In the latest troubling sign that the Taliban rule in Afghanistan would not bode well for women's rights, the group has set up a ministry for the “propagation of virtue and the prevention of vice" in the building that once housed the Women's Affairs Ministry.
During their previous rule of Afghanistan in the 1990s, the Taliban had denied girls and women the right to education and barred them from public life.
On Saturday, a new sign was up outside the women's affairs ministry in Kabul, announcing it was now the “Ministry for Preaching and Guidance and the Propagation of Virtue and the Prevention of Vice.”
Staff of the World Bank's $100 million Women's Economic Empowerment and Rural Development Program, which was run out of the Women's Affairs Ministry, were also forced out of the complex.
On Friday, the Taliban-run education ministry asked boys from grades six to 12 back to school along with their male teachers. There was no mention of girls in those grades returning to school.
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Previously, the Taliban's minister of higher education, had said girls would be given equal access to education, albeit in gender-segregated settings.