RAWA NEWS:The people of Farah have endured a myriad of social, economic, and cultural challenges for over four decades, and similar to the residents of other provinces, never enjoyed freedom, prosperity, and welfare. However, in the past couple of years, under the oppressive rule of the Taliban, these difficulties have escalated. The impoverished population, mostly daily wage laborers and farmers, are tackling a triple threat of hardships - psychological, economic, and drought - like three deadly misfortunes.      Full news...

The Diplomat:When the Taliban seized power in Afghanistan in 2021, it publicly promised a future where women would be active participants in society, free to study and work within a framework outlined by the group. In a world eager for positive change, the international community hoped that this time, perhaps, the regime would be different from its previous iteration.Fast forward two and a half years and the reality facing Afghan women and girls is grim. As the Taliban have tightened their grip on Afghanistan, they have introduced over 50 decrees that directly curtail the rights of women and girls, weaving a tapestry of restrictions that binds women and girls in Afghanistan in a web of oppression.      Full news...

CPJ:Taliban authorities should immediately and unconditionally release radio reporters Ismail Saadat, Wahidullah Masum, and Ehsanullah Tasal and stop harassing the press for their work, the Committee to Protect Journalists said Thursday.On Monday, the provincial directorate of the Taliban-controlled Ministry for the Promotion of Virtue and Prevention of Vice in eastern Khost Province summoned and detained Saadat of Naz FM Radio, Masum of Iqra FM Radio, and Tasal of Wolas Ghag, according to the exiled Afghanistan Journalists Center watchdog group, the London-based news broadcaster Afghanistan International, and a person familiar with the case, who spoke with CPJ on condition of anonymity, citing fear of reprisals.      Full news...

CPJ:Taliban authorities should immediately and unconditionally release radio reporters Ismail Saadat, Wahidullah Masum, and Ehsanullah Tasal and stop harassing the press for their work, the Committee to Protect Journalists said Thursday.On Monday, the provincial directorate of the Taliban-controlled Ministry for the Promotion of Virtue and Prevention of Vice in eastern Khost Province summoned and detained Saadat of Naz FM Radio, Masum of Iqra FM Radio, and Tasal of Wolas Ghag, according to the exiled Afghanistan Journalists Center watchdog group, the London-based news broadcaster Afghanistan International, and a person familiar with the case, who spoke with CPJ on condition of anonymity, citing fear of reprisals.      Full news...

RAWA News: With the return of the oppressive Taliban regime, the dark and bloody history of our land has reverted, reopening the unhealed wounds of our people, particularly from the initial period of the current medieval group's rule. In both eras of their barbaric governance, the people of this stricken land have borne witness to the most heinous crimes. Bamyan stands as a living testament to the atrocities committed by these malevolent individuals, a legacy that our people will never forget. Despite their silence born from a sense of helplessness, the scars of destruction remain apparent even after two decades.      Full news...

Ms Magazine: In a nationwide women’s consultation, Afghan women have expressed “dread” and “anxiety” over the potential international recognition of the de facto authorities (DFA), with 67 percent stating it would severely affect their lives.The consultations and survey on the situation of women in Afghanistan convened 745 Afghan women from across all provinces. The report was put together by U.N. Women, the International Organization for Migration (U.N. Migration), and the United Nations Assistance Mission in Afghanistan (UNAMA).      Full news...

Stars and Stripes: My sister Malala called me from Afghanistan: “Mom is in the final days of her life and wishes to see you and the rest of the family.” The call abruptly ended. I couldn’t shake the feeling that both the U.S. and the Taliban were monitoring incoming and outgoing calls. “Are you going to throw yourself to the wolves?” my daughter Shabnam said, referring to the Taliban. We have lived safely in the United States for many years now. Sandwiched between my children and my dying mom, I made the decision.      Full news...

Amnesty International: Responding to the double public executions by the Taliban yesterday, Livia Saccardi, Amnesty International’s interim Deputy Regional Director for South Asia, said: “We oppose all executions as a violation of the right to life. The Taliban has been repeatedly carrying them out publicly which is a gross affront to human dignity as well as a violation of international laws and standards and cannot be tolerated.      Full news...

Independent News: The Taliban in Afghanistan have announced plans to restrict or completely block access to Facebook, a move condemned by rights activists. The Taliban’s acting minister of telecommunications and information technology Najibullah Haqqani confirmed the plans in an interview with Kabul-based TOLO News last week.Reeling from two decades of siege and war, millions of people in Afghanistan have limited access to cellular services and internet connection in a widening information blackout.      Full news...

AP News: The Taliban held a public execution on Monday of a man convicted of murder in northern Afghanistan as thousands watched at a sports stadium, the third such death sentence to be carried out in the past five days. The execution took place in heavy snowfall in the city of Shibirghan, the capital of northern Jawzjan province, where the brother of the murdered man shot the convict five times with a rifle, according to a witness. Security around the stadium was tight, said the witness, who spoke on condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to talk to the media.      Full news...

