The Taliban, the terrorist group that is in charge of Afghanistan, has implemented a new ban that will prohibit some media outlets from airing any “images of living beings” in the country.”
On Tuesday, an official with the militant group confirmed to The Associated Press that it was starting this new ban. It’s being carried about by their Vice and Virtue Ministry, with enforcement already being carried out in certain provinces.
At this point, it’s not certain whether the rule will apply to every media outlet in Afghanistan, even those that are there from foreign countries.
Back in August, the Vice and Virtue Ministry announced new restrictive laws that would go into effect in Afghanistan, which included women not being able to bare their faces or speak in public.
That announcement marked the first public declaration of such rules since the Taliban quickly regained power in Afghanistan after the botched U.S. military withdrawal from the country in 2021.
Hibatullah Akhundzada, the supreme leader of the Taliban, approved the new legislation. Under Article 17, any images that depict living beings are banned from being published.
Saif ul Islam Khyber, a spokesman for the Vice and Virtue Ministry, confirmed this week that media outlets in the country’s Takhar, Kandahar and Maidan Wardak provinces have been told that they aren’t allowed to publish images of anything that has a soul.
Hujjataullah Mujadidi, the director of the Afghan Independent Journalists Union, said state media was directly told they weren’t allowed to air any such images. That rule was later extended to all media outlets located in those provinces.
As Mujadidi said this week:
“Last night, independent local media (in some provinces) also stopped running these videos and images and are instead broadcasting nature videos.”
Afghanistan is now the only Muslim-majority country that has such a rule in place. Once the Vice and Virtue Ministry announced this legislation, much concern was raised across the world, particularly about laws that are aimed at women in Afghanistan.
In banning women from speaking, reading or singing aloud in public, the Vice and Virtue Ministry said that women’s voices are too “intimate” to do so. Women in the country are also forced to wear veils over their heads while in public.
These are just some of the ways in which the Taliban quickly and abruptly reversed years of progress that women had gained in Afghanistan since the militant group was first removed from power by military forces led by the United States after the 9/11 terrorist attacks.
A new democratic government was installed in Afghanistan following that period, and they ruled for nearly 20 years.
That all came to a quick end, though, when the haphazard withdrawal from Afghanistan was initiated by President Joe Biden in August of 2021. It didn’t take long at all for the Taliban to retake control, even though it was promised that it wouldn’t happen.
