RASC News Agency: The Afghanistan Women’s Movement in Exile has denounced the recent mass arrests of women and girls by the Taliban as part of a calculated, institutionalized strategy to erase female presence from public life. In a forceful statement, the movement condemned the detentions as extrajudicial and arbitrary carried out without legal warrants, judicial oversight, or even informing the families of those seized. Women have reportedly been targeted merely for their style of dress or on the suspicion that they might participate in anti-Taliban protests. The statement portrays the detentions not as isolated abuses, but as a deliberate and systemic assault on the civil and human rights of women an extension of the Taliban’s broader strategy to institutionalize gender apartheid in Afghanistan. By banning women from education, barring them from employment, and suffocating their basic freedoms, the Taliban regime is not only violating the moral principles of humanity, but also breaching key international treaties, including the Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination Against Women (CEDAW) and the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights (ICCPR).
The exiled movement urged the United Nations, the Human Rights Council, and democratic governments not to remain passive in the face of these escalating atrocities. It called for targeted sanctions against Taliban leaders, an immediate halt to financial aid to any entities facilitating the regime’s gender-based persecution, and the unconditional release of all women currently detained. The movement further demanded that an independent international fact-finding mission be dispatched to Kabul and other provinces to assess and publicly report on the Taliban’s mounting human rights violations. Simultaneously, local sources in Kabul have confirmed that Taliban forces have conducted widespread raids across several neighborhoods including Shahr-e-Naw, Qala-e-Fathullah, Dasht-e-Barchi, and Kote Sangi arresting dozens of women under the vague and often abused pretext of “violating hijab rules.” In some incidents, Taliban agents have stormed women’s beauty salons, physically assaulting and forcibly detaining female clients and workers. The precise number of women arrested remains unknown, as the Taliban continues to operate with total opacity and zero accountability.
These latest crackdowns mark yet another alarming escalation in the Taliban’s war on women a campaign that has become one of the defining features of its rule since its return to power nearly four years ago. Despite international pressure and promises of moderation, the Taliban’s actions betray a deep ideological hostility to the very concept of women’s autonomy. What is unfolding in Afghanistan today is not merely repression; it is a state-sponsored erasure of half the population an apartheid regime based on gender. The continued inaction of the global community risks normalizing these atrocities. As the Taliban tightens its grip on power, Afghanistani women are being systematically silenced, stripped of their rights, and erased from public memory while the world watches, largely in silence.
