KABUL, Afghanistan — Afghanistan’s Taliban rulers ordered all female presenters on TV channels to cover their faces on air, the nation’s largest media outlet mentioned Thursday.
The order got here in an announcement from the Taliban’s Virtue and Vice Ministry, tasked with imposing the group’s rulings, in addition to from the Information and Culture Ministry, the TOLOnews channel mentioned on Twitter. The assertion referred to as the order “final and non-negotiable,” the channel mentioned.
The assertion was despatched to the Moby Group, which owns TOLOnews and a number of other different TV and radio networks, and the tweet mentioned it was being utilized to different Afghan media as properly.
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Several female anchors and presenters posted their photographs on social media exhibiting them with their faces lined with face masks throughout presenting packages. One outstanding TOLO presenter, Yalda Ali, posted a video of herself placing on a face masks with a caption: “a woman being erased, on orders from the Virtue and Vice Ministry.”
On one station, Shamshad TV, implementation of the order was combined: One female anchor appeared with a face masks Thursday, whereas one other later within the day went with out, exhibiting her face.
During the Taliban’s first time in energy from 1996-2001, they imposed overwhelming restrictions on ladies, requiring them to put on the all-encompassing burqa and barring them from public life and training.
After they seized energy once more in Afghanistan in August, the Taliban initially appeared to have moderated considerably their restrictions, saying no gown code for ladies. But in latest weeks, they’ve taken a pointy, hard-line pivot that confirmed the worst fears of rights activists.
Earlier this month, the Taliban ordered all ladies in public to put on head-to-toe clothes that leaves solely their eyes seen. The decree mentioned ladies ought to go away the house solely when obligatory and that male kin would face punishment for ladies’s gown code violations, beginning with a summons and escalating to court docket hearings and jail time.
The Taliban chief additionally issued a decree barring women from attending faculty after the sixth grade, reversing earlier guarantees by Taliban officers that women of all ages could be allowed an training.