The Guardian: The Taliban’s announcement that it is resuming publicly stoning women to death has been enabled by the international community’s silence, human rights groups have said. Safia Arefi, a lawyer and head of the Afghan human rights organisation Women’s Window of Hope, said the announcement had condemned Afghan women to return to the darkest days of Taliban rule in the 1990s.“With this announcement by the Taliban leader, a new chapter of private punishments has begun and Afghan women are experiencing the depths of loneliness,” Arefi said.      Full news...

BBC News: Teenage Afghan girls have told the BBC they feel “mentally dead” as the Taliban’s ban on their education prevents them from returning to school once again.More than 900 days have now passed since girls over 12 were first banned. The Taliban have repeatedly promised they would be readmitted once a number of issues were resolved - including ensuring the curriculum was “Islamic”. But they have made little comment as a third new school year started without teenage girls in class this week.      Full news...

Aljazeera News: Small groups of Afghan women have gathered in private spaces to demand that harsh restrictions on their freedoms be lifted, despite recent Taliban crackdowns on protests that have seen activists detained. The demonstrations were staged in different locations, including the provinces of Takhar and Balkh, as the world celebrated International Women’s Day on Friday, according to the activists from the Purple Saturdays group – an organisation formed to raise awareness and oppose restrictions on women’s freedoms.      Full news...

UN NEWS: Police enforcement has increased harassment in public spaces and further limited women’s ability to leave their homes, according to testimony from 745 Afghan women participating in the latest survey by UN Women, International Organization for Migration (IOM) and the UN’s Assistance Mission in Afghanistan (UNAMA).The insights follow recent reports of the arbitrary and severe enforcement of the hijab decree, particularly in Kabul, the agencies said – which began publishing quarterly consultations with diverse Afghan women a year after the Taliban took power in August 2021.      Full news...

UN News: Kanni Wignaraja, Director of UNDP’s Regional Bureau for Asia and the Pacific, who recently visited the country, told correspondents in New York that 69 per cent of Afghans are “subsistence insecure” – meaning they do not have enough basic resources. “Something that really hit me … was the harsh impact of continuous natural disasters,” she said, adding that many parts of Afghanistan are facing “dramatic” scarcity of water further setting back development efforts.      Full news...

UN Women News: Since August 2021, Afghan women and girls have been grappling with increasingly restrictive decrees limiting their participation in all aspects of social, economic, and political life. These have confined millions of women to their home, restricting their important contributions to society. Their already dire situation has been compounded in recent months by humanitarian crises. First, devastating earthquakes rocked western Afghanistan in October 2023. Then, since November 2023, hundreds of thousands of Afghans have been forced to return after a Pakistani decree on undocumented migrants went into effect. According to International Organization for Migration (IOM) data, an estimated 80 per cent of those affected are women and children.      Full news...

Indian Express News: Afghan women feel scared or unsafe leaving their homes alone because of Taliban decrees and enforcement campaigns on clothing and male guardians, according to a report from the UN mission in Afghanistan.The report, issued Friday, comes days before a UN-convened meeting in the Qatari capital is set to start, with member states and special envoys to Afghanistan to discuss engagement with the Taliban and the country’s crises, including the human rights situation.      Full news...

The Independent: The Taliban on Thursday executed two men convicted of stabbing by gunfire in Afghanistan’s southeastern Ghazni province. Thousands of people watched the public execution in broad daylight after the Taliban-led Supreme Court convicted the two men for a murder by stabbing. The court identified the two men as Syed Jamal from central Wardak province and Gul Khan from Ghazni but did not clarify who carried out the stabbings.      Full news...

The Hindu News:A Taliban official said journalists were committing “a major sin” by taking pictures, Afghan media reported on Wednesday. Television and pictures of living things were banned under the previous Taliban rule from 1996 to 2001, but a similar edict has so far not been imposed since authorities took back power in Afghanistan in 2021. “Taking pictures is a major sin,” Mohammad Hashem Shaheed Wror, a senior official in the justice ministry, told a seminar for department staff in the capital Kabul on Tuesday, according to footage broadcast by several media.      Full news...

Afghan Women News: Local sources in Balkh province report the shooting of a young woman by unidentified armed individuals in the province. According to the sources, the body of a woman who had been shot was discovered in the village of Kol Ambu in the Balkh district of Balkh province on the morning of Monday, February 5. According to an informed source, this woman was shot by unidentified armed individuals around 4 a.m. Her identity and the motive behind her murder are not yet clear.      Full news...

