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A woman sits in a public space in Kabul. Under new Taliban laws, a wife who visits her relatives without her husband's permission faces up to three months in prison. Credit: Learning Together.

By External Source
KABUL, Apr 21 2026 (IPS)

The Taliban have announced new laws that effectively legalise domestic violence against women and children. Afghanistan’s supreme leader, Mullah Hibatullah Akhundzada, signed a decree introducing a new criminal code in January. It contains three parts, ten chapters, and 119 articles that legalise violence, codify social inequality, and introduce punitive measures widely condemned as a return to slavery.

“The laws are yet another attack on women and they blatantly violate human rights,” says Mitra (name changed for privacy), a women’s rights activist based in Afghanistan.

The laws, which were leaked to the public by various organizations and media outlets, have left people, especially women, in shock. Yet they are unable to act or even raise their voices. Under the new code, opposing or speaking negatively about Taliban rule is considered a crime and can lead to criminal punishment.

According to Article 32 of the Taliban’s penal code, husbands have the right to physically discipline their wives and children. As long as no bones are broken and no visible bleeding occurs, man’s actions are not considered a crime and carry no criminal punishment.

Even if it is proved in court that violence inflicted on a woman has caused visible injuries or broken bones, the man faces a maximum sentence of only 15 days in prison.

This Taliban law has effectively legalized domestic violence and blocked women’s access to justice.

According to Article 32 of the Taliban’s penal code, husbands have the right to physically discipline their wives and children. As long as no bones are broken and no visible bleeding occurs, man’s actions are not considered a crime and carry no criminal punishment

According to Article 34 of the Taliban’s penal code, if a woman repeatedly visits her father’s home or relatives without her husband’s permission and does not return to her husband’s house, this is considered a crime for both the woman and her family members. The punishment can be up to three months in prison.

A husband has the right to violently assault his wife if she disobeys, according to the new law.

This Taliban decree forces women to remain in their homes under all circumstances, even in the face of threats and domestic violence. Women can no longer seek protection or shelter in their own family homes.

According to documents from the human rights organization Rawadari, the Taliban’s penal code, was signed into law by Mullah Hibatullah Akhundzada on January 7, 2026, and subsequently distributed to provincial judicial institutions for implementation.

The decrees issued by the Taliban are usually kept secret within their judicial institutions and communicated to the public only through mosques and community elders. The public learns of them only when the media and rights organization gain access and publish them.

Taliban rule has effectively divided Afghan society into four classes, with punishment for a crime determined not by the nature of the crime but by the offender’s social status. At the top are religious scholars, who receive advice and caution rather than criminal punishment.

Next comes the elite, which includes those in the ruling class, such as village elders and wealthy merchants. They are subject to a lighter punishment scale and usually avoid prison sentences, for example.

The middle class faces more severe punishment. At the bottom of the ladder is the lower class whose punishment can include public flogging and harsh prison terms.

The new law also employs a term referring to slaves as distinct from free people. Slavery was officially abolished in Afghanistan in 1923. Under the new code, treating people as slaves is back to normal practice. For example, a master has the legal right to discipline his subordinate and a husband his wife. It effectively dismantles the principle of equality before the law.

Mitra says these Taliban laws are a clear attack on women and violate all their human rights. By enforcing these rules, the Taliban have confined women to the four walls of their homes, forcing them to endure any kind of abuse in silence.

“What the Taliban have stated in Articles 32 and 34 makes your hair stand on end. The Taliban see women only as sexual objects. These laws legitimise all forms of violence against women, and they cannot even seek justice or take refuge in their father’s or brother’s home. In effect, this officially imprisons women under the full weight of domestic violence,” she says.

All these provisions were drafted without discussion and have come into force with little discussion and no public input. Their existence only became known when the human rights organization Rawadari obtained the laws and published them on its Pashtun language website. Soon after being signed, they were immediately sent to the provinces to be processed by Taliban-run courts.

As Maryam, a resident of Ragh District in Badakhshan, points out, once the Taliban’s laws are announced in mosques by the local mullahs, they are immediately enforced in districts and villages, and all cases are judged under those rules.

“Most people in our village are illiterate, and even those who are educated or know about women’s rights cannot say anything out of fear. If they even utter one word, the local people turn against them, and trouble follows. Women are forced to accept whatever their husbands say because they have no other choice,” she says.

Since the Taliban took control of Afghanistan, they have been issuing and enforcing decrees and laws that have consistently violated human rights, confining women to the four walls of their homes. But this time, they have gone further, granting legal legitimacy to all forms of violence against women.

Mitra is calling on all human rights organizations and the international community to stand against the Taliban’s actions and not allow them to drag women into a system of slavery from the early centuries. She warns that if the world does not stand with Afghan women, they will be pushed toward destruction and face a major humanitarian catastrophe.

Excerpt:

The author is an Afghanistan-based female journalist, trained with Finnish support before the Taliban take-over. Her identity is withheld for security reasons

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Source : © European Union, 2026 - EP

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By Alon Ben-Meir
NEW YORK, Apr 21 2026 (IPS)

It is hard to exaggerate the dire implications of Trump’s April 7 post on Truth Social, stating that a civilization will die tonight, never to be brought back again,” if no deal is reached with Iran. Such a damning statement implies that he would use ‘weapons of mass destruction,’ i.e., nuclear, to execute his threat.

Obviously, he cannot destroy such a huge country and annihilate a population of 95 million with conventional weapons. Even though Trump was unlikely to carry out his threat, what he said was not taken lightly by either Iran or much of the international community.

