August 2021, the Taliban have turned their country into a totalitarian hellscape for girls and women. In an October decree, the Minister of Propagation of Virtue and Prevention of Vice Khalid Hanafi forbade women from speaking with one another in public.

In Afghanistan, women are forbidden from doing almost everything outside their biological function of getting pregnant and birthing babies. They are denied access to education, travel, work, prayer, singing, dancing, showing their faces, having their voices heard in public and now talking amongst themselves. In his most recent assault on women’s rights, Taliban leader Haibatullah Akhundzada banned women from studying nursing and midwifery, which will lead to more suffering and death in a country where female patients are not always allowed to see a male doctor. The Taliban continue to weaponize religion and the institution of marriage to annihilate girls’ and women’s personhood and agency in a gender apartheid.

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