No revealing slipper, women not allowed to go out alone: Taliban diktat

As the women in Afghanistan, especially those who grew up in a Taliban-free country, fear a Taliban-dominated future, families that have taken refuge in Kabul bear testimony to the regressive diktat the insurgent group has already started issuing. According to a report by the Associated Press, a schoolteacher from Takhar province in northern Afghanistan said that after Taliban capture, women were not allowed to go out to the market without a male escort.

Girls riding home in a motorised rickshaw in the Takhar province were stopped and lashed for wearing "revealing sandals", the report said quoting families who have left their homeland and now took refuge in Kabul -- on the sidewalk, in the park.

Those who saw Taliban rule before 2001, for them these diktats bring a flashback of that harrowing time when women were not allowed to study and work. The Taliban also carried out public executions, chopped off the hands of thieves and stoned women accused of adultery.

The Taliban now control more than two-thirds of the country, including Herat and Kandahar, the two of the largest cities of the country. According to reports, it is now just a matter of time that Kabul will also be captured by the Taliban, though Afghan President Ashraf Ghani on Saturday said that he was remobilising the armed forces.

United Nations Secretary-General Antonio Guterres on Friday said horrific reports of Taliban oppression on Afghan women and girls have emerged from areas that have already been seized. "I'm... deeply disturbed by early indications that the Taliban are imposing severe restrictions on human rights in the areas under their control, particularly targeting women and journalists," Guterres told reporters.

Associated Press interviewed Zahra (name changed) who has been working from home but after the Taliban took over Herat, she is not being able to work and she does not know when she will be able to work again. She is apprehensive that she won't be able to play the guitar, her brother won't be able to play football. And the women community of the country, which even reached the parliament in the last 20 years, will again be pushed back to the wall.

Zarmina Kakar, a women's rights activist in Kabul,was a year old when the Taliban entered Kabul for the first time in 1996. Her mother took her out to buy her ice cream and was whipped by a Taliban fighter for revealing her face for a couple of minutes. “Today again, I feel that if Taliban come to power, we will return back to the same dark days,” she said.

(With agency inputs)