International Outrage Over Trump’s Threat

Trump’s outrageous statement has drawn an extraordinary wave of condemnation, from Tehran to the Vatican to international rights bodies.

Amnesty International’s Secretary General denounced Trump’s screed as an “apocalyptic threat,” warning that his vow to end “a whole civilization” exposes “a staggering level of cruelty and disregard for human life” and should trigger urgent global action to prevent atrocity crimes.

Pope Leo XIV called the language “truly unacceptable,” and UK Prime Minister Starmer condemned Trump’s threat, stating that “they are not words I would use — ever use — because I come at this with our British values and principles.”

Together, these reactions, among many others, underscore that Trump’s rhetoric is not being treated as mere bombast, but a genocidal threat that shreds basic norms of international law.

Iranian Officials’ Reaction to Trump’s Statements

The Iranian Embassy in Pakistan mocked the idea that Trump could erase a culture that survived Alexander and the Mongols, insisting that civilizations “are not born over a night and will not die over a night.”

Trump’s vows to “bring [Iranians] back to the Stone Ages” and to let “a whole civilization…die” have, indeed, landed in Tehran not as an outburst. Iranian leaders are treating this language as an open admission of an intent to commit war crimes—and they are already treating it as a narrative of existential struggle with Washington.

In the hands of the Revolutionary Guard, the “Stone Age” threat becomes a propaganda gift: it is proof, they claim, that the United States does not merely oppose the regime, but dreams of erasing an entire people.

The IRGC’s response has been defiant rather than cowed, promising “stronger, wider, and more destructive” retaliation and signaling that any American escalation will be met in kind.

To be sure, many Iranian leaders see Trump’s posts as desperate brinkmanship—a schoolyard bully bluffing nuclear annihilation he cannot deliver. That interpretation may calm nerves around the country, but it might also tempt Tehran to call his bluff, raising the risk of miscalculation.

Under any circumstance, Trump has provided Iran’s rulers the opportunity to claim that any concession wrung from Washington under such apocalyptic pressure is not capitulation. Still, Iran’s millennium-old history attests that these proud people with the richest civilization will not succumb to any threat.

The Iranian Public’s Reaction

Trump’s promise to “hit Iran extremely hard” also operates as psychological warfare against an already exhausted society. They place the threat of physical destruction on top of years of sanctions, economic meltdown, and repression.

For many Iranians, especially parents and the elderly, hearing a US president casually warn that “a whole civilization will die tonight” converts abstract geopolitics into an intimate dread they can imagine and quantify: hospitals without power, children without food and water, people starving to death, and cities lying in ruins.

This deepens their anxiety, concerns, and a sense that they are being collectively punished for decisions made by a mad authoritarian whose genocidal tone hardens a defensive nationalism. Even the Iranians who despise the regime still view the threat as an assault on a 3,000-year-old culture. They would rally around the flag, as they see their own lives as expendable in a struggle where the alternative, as Trump himself spells out, is civilizational extinction.

On the Iranian street and in the diaspora, one hears echoes of Trump’s rhetoric triggering a volatile mix of fear, fury, and contempt that the regime can readily weaponize. For some Iranians, talk of a “civilization” dying reopens the psychic wounds of crippling sanctions and war, making American threats feel dreadfully real, not figurative.

For others, it’s an insufferable insult to an ancient culture that predates the United States by millennia, reinforcing national pride and engendering support even among critics of the clerics.

Trump’s Fitness to Command American Power

These Iranian reactions rebound into US politics because a president whose threats are interpreted abroad as genocidal, unhinged, or clearly insane is not projecting resolve but publicizing volatility and strategic incoherence.

This inevitably undermines deterrence and hands Iran both a recruitment tool and a pretext for escalation if they must.

On the home front, the perception of a man on the loose feeds directly into already fierce debates over Trump’s mental fitness to command American power—arming critics who argue that his apocalyptic language is not just morally repugnant but operationally unthinkable.

This led even some Republicans and national security conservatives to ask whether a commander in chief who casually talks of destroying a “civilization” and whose finger is on the nuclear button can be trusted with the judgment, discipline, and national security on which the US ultimately depends.

When a president of the United States threatens that a whole civilization will die, the world must listen—not because the threat is necessarily credible, but because it exposes the peril of letting unrestrained rhetoric shape global realities.

Trump’s words are not the tantrum of a man out of power; they echo a worldview that wields extinction as diplomacy and gambles civilization itself for theatrical dominance and projection of raw power.

Trump’s declaration that millions might perish is not merely the ravings of an unbalanced mind—it is a chilling testament to how easily words can imperil peace when uttered by one who commands the world’s most formidable military.

His invocation of civilizational death transcends political recklessness; it reveals a moral collapse that renders him ominously unfit to wield influence over American power and global order.

There seems to be no level of disgrace that Trump will not embrace. One day, he threatens to wipe out a whole civilization and exterminate 95 million Iranians; the next, he portrays himself in an AI-generated image as Jesus Christ-like savior healing the sick—a blasphemy that only Trump can commit, debasing the exalted and sublime values of Christianity only to feed his sick soul.

What was once dismissed as bluster must now be recognized for what it is—a warning that when dangerous mendacity meets bottomless ego, humanity itself becomes collateral. The world cannot allow a madman’s narrative to become the language of statecraft.

Dr. Alon Ben-Meir is a retired professor of international relations, most recently at the Center for Global Affairs at NYU. He taught courses on international negotiation and Middle Eastern studies.

IPS UN Bureau

 

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