Hasht-E Subh: Local sources in Herat have tragically confirmed the death of a woman due to the cold weather in the Herat province. According to witnesses speaking to Hasht-e Subh, the woman passed away on Wednesday, October 17th, in Taraqi Park, Herat. Originally from the Karukh district, she lived in the open space of Taraqi Park with her family, driven by fear of potential earthquakess speaking to Hasht-e Subh, the woman passed away on Wednesday, October 17th, in Taraqi Park, Herat. Originally from the Karukh district, she lived in the open space of Taraqi Park with her family, driven by fear of potential earthquakes.      Full news...

Rukhshana: Two women have been killed allegedly by their husbands in separate incidents in Kapisa province, while a third married woman has allegedly taken her own life after a domestic dispute in northern Faryab province. A reliable source in Kapisa province, who wished to remain anonymous for security reasons, said a 17-year-old named Mosak was allegedly shot dead by her husband in Chishma area of Hese-Awal area of Kohistan district on Sunday.      Full news...

Associated Press: Afghan women and children were disproportionately killed by the earthquake across Herat province this last weekend because they were more likely to be at home when buildings fell. Many are now concerned about who will raise the children left without mothers. The Afghanistan representative for the U.N. Population Fund, Jaime Nadal, said there would have been no “gender dimension” to the death toll if the quake had happened at night.      Full news...

Hasht-E Subh: The Earthquake in Herat province has claimed the lives of more than two thousand people and injured thousands more. As a result of this earthquake, approximately 13 villages have been destroyed, and hundreds are still trapped under the rubble.On the other hand, sources report that on the first day of the earthquake, the Taliban prevented women who had left their homes for safety from venturing outside. These sources alleged that the Taliban told women they had no right to leave their homes without a male escort. Additionally, the Taliban’s office in Herat had arranged transportation for male journalists to go to the disaster site on the previous day but did not provide the same facilities for female journalists.      Full news...

Reuters: The U.N.’s humanitarian office has announced $5 million worth of assistance for the quake response, but immediate material support has come from a limited few countries. Afghanistan's healthcare system, largely reliant on foreign aid, has faced crippling cuts in the two years since the Taliban took over and much international assistance, forming the backbone of the economy, was halted.      Full news...

ABC News: The death toll from strong earthquakes that shook western Afghanistan has risen to over 2,000, a Taliban government spokesman said Sunday. It’s one of the deadliest earthquakes to strike the country in two decades. A powerful magnitude-6.3 earthquake followed by strong aftershocks killed dozens of people in western Afghanistan on Saturday, the country's national disaster authority said.      Full news...

Rukhshana: An Afghan women protestor and her adult son have been detained by Taliban forces in a raid on the family home in Qala-e-Fatullah in Kabul. Mrs Parsi is one of the protesting women and a member of the women’s movement called the Spontaneous Women’s Movement in Kabul. She has participated in many demonstrations for women’s rights in Afghanistan.      Full news...

Rukhshana: Fears are growing of the Taliban’s moves to expand extremist religious schools in Afghanistan, with more buildings allegedly being claimed for this purpose.Since taking power in Afghanistan over two years ago, the Taliban have been slowly building more religious schools across the country.Two buildings of the Herat teacher training center were turned into jihadist schools in April. Before the Taliban takeover in August 2021, more than four thousand men and women had been studying teaching in the center.      Full news...

AP: The mental health of Afghan women, who have suffered under harsh measures imposed by the Taliban since taking power two years ago, has deteriorated across the country, according to a joint report from three U.N. agencies released Tuesday. Nearly 70 percent reported that feelings of anxiety, isolation and depression had grown significantly worse between April and June, an increase from 57 percent in the preceding quarter, according to the report from U.N Women, the International Organization for Migration and the United Nations Assistance Mission in Afghanistan.      Full news...

Rukhshana: The Taliban’s Vice and Virtue department in Bamyan released a statement that they had a meeting with local traders and businessmen to inform them that tight and thin clothes are “against Islamic Sharia and Afghan culture” and residents should not use such clothes.Fashion shops in Bamyan province have been told to stop importing short or tight dresses to sell at the market, according to shopkeepers in Bamyan Bazaar.      Full news...

