The Taliban’s ‘morality police’ are regularly inspecting CCTV cameras in women-owned businesses in Herat city to enforce strict hijab requirements, according to local sources.
Herat business owners, who requested anonymity for security reasons, said officials with the Taliban’s Ministry of the Propagation of Virtue and Prevention of Vice check the cameras to assess also women’s behaviour.
“The Taliban’s purpose in patrolling this center is to impose the clothing they want on women,” a saleswoman in Passage-e-Marmar, a women-owned market, said.
The manager of the market has held meetings with the shopkeepers to outline the Taliban’s expectations of women.
“Everyone was told about how to behave outside the house and control their voices. Now all the women understand the rules of the market and follow them,” she said.
Passage-e-Marmar has 33 shops and 11 stalls including clothes manufacturers, ready to wear clothes shops, ornament stores, food market, and cosmetics shops.
The morality police have ordered the clothes stores and manufacturers to install curtains at the entrance gate of their shops in the basement.
“Since the day the Taliban increased the restrictions on women shopkeepers and women’s products in this market under the pretext of enforcing the proper hijab, we are often locked in our shops,“ one of the shop owners said.
“Some women are not even aware of the existence of women’s shops here.”
Since the start of the year, the shop owners in the Banowan-e-Prince center have begun closing their shops because of the lack of customers, with some facing losses of more than fifty percent of their startup capital.
Herat’s Vice and Virtue department has installed banners on the walls of the Great Mosque of Herat to promote the prescribed hijab.
One of the banners shows a painting of a woman wearing a green veil with a caption that describes the hijab as a woman’s “crown of life”.
