Taliban push back against allegations of gender bias, rights abuses
Voice of America
Taliban Deputy Prime Minister Maulavi Abdul Kabir speaks to Ariana News, Sept. 27, 2024. (Ariana News) FILE - Afghan women wait to receive food rations in Kabul, Afghanistan, May 23, 2023. Afghan women are required to cover their faces and bodies in public.
Taliban leaders in Afghanistan have defended their Islamist rule amid intensified accusations of "gender-based" discrimination against women and girls at this week's U.N. General Assembly. "The situation is not as it is portrayed and propagated abroad," Maulavi Abdul Kabir, the Taliban deputy prime minister for political affairs, asserted in an interview with an Afghan television channel aired Friday. Kabir's comments came a day after nearly two dozen countries jointly supported Germany, Canada, the Netherlands and Australia in their initiative to hold the Taliban accountable for their alleged campaign to systematically exclude women from public life since the Taliban regained power in 2021.
An Indian paramilitary soldier stands guard as Kashmiris queue up at a polling station to cast their vote during the second phase of assembly elections, on the outskirts of Srinagar, Indian-administered Kashmir, Sept. 25, 2024. (Wasim Nabi for VOA) Residents of Faqir Gujri, a remote village in Indian-administered Kashmir, queued for hours at their polling station to cast their votes, Sept. 25, 2024. (Wasim Nabi for VOA)
A portrait of Hezbollah chief Hassan Nasrallah sits amid destruction in a area targeted overnight by Israeli airstrikes in Saksakiyeh on Sept. 26, 2024. An emergency worker cuts concrete blocks as he searches for survivors at the scene of an Israeli airstrike in the town of Maisara, north of Beirut, Sept. 25, 2024.