VOA: There has been a “disturbing surge” in the number of female suicides and attempted female suicides in Afghanistan since the Taliban took control in 2021, according to a report by British newspaper The Guardian. The Taliban government has not published any statistics on the phenomenon and has forbidden health care workers from sharing the numbers, the newspaper said. However, the report said health care providers agreed to privately share the information from August 2021 to August 2022 “to highlight an urgent public health crisis” that has made Afghanistan one of the few locations in the world where more women than men kill themselves.      Full news...

HRW: Taliban authorities in Afghanistan are committing the crime against humanity of gender persecution against women and girls, Human Rights Watch said in a report released today. Since taking over the country in August 2021, the Taliban have imposed laws and policies intended to deny women and girls throughout the country their fundamental rights because of their gender.      Full news...

BBC: The Taliban government have banned women from visiting the Band-e-Amir national park in Bamiyan province. Afghanistan’s acting minister of virtue and vice, Mohammad Khaled Hanafi, said women had not been observing hijab inside the park. He called on religious clerics and security agencies to forbid women from entering until a solution was found.      Full news...

RFE/RL: Hora Sadat, a prominent female Afghan YouTuber, mysteriously died in Kabul on August 21. Reports suggested the 25-year-old was poisoned after attending a public event. Sadat, who had 300,000 subscribers on YouTube, produced videos on social issues for a mainly young audience. She also participated in public events organized by women in Kabul, although she was not known for publicly criticizing the Taliban.      Full news...

Amu: As per reliable accounts, these women were participating in a protest held at a residence located in Khairkhana area in northern Kabul when the Taliban forces took them into custody.A video obtained by Amu captures the moment when a contingent of Taliban members entered the premises, making efforts to detain the women involved.      Full news...

8am: In a recent and concerning development, Taliban fighters have reportedly detained eight individuals associated with the “Union and Solidarity of Afghan Women” movement following an attack on a gathering of women protesters in Kabul. Sources reveal that the Taliban apprehended these eight individuals within Kabul city and have taken them into custody. The incident unfolded on Sunday, August 20th, when Taliban fighters executed the arrests from a confined location in the Khairkhana district of Kabul.      Full news...

RAWANews: On the 15th August, two terrible years have passed when, according to the plans of the US and NATO, the brutal and misogynist creatures named Taliban, were replaced with the "republican" brothers and took the responsibility for the advancement of the United States colonial policies in our homeland; Two years that brought nothing but the collapse of the last manifestations of freedom, humanity and knowledge, poverty and cruelty for the people and especially the women of Afghanistan...      Full news...

The Guardian: Shima Forugh* was in 10th grade at school when she decided she would join the Afghan army. It had been taboo in Afghanistan’s patriarchal society for women to join the military, but hundreds of women like Forugh broke through this restriction.When she was 21, she joined the 207th Zafar army corps in Herat. Her father, who was also a member of the Afghan army, and mother both supported her decision to sign up.      Full news...

Afghanistan International: On Saturday, two groups of women held demonstrations in Kabul and Takhar against the "tyrannical policies of the Taliban".Sources from Kabul told Afghanistan International that the Taliban had been aware of the women’s demonstration in Kabul and still attacked the demonstrators.However, Afghanistan International received images from the protest site which showed that the female protesters had changed the location of the demonstration and read their resolution in a different area.      Full news...

WION: Gen-Z, their predecessor millennials and even the people from Gen-X often take to social media when they are behind or near the wheel, to show a fleeting world in front of the car's windshield sometimes accompanied by a particular music track.For Zareena, 24, who last year lost her right to attend university in Taliban-ruled Afghanistan's capital Kabul, a behind-the-steering-wheel Snapchat update while she was on Kabul's roads was a part of her life until August 2021. Not anymore.      Full news...

