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Kabul, Afghanistan
Gyms and public baths are now also off limits to Afghan women, the Taliban confirmed Sunday, days after banning them from parks and funfairs. online news
Women are increasingly being squeezed out of public life since the Taliban’s return last year despite the hardline Islamists promising a softer version of the harsh rule that characterised their first stint in power that ended in 2001.
Most female government workers have lost their jobs — or are being paid a pittance to stay at home — while women are also barred from travelling without a male relative, and must cover up with a burqa or hijab when out of the home.
Schools for teenage girls have also been shuttered across most of the country since the Taliban’s August 2021 return.
“Gyms are closed for women because their trainers were male and some of them were combined gyms,” Mohammad Akif Sadeq Mohajir, spokesman for the Ministry for the Prevention of Vice and Promotion of Virtue, told AFP.
He said “hammams” — traditional public bathing houses that have always been segregated by sex — were now also off limits.
“Currently, every house has a bathroom in it, so it won’t be any issue for the women,” he said.
One video clip circulating on social media — which could not immediately be verified — showed a group of women, backs to the camera, lamenting the gym ban.
“It’s a women-only gym — the teachers and trainers are all women,” a voice says, breaking with emotion.
“You can’t just ban us from everything. Do we not have the right to anything at all?”
Activists have said the increasing restrictions on women are an attempt to stop them from gathering to organise opposition to the Taliban’s rule.
Small groups of women have staged frequent flash protests in Kabul and other major cities, risking the wrath of Taliban officials who have beaten and detained them.
Earlier this month the United Nations voiced concern after the Taliban disrupted a press conference in the capital, submitting female participants to body searches and detaining the event organiser and several others.
ash-fox/mtp
© Agence France-Presse. All rights are reserved.
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Notes from APS Radio News
The “Cost of War”, a project affiliated with Brown University, has itemized the costs associated with the wars in Iraq and in Afghanistan:
Over 801,000 people have died in the post-9/11 wars due to direct war violence, and several times as many due to the reverberating effects of war
Over 335,000 civilians have been killed as a result of the fighting
37 million — the number of war refugees and displaced persons
The US federal price tag for the post-9/11 wars is over $6.4 trillion
The US government is conducting counterterror activities in 85 countries
The wars have been accompanied by violations of human rights and civil liberties, in the US and abroad.
In addition, the website makes mention of this fact: Since the commencement of these wars, there have been 30,177 suicides of veterans of these wars.
According to a number of economists, the expenditure of vast sums of money—trillions of dollars—on these wars has reduced substantially the purchasing power of the dollar.
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Observers have called inflation a “hidden tax”.
During the 1990’s the Clinton administration gave tacit if not explicit support to the Taliban government that took over the country during that time after over a decade of US and Soviet interventions in Afghanistan in the 1980’s.
During the late 1970’s then National Security Advisor Zbigniew Brzezinski oversaw surrpetitious intervention, which, in its turn, caused the secular government in Afghanistan to petition the Soviet Union to intervene.
According to the author Jean-Charles Brisard, in the summer of 2001, representatives of the Bush Administration and those of Unocal held a series of meetings with representatives of the Taliban government, for the purpose of obtaining rights of way for the emplacement & construction of a massive pipeline.
When the negotiations came to grief, Bush representatives threatened the Taliban with attacks against the country, Mr. Brisard described in his book, “Forbidden Truth“.
Following the commencement of Soviet and US intervention in Afghanistan in the 1980’s, the country devloved into spheres of influnece dominated by various warlords.
The Pashtuns are the largest ethnic group in Afghanistan; they form a substantial precentage of the population on both sides of Afghanistan’s border with Pakistan.
The Taliban are comprised of members of the Pashtuns, which are the largest ethnic group in Afghanistan.
During the 1960’s and 1970’s, compared to the the 1990’s and beyond, Afghanistan had governments that were deemed more secular.
During that time women attended schools and were more likely to wear Western type clothing.
As a result of actions and policies implemented National Security advisor, Zbigniew Brzezinski, during the Carter administration, the government in Afghanistan in the late 1970’s requested Soviet assistance.
After the Soviet armed forces had entered Afghanistan, the CIA funded and armed groups like the Mujahideen and other militant Islamists.
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