More than a year after returning to power in Afghanistan and promising to respect women's rights, the Taliban are busy crushing the few rights women in the country still have. Women are now banned from parks and gyms in the country, according to a Ministry of Vice and Virtue spokesman who claims the Taliban has "tried its best" to keep them open to women with gender segregation orders, the AP reports. "But, unfortunately, the orders were not obeyed and the rules were violated, and we had to close parks and gyms for women," the spokesman says. "In most cases, we have seen both men and women together in parks and, unfortunately, the hijab was not observed. So we had to come up with another decision and for now we ordered all parks and gyms to be closed for women."
Earlier this year, the Taliban banned girls from middle schools and high schools and brought back an order for women to wear burkas in public. Women have also been barred from most fields of employment. On Wednesday, Reuters reporters witnessed women being turned away from an amusement park in Kabul, including a woman who was turned away with her grandchild. "When a mother comes with their children, they must be allowed to enter the park, because these children haven't seen anything good," she said. "I urged a lot to them, but they didn't allow us to get inside the park, and now we are returning home." (More Afghanistan stories.)
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