Taliban Open Fire on Women Protesting the Islamic Dress Code

The story is all too predictable. What could anyone have expected when women in Afghanistan, of all places, decided to take to the streets to protest the Taliban’s Islamic dress code? The South Asia Terrorism Portal (SATP) reported recently that “on June 9, at least two people, including a woman and a child, were killed and many others wounded after Taliban opened fire on protesters in Herat city of Herat Province, reports Amu TV. The violence erupted after residents took to the streets to protest the detention of women and girls accused of violating the Taliban’s dress code.”

It seems that “the demonstration began in Jebrail township, a predominantly Hazara area northwest of Herat city, where men and women gathered in support of women who had been detained by members of the Taliban’s Ministry for the Promotion of Virtue and Prevention of Vice. Taliban opened fire near an intersection known as Bahar-e Zendagi as protesters marched through the area.”

What else did anyone think the Taliban would do? The Taliban, like the rulers of the Islamic Republic of Iran, have only one tool in their box: terror. This is because terror is the only punishment the Qur’an recommends for those who “wage war against Allah and his messenger” (5:33). In both Iran and Afghanistan, those who run the regime and those who support it both assume that to oppose any decree of the regime is to oppose Islam and Allah himself, since all the regime’s policies are based on Islamic law.

The Qur’an says: “Make ready for them all that you can of force and of warhorses, so that by them you may strike terror in the enemy of Allah and your enemy…” (Qur’an 8:60) It also says: “The only reward for those who make war upon Allah and his messenger and struggle to sow corruption on earth,” say, by refusing to comply with Allah’s own dress codes, “will be that they will be killed or crucified, or have their hands and feet cut off on opposite sides, or be expelled from the land. Such will be their degradation in this world, and in the hereafter, theirs will be an awful doom.” (5:33)

The organizers of World Hijab Day haven’t said anything about any of this, and are unlikely to do so. The Hamas-linked Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR) said in 2025 that “World Hijab Day, in its 12th year, is a platform to promote understanding, dismantle stereotypes, and celebrate the empowerment of women who choose to wear the hijab.”

CAIR-New York top dog Afaf Nasher said, “World Hijab Day is an important opportunity to amplify the voices of hijab-wearing women and to combat the prejudice and discrimination they often face.”

Yet the actual oppression related to the hijab is not linked to wearing it, but to not wearing it. Actual incidents of Muslim women being harassed or discriminated against for wearing the hijab in the U.S. or anywhere else are extraordinarily hard to find. It’s much easier to find examples of Muslim women in America who falsely claimed that they were being harassed or discriminated against in order to score points on the left’s insane scale of victimhood worship.

Back on Sept. 16, 2022, in Tehran, the Iranian morality police arrested Mahsa Amini, a 22-year-old woman, for not wearing her hijab properly. Amini later died in a hospital in Tehran, and numerous Iranians charged that she had been tortured to death while in custody. All over the country, protesters took to the streets to protest not against the hijab laws, but against the repressive and brutal Islamic Republic itself.

Other women, and male protesters as well, were killed as the Iranian regime ruthlessly applied the Qur’anic injunction to “strike terror in the enemies of Allah” (8:60). The protests went on for months until the regime began summarily executing protesters, and even then some indomitably courageous Iranians continued to take to the streets to demand their freedom.

It is against that backdrop that World Hijab Day is annually celebrated. For innumerable women in Iran, the hijab is the most visible sign of their second-class status, and of the brutality of the regime that will imprison them for years or even kill them outright for daring to venture out in public without wearing it. None of the virtue signaling leftists who don hijabs on World Hijab Day, however, will remember Mahsa Amini, or the protesters just killed in Afghanistan, as they show the world how resolutely they stand opposed to injustice.