Lisa Curtis and Annie Pforzheimer
Introduction
Since the Taliban took power in August 2021, the human rights situation in Afghanistan, especially for women and girls, has substantially deteriorated. Female citizens are banned from attending school past grade six, working in almost all professions, and traveling outside their neighborhoods without a male companion. The Taliban also imposed a strict dress code on women and girls, prevented them from going to parks, and closed all beauty shops—further denying women sources of income and social recreation. The Taliban enforces its harsh edicts through detention, jailing, whipping, torture, rape, and disappearances.
Meanwhile, terrorist threats are growing, especially from the Islamic State Khorasan Province (ISIS-K), which has begun striking targets outside Afghanistan, such as at a concert hall in Moscow in March and at a commemorative ceremony in Kerman, Iran, in January. Regional groups like the Tehrik-e-Taliban Pakistan (TTP) and Central Asia–focused Jamaat Ansarullah are active and face few constraints on their activities from the Taliban—with whom they share core ideological beliefs.6 According to reports by experts affiliated with the United Nations Security Council Resolution 1988 sanctions regime monitoring committee, al-Qaeda leaders are now part of the Taliban’s administrative structure and are constructing their own training camps in the country.
No comments:
Post a Comment