RASC News Agency: United Nations Secretary-General António Guterres has delivered one of his sharpest rebukes yet of the Taliban’s escalating restrictions on women, condemning their latest decree as “absurd, indefensible, and intolerable.”
Speaking at a press briefing in New York, Guterres declared that the international community can no longer remain passive in the face of Afghanistan’s deepening crisis. “The current conditions are unbearable,” he warned. “The world cannot stay silent while half of Afghanistan’s population is being erased from public life. Women are not only entitled to work; their participation is indispensable to the delivery of humanitarian assistance. Without them, millions of lives especially those of women and children are at risk.”
The Taliban’s newly imposed order bans all Afghanistani women employed by international organizations and NGOs from continuing their work. The directive has triggered an immediate collapse in humanitarian programs across the country. Local reports confirm that critical relief efforts ranging from aid to migrants forcibly returned from Pakistan and Iran, to emergency assistance for earthquake survivors in Kunar have been paralyzed.
Human rights defenders, Western governments, and international aid agencies have denounced the decision as a direct violation of Afghanistan’s obligations under international law. Within the country, women’s rights activists have voiced alarm that stripping women of their livelihoods not only worsens the financial desperation of households but also creates insurmountable barriers to humanitarian access for vulnerable communities.
UN officials have stressed that in Afghanistan’s deeply conservative society, the presence of female aid workers is not optional it is essential. Without women staff, female beneficiaries cannot be reached at all, leaving vast sections of the population deliberately cut off from lifesaving services. “This ban,” one UN official noted, “is not simply discriminatory. It is a calculated act of cruelty that weaponizes hunger and deprivation against the very people the Taliban claim to govern.”
Analysts argue that this measure is part of a systematic campaign of gender apartheid a deliberate strategy to erase Afghanistani women from education, employment, and public life. By sabotaging humanitarian operations, the Taliban has once again shown that its obsession with ideological domination outweighs even the survival of its citizens.
A Kabul-based political observer told RASC: “This is not governance. It is cruelty institutionalized. The Taliban are sacrificing the lives of women, children, and the poor just to entrench their absolute control. They are not leading a state; they are dismantling one.”
Guterres vowed that the UN, alongside its partners, will continue to exert pressure on the Taliban to reverse its decision. He underscored that international engagement must remain firm: “Excluding women from humanitarian work does not merely violate human rights. It dismantles the very mechanisms that keep people alive. This decision must be rescinded immediately.”
