Taliban Beat Care Women Program To Aid Widows Halted After Female Workers Whipped

CARE International said Monday it was suspending an aid program for widows in Kabul because the Taliban religious police dragged five of its local female employees off a bus and beat them.

The Taliban, which already has imposed its strict version of Islamic law on two-thirds of Afghanistan, bans women from working outside the home or interacting with men who are not their relatives.

A CARE report said that on Saturday, police with the Department of Virtue and Suppression of Vice stopped a bus carrying the Afghani aid workers and beat the women with leather and metal whips.

One officer shouting through a loudspeaker denounced foreign aid programs and said Afghans should depend on God for food and money instead, the report said. He called the women “prostitutes” because they worked for foreigners.

“The women were bruised all over, but no bones were broken,” said Paul Barker, CARE’s country director for Afghanistan.

The women, who had been dressed in the Taliban-mandated full-length veil, were monitoring a food program for 10,000 widows in Kabul and had written authorization from the Taliban to do their work, Barker said.

CARE said it was suspending the program until the Taliban guarantees that its workers will be protected.

The Taliban seized Kabul in September and had been fighting a coalition led by ousted Gen. Ahmed Shah Masood and warlord Rashid Dostum, who surrendered his northern stronghold of Mazar-e-Sharif to pro-Taliban mutineers Saturday and fled to Turkey.

The fall of Dostum’s northern provinces put all but two or three of Afghanistan’s 29 provinces under the white flag of the Taliban.

In Mazar-e-Sharif, a desert city 125 miles north of Kabul, the Taliban issued its first edicts Monday to bring the more liberal north in line with its version of Islamic law.

From the loudspeakers on the ancient blue-dome mosque that dominates the city, a cleric ordered women to wear veils and quit their jobs, girls to stop attending schools and shopkeepers to open their stores.

Women were told they could venture outside only if accompanied by a man.

Men were ordered to grow beards. Music was banned.

“Speaking as an Afghan I don’t like this,” said a young man who did not want to be identified by name.