Zan Times: Zarifa Ghafari had arguably one of the toughest jobs in the world: being a female mayor in Afghanistan. But, aside from that political role, Zan Times discovered that some of Ghafari’s claims about her life, education, and experiences contained contradictions and inconsistencies. Zan Times discovered that even basic information, such as her place of birth, is inconsistent across the media. According to her memoir, she was born in Kabul. A piece published by Vanity Fair in March 2023 reports that she was born in Paktia province. However, back in 2018, she told Afghanistan’s EtilaatRoz that she was “born in Maidan Wardak.”      Full news...

The Washington Post: Afghanistan’s primary mental health facility in Kabul has filled with patients who say they are experiencing a different kind of suffering, he said. With the Taliban leadership severely restricting female education and work, there are mounting concerns about the mental health of girls and women. The restrictions and “sudden changes,” said Azim, appear to be at the root of the trauma suffered by most women and girls now seeking help at this hospital.      Full news...

The Guardian: The Taliban administration in Afghanistan has ordered beauty salons to close within a month, the morality ministry said, in the latest shrinking of access to public places for Afghan women. “The deadline for the closing of beauty parlours for women is one month,” Mohammad Sadiq Akif, a spokesperson for the Ministry for the Prevention of Vice and Propagation of Virtue, said on Tuesday, referring to a ministry notice.      Full news...

EFE: Without a husband or grown-up sons to go out and earn in a highly orthodox and patriarchal Islamist society, widows in Afghanistan are left in a lurch, condemned to poverty on account of increasing restrictions on women by the Taliban. Fatima is the oldest of four widows in a 100 square meter house in the northern state of Kandahar, a few meters from the office of the provincial governor. The other three are her 25- and 30-year-old daughters-in-law – each with four children – and her niece, who has one child.      Full news...

Tortoise media: Afghan women working for the UN in Kabul say they have been betrayed by the organisation’s failure to protect them from the Taliban’s gender apartheid. Also in today’s Sensemaker: why an opposition win in Thailand isn’t quite a win.      Full news...

THE SCOTSMAN: The opposition party in Afghanistan has "strongly appealed" to the United Nations Security Council and the international community to refrain from legitimising the Taliban regime ahead of the UN’s quarterly meeting on Afghanistan. The National Resistance Council for the Salvation of Afghanistan (NRCSA) warned international authorities that recognising the Taliban as a legitimate government would be detrimental to the pursuit of peace, stability, and the rights of the Afghan people      Full news...

Devdiscourse: "One of the most illustrative examples of the systematic discrimination against women and girls in Afghanistan today is the relentless issuance of edicts, decrees, declarations and directives restricting their rights, including their freedom of movement, attire and behaviour, and their access to education, work, health and justice,"      Full news...

Amnesty International: The report, ‘The Taliban’s war on women: The crime against humanity of gender persecution in Afghanistan’, presents a detailed legal analysis of how the Taliban’s draconian restrictions on the rights of Afghanistan’s women and girls, together with the use of imprisonment, enforced disappearance, torture and other ill-treatment, could amount to the crime against humanity of gender persecution under Article 7(1)(h) of the Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court (ICC).      Full news...

UN News: This year, some 2.3 million Afghan boys and girls are expected to face acute malnutrition. Of this number, 875,000 will need treatment for severe acute malnutrition, a life-threatening condition. Furthermore, around 840,000 pregnant women and breastfeeding mothers are likely to experience acute malnutrition, jeopardising their ability to give their babies the best start in life.      Full news...

SALAM WATANDAR: “We came to Kabul from Kapisa, hoping that some job would be available for us, but for now, my husband works as laborer and I am also a housewife. It is nearly impossible to pay the expenses of the house of my in-laws, which was used for our livelihood.” said Sheeba, a woman who worked as a teacher before the establishment of the Islamic Emirate. After imposition of restrictions on women, she stayed at home and her husband became unemployed at the same time.Sheeba said that she used to work as a teacher in Kapisa and with the closing of the schools, she became unemployed and now she is in confused and without a future plan. Unemployment has multiplied the pressure of life on her shoulders. “Problems of house rent and food cannot be solved. This situation hurts me and puts pressure on my soul. We have a miserable life.”      Full news...