This Monday, the Taliban took another step in a policy that, for many Afghan women, boils down to burying them alive. The former guerrilla de facto government has now banned newly built residential buildings from having windows overlooking neighboring houses where women reside. “Windows facing areas traditionally used by women in neighboring homes will be designed in such a way that they are blocked by walls or other means,” explained this Monday the deputy spokesman for the Taliban, Hamdullah Fitrat, who assured that this measure “ It aims to safeguard Islamic principles and the sharia (Islamic law) rights of neighbors.”
The rule will apply to all newly built buildings, but it is not clear whether it will be imposed on already built properties or how it will be decided whether or not a window has views of an area used by women and, therefore, whether they should be blocked. .
Although in theory this law is aimed at protecting women from the view of others, this means that any house can end up with its windows boarded up under the pretext that a man lives there who can see his neighbors. The result may be that many Afghan women, already practically confined to their homes due to successive bans by the Taliban, may end up with the windows of their homes sealed so that their male relatives cannot look at the women in nearby properties.
Like the rest of the more than a hundred edicts that have suppressed women’s rights – adopted by the Taliban since they came to power in August 2021 -, this order comes from the supreme leader of the Afghan fundamentalists, Haibatullah Ajundzadá, confirmed the spokesperson deputy of the fundamentalists.
On August 23, the Afghan rulers ratified a morality law that definitively sentenced the erasure of women from the public sphere and that deprivation of rights that Richard Bennett, UN special rapporteur on human rights in Afghanistan, defined in June as gender-based apartheid in a report to the United Nations Human Rights Council. This rule includes the prohibition of Afghan women from speaking in public spaces and from showing their faces, which, from that day on, they have to cover completely. Women and girls in the Central Asian country cannot even look at men who are not very close relatives.
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Afghan women are prohibited from studying from the age of 12 and working in the Administration, security forces, banks, NGOs and the United Nations. They are also not authorized to obtain a passport or travel without the company of a close male relative. Leisure is also prohibited to them. In addition to the general prohibition on listening to music, Afghan women can no longer enter parks, gardens or gyms. Nor go to hair salons—also closed by the Taliban—or public bathrooms. Five out of ten Afghans do not have access to basic sanitation facilities, according to Unicef data. For many women and girls, these baths were the only way to wash with hot water and have proper menstrual hygiene.
The persecution of Afghan women reached a new peak on December 2 when Ajundzada signed a decree to prohibit women from training in health professions. The consequences of that decision go far beyond the already serious consequence of depriving Afghan women of one of the last remaining pockets of study and work. Without doctors, dentists, midwives or nurses, many women will be deprived of medical care, given that, in several provinces of the country, male health workers are prohibited from treating them.
Even without a formal ban, given the extreme conservatism of Afghan society, in most of Afghanistan it is unthinkable for, for example, a male obstetrician to assist a woman in childbirth. In practice, this order leaves the country’s women and girls without health care “since there will be no female workers to treat them,” Human Rights Watch (HRW) has denounced, and represents a future death sentence for many Afghan women.
The Taliban’s new order on house windows has been received with mixed opinions in the country’s society. “It is a good order, today Kabul is full of tall buildings,” Surosh Ahmad, a resident of the Taimani neighborhood, in the northwest of the capital, told EFE, who assured that the privacy of the residents of the traditional houses ( lower) “is threatened by tall buildings.”
Other neighbors, like Rasool Sharifi, find this law “useless,” stating that Afghans have bigger problems. “The Afghan people are facing many problems, including extreme poverty, hunger, economic catastrophe, unemployment, violation of human rights and thousands of other problems, while the Taliban leader works on building windows,” this man ironically said. The United Nations humanitarian coordination estimates that, in 2024, 23.7 million people—more than half of the country’s population—need humanitarian aid.
