Taliban leader asks the world to ‘stop interfering in Afghanistan’
Agencies
KABUL/ZURICH: The Taliban’s reclusive supreme leader Hibatullah Akhundzada called on Friday for the world to stop telling them how to run Afghanistan, insisting sharia law was the only model for a successful Islamic state.
Akhundzada, who has not been filmed or photographed in public since the Taliban returned to power in August, was addressing a major gathering of religious scholars in the Afghan capital called to rubberstamp the hardline Islamist group’s rule.
Over 3,000 clerics have gathered in Kabul since Thursday for the three-day men-only meeting, and Akhundzada’s appearance had been rumoured for days - although media are barred from covering the event.
“Why is the world interfering in our affairs?” he asked in an hour-long speech broadcast by state radio.
“They say ‘why don’t you do this, why don’t you do that?’ Why does the world interfere in our work?”
Respect women’s rights: UN rights chief to Af
The UN human rights chief urged the Taliban authorities on Friday to respect the rights of women and girls in Afghanistan, which she said were facing the biggest erosion in decades.
Women face hunger, domestic violence, unemployment, curbs on movement and dress, and lack of access to education in a country where secondary schooling for 1.2 million girls has stopped, Michelle Bachelet told a UN Human Rights Council debate in Geneva.
Bachelet said authorities she met during a visit to Kabul in March said they would honour their human rights obligations as far as they were consistent with sharia law. She decried the exclusion of women and girls from the public sphere.