There Are Visitors Not Wearing Hijab, The Taliban Bans Women From Visiting Band-e Amir National Park

Band-e-Amir Lake Afghanistan. (Wikimedia Commons/Carl Montgomery)

JAKARTA - The Afghan government under the Taliban issued a ban for women to visit the Band-e Amir National Park in Bamiyan Province.

Afghanistan's Acting Minister of Good and Bad, Mohammad Khaled Hanafi, said there were women not wearing headscarves in the park.

He asked clerics and security agencies to bar women from entering, until a solution is found.

Band-e-Amir is one of the popular tourist destinations in Afghanistan, as well as the country's first national park to be established in 2009, reported the BBC 28 August.

The park is a popular destination for families and a ban on women from coming there will prevent many people from enjoying the park.

UNESCO describes the park as "a group of naturally created lakes with special geological formations and structures, as well as natural and unique beauty".

However, Hanafi said going to the park to have a look was not mandatory, reported the Afghan news agency Tolo News.

Ulama in Bamiyan said women who visited the park and did not follow the rules were tourists and not local residents.

"There are complaints about the lack of or bad hijab, these are not residents of Bamiyan. They come here from other places," Sayed Nasrullah Waezi, chairman of the Bamiyan Shiite Ulama Council told Tolo News.

Meanwhile, former Afghan lawmaker Mariam Solaimankhil shared a poem she wrote on Twitter about the ban, "we will be back, I'm sure of it".

Separately, Fereshta Abbasi of Human Rights Watch noted, women were barred from visiting the park on Women's Equality Day, saying it was "an act that is disrespectful to Afghan women".

Meanwhile, Richard Bennett, UN Special Rapporteur on human rights in Afghanistan, asked why stopping women from visiting Band-e Amir was important to comply with sharia and Afghan culture?

The Taliban are known to have a history of imposing temporary bans on women from certain activities, including banning them from going to school in December 2022.

The ban on visiting the Band-e Amir national park is the latest in a long list of activities women have been banned from since the Taliban returned to power in August 2021.

Recently, the Taliban ordered the closure of hair and beauty salons in Afghanistan. In mid-July, they banned women from taking the national university entrance exams.