Human Rights Watch says the Taliban’s enforcement of the burqa in Herat is an attack on women’s autonomy and violates their rights to work, access healthcare and receive other essential services.

The organisation said the mandatory hijab is part of a broader Taliban strategy to control women’s bodies and exclude them from public life.

In a report published on Wednesday the international rights group said each new restriction imposed by the Taliban further isolates Afghan women and removes them from public spaces. It noted that women in Herat and across Afghanistan have continued to resist the Taliban’s decrees.

Human Rights Watch urged the international community to listen to Afghan women and take urgent steps to hold the Taliban accountable and restore their rights and freedoms. Afghan women and UN experts have increasingly described the Taliban’s restrictions as a form of “gender apartheid.”

The organisation said the repression of women in Herat reflects a wider pattern across the country. The Taliban have ordered women to wear clothing that fully covers their bodies and faces, while the group’s “morality law” classifies a woman’s voice as awrah and requires women to be accompanied by a male guardian in public spaces.

On 4 November, Taliban officials in Herat blocked women without burqas from entering the provincial hospital and other government offices, with several women beaten. Since then, women who are not wearing the chadari, the specific garment mandated by the Taliban, have reportedly been denied government services and barred from public places throughout the province.

The enforcement of the chadari in Herat has drawn widespread condemnation from international organisations and human rights advocates. Doctors Without Borders earlier reported a 28 percent drop in female patients at health facilities in the first days after the ban. Amnesty International has said the Taliban are excluding women and girls from every sphere of life and making their existence “unbearable.”