Islamabad —
Afghanistan’s Taliban regime on Saturday criticised the United States for imposing new sanctions on two of the nation’s leaders over human rights violations, saying strain and restrictive measures wouldn’t clear up the issue.
The transfer got here a day after the U.S. Treasury Department imposed sanctions on 20 people from 9 nations, together with China, Iran and Taliban-controlled Afghanistan, to mark International Human Rights Day on December 10.
Friday’s Afghanistan-related designations included the names of Mohammed Khalid Hanafi, head of the Taliban’s Ministry of Vice and Virtue, and Fariduddin Mahmoud, a member of the group’s all-male cupboard and president of the Afghanistan Academy of Sciences.
The US mentioned the 2 Taliban males had been accountable for “repressing the rights of girls and ladies solely on the premise of their gender”.
The Taliban prohibit Afghan ladies from receiving schooling past the sixth grade and bar girls from most workplaces. The Islamist group seized energy from the US-backed authorities two years in the past and declared its male-only regime the Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan (IEA).
“We condemn the restrictions imposed by the US Treasury Department on two IEA officers,” Taliban spokesman Zabihillah Mujahid mentioned in an English-language assertion on social media platform X, previously often known as Twitter.
He argued that the United States “mustn’t repeat the failed experiences” of the previous and known as on Washington to cease “imposing strain and restrictions” on Washington.
“It is unjust and illogical to accuse different nations of violating human rights after which ban them from getting into the nation, when the US itself is among the greatest human rights violators attributable to its help for Israel,” Mujahid mentioned.
Education Ban
The U.S. assertion on Friday recognized Mahmoud as supporting education-related bans for girls and ladies. It mentioned that members of Hanafi’s ministry “have been implicated in critical human rights violations, together with abductions, floggings and assaults,” and that he has attacked Afghans protesting restrictions on girls’s actions, together with entry to schooling.
“Khalid Hanafi and Fariduddin Mahmoud are complicit in critical human rights violations in opposition to girls and ladies in Afghanistan. They are accountable for denying the rights of half of Afghanistan’s inhabitants,” Karen Decker, cost d’affaires on the U.S. Embassy in Afghanistan, mentioned on the X on Saturday.
In August 2021, U.S.-led worldwide forces withdrew from Afghanistan after 20 years of preventing a battle in opposition to the then-insurgent Taliban, which returned to energy.
“Since August 2021, the Taliban has applied widespread discriminatory insurance policies concentrating on girls and ladies, stopping them from having fun with a variety of rights, together with schooling, employment, peaceable meeting and motion,” the U.S. Treasury Department’s Office of Foreign Assets Control mentioned in an announcement on Friday.
He additionally mentioned that Taliban restrictions have made Afghanistan the one nation on this planet the place girls and ladies are barred from receiving secondary schooling.
Friday’s sanctions freeze all belongings and pursuits within the United States of these designated and prohibit them from doing enterprise with Americans.
De facto Taliban rulers defend their insurance policies, saying they’re in step with Afghan tradition and Islamic legislation, however students and governments in different Muslim-majority nations dispute their claims.
Foreign governments don’t recognise the Taliban because the nation’s reliable rulers, primarily attributable to human rights data and the Taliban’s harsh remedy of Afghan girls.