Taliban Leaders Tell Female Kabul Municipal Employees to Stay Home

Female city employees in the Afghan capital Kabul were told on Sunday to stay home – indefinitely – by the new Taliban government. The only women who were told that they could return to their jobs are those that cannot be replaced by men, The Associated Press reported. So much for the Taliban’s promise when they took over Afghanistan that “women are going to be very active within our society, within our framework.” That framework apparently precludes women from working, something the Taliban prohibited women from doing when they ran the country in the 1990s, along with keeping women from school and from appearing in public. The order for women to not report for work came after the Taliban on Friday closed the Women’s Affairs Ministry, and opened a ministry for the “propagation of virtue and the prevention of vice,” which will impose Islamic law. Meanwhile, girls in middle school and high school were ordered to stay home from school, while boys returned to school over the weekend.