Bearing the cost of Taliban's oppression

Almost two years after they seized control of Kabul, the Afghan Taliban are still engrossed in suffocating Afghan women. Education for girls in secondary school and women in university was banned a while ago.

- RAFIA ZAKARIA

Then a ban was imposed on women working in NGOs, adding to the restrictions on women working for the government.

This plethora of curbs eliminating and erasing women from the public sphere was not enough for the Taliban. Recently, women working in beauty parlours came to work to find out that the faces of women on signs advertising their parlours had been erased.

They soon learned that this was the work of the Taliban who have now imposed a ban on beauty parlours as well. According to them, these allwomen establishments were offering services “forbidden in Islam” making a blanket ban necessary.

The offensive and un-Islamic practices, which they identified, included the shaping of eyebrows, the use of other people’s hair to augment a woman’s natural hair and the application of make-up.

This latest ban is expected to have a huge economic impact on Afghan women who inhabit a country where already 85 per cent of the people live below the poverty line. “The beauty salon was our only income, and now I don’t know what to do. How should we pay for our expenses?” one Kabul salonv owner told AP. Her husband, an expoliceman, was already out of a job.