Taliban Chief: Afghan Women 'Saved From Oppression' by Regime

Facts

• Ahead of the Eid al-Adha holiday, Taliban supreme leader Haibatullah Akhunzada issued a public statement saying that Taliban rule has made Afghan women "free and dignified," while taking steps to guarantee Afghan women a "comfortable and prosperous life according to Islamic Sharia."¹
• While the UN last week expressed "deep concern" over the disenfranchisement of women under Taliban rule, Akhunzada has said the government is working "for the betterment of women."²
• The Taliban supreme leader claimed progress had been made in protecting women from forced marriages and furtherance of their "Shariah rights" under Islamic law, saying a Taliban decree from 2021 secured a woman's "marriage, inheritance and other rights."³
• Akhunzada has also called on other nations to refrain from interfering in the internal affairs of Afghanistan, saying the Central Asian nation wants to maintain good international relations.⁴
• Since coming to power in August 2021, the Taliban have excluded women from public life, banning them from attending high school, university, parks, and gyms, as well as forcing them out of work at nongovernmental organizations and government jobs.¹
• Last Wednesday, the head of the UN Assistance Mission in Afghanistan told the UN Security Council that the country's treatment of women and girls has made recognition of the Taliban government "nearly impossible."¹

Sources: ¹Al Jazeera, ²France 24, ³CTVNews, and ⁴ABC News.

Narratives

• Narrative A, as provided by Foreign Policy. These remarks from an extremist theocrat are a slap in the face to the women of Afghanistan, who have had their rights rolled back startlingly. Despite promises to be less extreme than previous iterations of the Taliban, the ruling government has increasingly erased women from every domain of public life. These comments are a transparent attempt to try and rehabilitate the image of the Taliban and garner international legitimacy, which no nation has so far fallen for.
• Narrative B, as provided by Bakhtar News Agency. Every nation has the right to govern itself under a system accepted by the population. It was the destructive foreign intervention, not the Taliban, that forced the nation into such dire straits. The oppression that women face is pre-Islamic cultural prejudices, and it is the Taliban that is devoted to eradicating them. Instead of attacking a nation amid a humanitarian crisis, the world would do well to account for the indignities they continue to inflict on the people of Afghanistan.