New Delhi: No one is allowed to criticise the Taliban regime’s officials and members publicly, top leader Hibatullah Akhundzada decreed Monday, in yet another clampdown on free speech in Afghanistan.
The order has warned civilians and journalists of public punishment for “baseless” allegations, “detached from reality” that can not be proven before the government.
The decree comes as public flogging and other forms of corporal punishment have become increasingly common in Afghanistan since the Taliban seized power in August 2021.
The Taliban courts have the authority to impose public punishments. For instance, the primary court of Parwan City handed down 15 lashes each to 12 persons facing narcotics-related charges in the central Afghanistan province, the country’s Supreme Court has noted in a recent statement. After the public flogging, the 12 will now serve one to three years of jailtime, the top court has stated, according to Afghanistan-based Amu TV.
In Kabul, Balkh, and Kunar provinces, the Taliban also punish people for sexual offences such as extramarital relations and same-sex relations with public flogging, the SC’s statement has noted.
The disclosures made in the statement have drawn widespread condemnation from the international community.
In 2025, the Taliban regime publicly executed or flogged over 1,000 people, including over 150 women, across Afghanistan, the SC statement has also highlighted.
Common offences that are punished this way include absconding from home, theft, and other activities that the Taliban perceives as against Sharia law.
One of the most shocking cases was the 2 December 2025 public execution of a man in a sports stadium in southeastern Afghanistan’s Khost. A 13-year-old boy reportedly killed the man with three gunshots, while thousands of people, including young children, watched the execution.
Hibatullah Monday also changed the detention rules. Now, if someone is arrested, they can be kept in jail for up to 10 days, instead of the earlier limit of three days. Moreover, no one can be released unless a Taliban court allows it, meaning police or prosecutors can no longer let people go on account of insufficient proof of the crimes they’re suspected of.
Human rights groups have pointed out that such laws are “cruel, inhuman and degrading”, consistently urging the authorities in Afghanistan to follow international law and protect basic rights such as freedom of speech and expression, but to no avail.
(Edited by Madhurita Goswami)
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The only reason Bush and Blair invaded Iraq was so they could take focus and attention away from Afghanistan because they did not want the Taliban to be eliminated (the Taliban had unconditionally surrendered in Dec 2001).
The defeat/elimination of the Taliban would have meant the end of Pakistan (the Afghan part of Pakistan re-joining Afghanistan, and the Indian part of Pakistan re-joining India with the support of the international community), which Bush and Blair opposed.
Within a month and a half of the Iraq invasion, the US and UK had achieved total victory, but Bush deliberately did things which led to an insurgency in Iraq, an insurgency he could have easily crushed anytime he wanted to within the first 2 and a half years of that war, but he deliberately allowed to fester.
For this reason, in people’s heart of hearts, people think the invasion of Iraq was the right thing to do, even though they may pretend otherwise. When they pretend otherwise, they are simply being disingenuous.
Regarding the first 4 years of the war of terror, journalists were totally complicit and they did not do their job of holding Bush to account by asking why America had not and is not crushing the terrorists already and why America is giving them breathing space to fester instead.