Taliban prohibit Afghan women from using gyms and public baths, days after banning them from parks

Days after banning Afghan women from parks and amusement centres, the Taliban announced on Sunday that women arenow forbidden from usinggyms and public baths.Despitepromises from staunch Islamists that they would usher in a lighter version of the harsh rule that characterised their first period in power, which ended in 2001, women are progressively being excluded from public life since the Taliban's return in 2021.

In addition to being prohibited from travelling alone and required to wear a burqa or hijab when outside the home, the majority of female government workers have lost their jobs or arebeing paid a pittance.

Since the Taliban's return in August 2021, most of the country's schools for teenage girls have also been closed.

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"Gyms are closed for women because their trainers were male and some of them were combined gyms," Mohammad Akif Sadeq Mohajir, spokesman for the Ministry for the Prevention of Vice and Promotion of Virtue, told AFP.

He said "hammams" -- traditional public bathing houses that have always been segregated by sex -- were now also off limits.

"Currently, every house has a bathroom in it, so it won't be any issue for the women," he said.

The heightenedrestrictions on women, according to activists, are an effort to prevent them from coming together to organise resistance to the Taliban's government. Small groups of women have frequently launched spontaneous demonstrations in Kabul and other large towns, incurring the anger of Taliban officials who have assaulted and imprisoned them.

(With inputs from agencies)

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