The chief prosecutor of the International Criminal Court said on Thursday he had requested arrest warrants for the supreme leader of Afghanistan’s Taliban government and the country’s chief justice for their “unprecedented” persecution of Afghan women and girls.

       The prosecutor, Karim Khan, said in a statement that the Taliban’s leader, Sheikh Haibatullah Akhundzada, and the head of Afghanistan’s supreme court, Abdul Hakim Haqqani, had committed a crime against humanity: “persecution on gender grounds.”

       “Afghan women and girls, as well as the LGBTQI+ community, are facing an unprecedented, unconscionable and ongoing persecution by the Taliban,” the statement said.

       Since U.S. troops pulled out of Afghanistan in 2021 and the Taliban regained power, the fundamentalist rulers have issued ever-tightening codes of vice and virtue laws that have driven women entirely from public life and from many private activities.

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       The edicts, presented as Muslim religious rules, have excluded women from jobs and almost all public areas. In 2023, the Taliban shut all beauty salons — one of the few public places left in the country where women could congregate outside the home. Afghanistan also barred girls from high school and women from university education — the only country to do so.

       A United Nations rapporteur has described the extreme regime as “gender apartheid.”

       Many women have fled the country, and others are seeking ways to escape from their confined way of life.

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