Human Rights Watch: In the last two and a half years after regaining power in Afghanistan, the Taliban, have created the world’s most serious women’s rights crisis. They have systematically violated the rights of women and girls including as they relate to education, paid employment, freedom of speech and movement, and political participation among many others. The response of the international community has been tepid and seems to lack an appreciation of how the situation in Afghanistan has grave implications for the rights of women and girls globally. More needs to be done to prevent this from developing any further and to reinforce global commitment to gender equality.      Full news...

Afghanistan Time:United Nations Assistance Mission in its latest report has said that the Taliban’s Ministry of Propagation of Virtue and Prevention of Vice played a key role in enforcing restrictions on women’s rights, particularly in areas of work, education, and freedom of movement. The ministry’s actions, including impeding unmarried women and those without a male guardian from working or accessing services, were documented during the reported period.      Full news...

East London Advertiser: The Taliban are restricting Afghan women’s access to work, travel and healthcare if they are unmarried or do not have a male guardian, according to a UN report.In one incident, officials from the Afghan vice and virtue ministry advised a woman to get married if she wanted to keep her job at a healthcare facility, saying it was inappropriate for an unwed woman to work.The Taliban have barred women from most areas of public life and stopped girls from going to school beyond the sixth grade (aged 11-12) as part of harsh measures they imposed after taking power in 2021, despite initially promising more moderate rule.      Full news...

CBS News: Afghanistan’s Taliban rulers have rounded up dozens of women in an apparent crackdown on perceived violations of the group’s strict dress code. Dozens of women and girls were detained briefly last week in Kabul, a senior Taliban spokesperson told CBS News on Monday, confirming what appeared to be a new tactic in the group’s efforts to curb women’s rights. The arrests by the Taliban’s morality police occurred over several days and first came to light via videos and photos posted on social media. The Taliban confirmed the arrests after photos and video clips showed women being loaded onto the back of police pickup trucks in the capital city.      Full news...

Khama Press: Sources from Herat confirm that the Taliban administration has prohibited women’s tailoring in the central region of this province. Simultaneously, some media outlets have reported establishing a specialized women’s market in Balkh. The source, who preferred not to be named in the report, informed Khama Press that Taliban forces entered the city Wednesday morning to inspect commercial markets. Several markets, including all women’s clothing tailoring centres, have been closed as part of this inspection.      Full news...

BNN News: Taliban fighters in Herat province, Afghanistan, launched a crackdown on girls’ education, forcibly shutting down several educational centers. The closures were enforced by physically blocking entrances and sealing gates, striking a blow to female education in a country where it has already been severely curtailed. In Ghazni province, schools were previously closed due to reasons such as male teachers shaving their beards and female teachers not adhering to the hijab dress code. For over two years, the Taliban has enforced a ban on girls attending universities and schools beyond the sixth grade.      Full news...

Human Rights Watch: Hauling women off of a plane when they had almost made their escape to study overseas. Banning women from one of the world’s most stunning national parks. Pushing girls out of school at age 10. Dismissing female nursery school teachers. Shuttering all beauty salons at a cost of 60,000 women’s jobs.The last month or two has been a busy time for the Taliban. As we mark the 22nd anniversary of the 9/11 attacks that led to the Taliban being toppled, they are fully back in charge and deeply unchanged, despite promises to the contrary. These are the latest among what UN experts describe as their “widespread, systematic, and all-encompassing” attack on the rights of women and girls.      Full news...

Gallup News: Prospects remain grim for women and girls inside Afghanistan in 2023, as well as the hundreds of thousands of undocumented refugee women and girls whom Pakistan is currently forcing to return to the Taliban-controlled Afghanistan. As they have since the Taliban’s takeover in 2021, Gallup surveys continue to show that nearly all Afghan women are suffering and most do not feel women in their country are treated with respect. But this year, women’s satisfaction with the freedom they have to choose what they do with their lives has dropped to an unprecedented low. Just 11% of Afghan women interviewed in July said they are satisfied with the freedom they have to choose what they do with their lives, which is a new record low, not just for Afghanistan but for any country or population that Gallup has ever polled.      Full news...

Hasht-e-Subh: The Department for the Promotion of Virtue and Prevention of Vice, under the Taliban’s rule in Ghazni province, has issued a directive prohibiting the treatment of male and female patients in the same building within the province’s hospitals, according to sources.Officials from the Taliban’s Department for the Promotion of Virtue in Ghazni province have warned healthcare facility authorities that violations will result in penalties.      Full news...

Hasht-e Subh: According to the findings of Hasht-e Subh Daily, the Taliban have arrested at least 59 residents of Panjshir province in the past two weeks, both from the province itself and Kabul.These arrests took place in various provinces provinces starting from October 16th of this year. The findings reveal that the Taliban detained 30 individuals from Pajwai, 15 from Dara-e-Abdullahkhel, two from Takhaw village, and two others from Abshar district in Panjshir province.      Full news...