KABUL: Taliban authorities on Tuesday condemned UN accusations that they are violating the rights of women to work in Afghanistan, insisting thousands are employed in the country's public sector.
But Sharafuddin Sharaf, chief of staff at the ministry of labour and social affairs, told AFP that many women were being paid despite not attending work, as offices were not set up for proper segregation of the sexes.
"Working together in one office is not possible in our Islamic system," he said, a day after a United Nations rights expert said there had been a "staggering regression" in women's rights since the Taliban's return to power in August.
He could offer no figure on the number of women working but insisted "not a single female employee has been fired" from the civil service.
However, there have been several protests by women over losing their jobs and demanding the right to work -- some of which have been put down forcefully by the Taliban.
Sharaf said some women only went to work "once in a week to their relevant offices to sign their attendance, and their salaries are paid at their homes".
This takes place in offices where "gender-based segregation is yet to be done," he said, adding that women were at work in the health, education and interior ministries where they are needed.
Sharaf said it was up to the all-male leadership of the Taliban to decide when women "can come to the rest of the offices where they are not coming currently".
His comments come after a UN rights expert said women's freedoms had significantly deteriorated since the Taliban returned.
"There's no country in the world where women and girls have so rapidly been deprived of their fundamental human rights purely because of gender," Richard Bennett, the special rapporteur on the rights situation in Afghanistan said in Geneva.
Government spokesman Zabihullah Mujahid said Bennett's report was biased.
"There is no threat to the lives of women in Afghanistan now, or nobody dishonours Afghan women," he said in a statement late on Monday, adding that they are still being enrolled in public and private universities.
Still, most secondary schools for girls have been ordered to shut across the country, meaning this generation of women university students could be the last.
Several Taliban officials say the ban is only temporary, but they have also wheeled out a litany of excuses for the closure -- from a lack of funds to time needed to remodel the syllabus along Islamic lines.
On Monday, the education minister was quoted by local media as saying it was a cultural issue, as many rural people did not want their daughters to attend school.
Since the Taliban seized power, they have imposed harsh restrictions on girls and women to comply with their austere vision of Islam -- effectively squeezing them out of public life.
They swiftly shut down the ministry of women's affairs and replaced it with the ministry for the promotion of virtue and prevention of vice.
The hardline Islamists have also ordered women to cover up in public, preferably with an all-encompassing burqa.
Taliban reject UN report, say no women fired from government jobs
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Taliban reject UN report, say no women fired from government jobs
- Still, most secondary schools for girls have been ordered to shut across the country
Trump takes unconventional approach to communicating to the public about war in Iran
- The communications strategy opened Trump to criticism that he hadn’t done enough to explain the rationale and objectives of the war
Typical of an unconventional presidency, the Trump administration waited more than 48 hours to make any live, public communication to the American people about why it had decided to go to war with Iran.
President Donald Trump discussed why he launched the attack prior to a White House ceremony honoring military heroes on Monday but took no questions from reporters. Earlier in the day, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth and Joint Chiefs of Staff Chairman Dan Caine briefed journalists at the Pentagon.
The two days previous, Trump delivered two pretaped statements that were released on Truth Social, the social media site owned by the president’s media company, and granted telephone interviews to more than a dozen journalists — several of which produced fragmented responses that, to some, clouded as much as they cleared up.
The communications strategy opened Trump to criticism that he hadn’t done enough to explain the rationale and objectives of the war, even as the American military suffered its first casualties. By contrast, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, who has teamed with the US against Iran, delivered two statements the day the war began and addressed reporters Monday at the site of a missile attack that killed nine people. The Israeli military has held multiple press briefings each day.
“The American people need a commander in chief, and he has been absent in that role,” Rahm Emanuel, White House chief of staff under President Barack Obama, said on CNN Monday. Emanuel, a Democrat, is contemplating a run for the presidency in 2028.
An unconventional strategy leads to criticism
Peter Baker, chief White House correspondent for The New York Times, wrote on social media that “after Trump launched a new war on Iran, he did not rush back to the White House to make an Oval Office address to rally the nation as other presidents have done. He stayed at Mar-a-Lago to attend a glitzy political fundraiser.”
That post provoked a response from Steven Cheung, White House communications director. “Imagine being a reporter so consumed with Trump Derangement Syndrome that he wants President Trump to mimic the failed policies of the past. The truth is that President Trump spent the majority of his time monitoring the situation in a secure facility, in constant contact with world leaders, and made multiple addresses to the nation that garnered hundreds of millions of views. He also took dozens of calls with reporters.”
The calls included one with Baker’s colleague at The Times, Zolan Kanno-Youngs. Trump’s mobile phone number is known to many of the reporters who cover him, and the president often takes their calls for on-the-spot interviews. Besides The Times, he spoke in the aftermath of the attack to journalists for ABC, CBS, NBC, CNN, CNBC, Fox News Channel, The Atlantic, The Washington Post, Axios, Politico and an Israeli television station.
Most of the calls were brief and marginally illuminating; Politico’s Dasha Burns said Trump answered but said he was too busy to talk. The public couldn’t hear what Trump said in the interviews and was dependent upon what the journalists chose to report on the conversations.
“I spoke to President Trump today and he told me that the operation in Iran is going to go very fast,” Libby Alon, a reporter for Channel 14 News in Israel, wrote about her interview on X. “It’s doing very well, and (will) make the people of Israel very happy, and the people of the world very happy.”
The Times reported that in its six-minute chat, Trump “offered several seemingly contradictory visions of how power might be transferred to a new government — or even whether the existing Iranian power structure would run that government or be overthrown.”
In one of his two conversations with Trump, ABC News’ Jonathan Karl said when he asked about the death of Iranian Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, the president said: “I got him before he got me. They tried twice. Well I got him first.” CNN’s Jake Tapper went on the air minutes after his conversation Monday, saying Trump told him “the big one is coming soon,” an apparent reference to a future attack.
Asked for comment, White House spokeswoman Anna Kelly said: “President Trump is the most transparent and accessible president in American history. The American people have never had a more direct and authentic relationship with a president of the United States than they have with President Trump.”
Hegseth briefing concentrates on friendly reporters
Pentagon reporters learned late Sunday about Hegseth’s briefing. Reporters from The Associated Press, Reuters, ABC, CBS, NBC, CNN, Fox News Channel and Stars & Stripes were permitted into the briefing room, but Hegseth did not call on them. Instead, he took questions from NewsNation and Trump-friendly outlets like the Daily Caller, Daily Wire, One America News and the Christian Broadcasting Network. Most mainstream news outlets left their regular stations at the Pentagon last fall rather than agree to Hegseth’s rules restricting their work.
Hegseth denounced the “foolishness” of people wanting to know details of the operation in advance, such as whether Americans would commit to more than air power, and said the operation would continue as long as it took to achieve objections. He initially ignored NBC News’ Courtney Kube when she called out a question: “President Trump put a four-week time limit on it. Are you saying he’s wrong?”
Later, Hegseth denounced Kube for asking “the typical NBC sort of gotcha-type question. President Trump has all the latitude in the world to talk about how long it might take — four weeks, two weeks, six weeks, it could move up, it could move back. We’re going to execute at his command the objectives he set out to achieve.”
Unlike Pentagon briefings in past administrations, reporters were given assigned seats, with the Trump-friendly outlets seated in front. Jennifer Griffin, Hegseth’s former colleague at Fox News Channel who left the Pentagon with other reporters after not accepting his new rules, was seated in the last row.
