RASC News Agency: In a powerful and damning indictment, Human Rights Watch (HRW) has accused the Taliban of methodically institutionalizing a regime of gender apartheid in Afghanistan, where women are being systematically erased from public life and subjected to relentless persecution. The international watchdog’s latest report underscores an alarming pattern of repression, documenting how the Taliban have escalated their campaign to strip Afghanistani women of every basic freedom and dignity. Over the past several days, dozens of women and girls in Kabul have been arbitrarily detained by the Taliban’s so-called Ministry for the Promotion of Virtue and Prevention of Vice an Orwellian organ of the regime tasked with enforcing regressive dress codes and religious edicts. The detained women were reportedly targeted for “improper hijab,” a vague and abusive term that the Taliban use as a pretext to terrorize and control women’s bodies.
According to HRW, these detentions are not isolated incidents but part of a broader, deeply entrenched architecture of gender-based violence and authoritarianism. “What the Taliban are constructing is not simply a conservative society it is a carceral state for women, one in which merely appearing in public or dressing independently invites arrest and abuse,” the report states. Far from fulfilling their earlier promises to respect women’s rights, the Taliban have instead weaponized morality to establish a rigid system of patriarchal domination. Public spaces have become increasingly unsafe for women and girls under Taliban rule, with street patrols, surveillance, and arbitrary arrests serving as tools to enforce social control through fear and humiliation.
Images emerging from Kabul last week show Taliban agents detaining women in broad daylight, forcibly transporting them to undisclosed locations without charge, trial, or due process. These scenes are disturbingly reminiscent of the Taliban’s first regime in the 1990s except now, the brutality is more systematic, cloaked in the deceptive language of governance and religious virtue. Human Rights Watch has called on the international community to urgently recognize the Taliban’s policies as gender apartheid a crime against humanity under international law. The organization stresses that what is unfolding in Afghanistan is not merely a humanitarian crisis but the deliberate construction of a legal and ideological framework designed to exclude half the population from all spheres of life.
“The Taliban’s campaign against women is not accidental or ad hoc it is central to their worldview,” said a senior HRW analyst. “They are seeking total domination over Afghanistani society by eliminating women’s visibility, autonomy, and agency.” Despite repeated warnings and pleas from Afghanistani civil society, global responses have remained largely symbolic. A few condemnations and expressions of “deep concern” from international bodies have done little to curb the Taliban’s impunity. Women’s rights defenders inside Afghanistan say they feel utterly abandoned by the world, left to resist an increasingly totalitarian regime alone.
What makes the current repression even more insidious is the Taliban’s use of religious language to mask political violence. By conflating faith with authoritarianism, they have constructed an ideological fortress that silences dissent and brands any challenge to their rule as immoral. In the absence of robust international accountability, the Taliban continue to rewrite Afghanistan’s social order one where women are neither seen nor heard, where fear replaces freedom, and where human dignity is extinguished in the name of virtue. Human Rights Watch warns that unless decisive diplomatic, legal, and economic pressure is applied now, the Taliban’s gender apartheid will become a permanent stain on both Afghanistan’s future and the world’s moral conscience.
