Taliban minister confronted by rare challenge on trip abroad: women journalists

Three days after being excluded from a press conference fronted by Taliban’s foreign minister in India, women journalists took their seats in a powerful show of force to question him about the social exclusion of Afghan women.

An image from Reuters news agency shows Foreign Minister Amir Khan Muttaqi facing a row of women journalists inside the Afghan Embassy in Delhi on Sunday.

It was a rare audience for the Taliban minister representing an all-male government that over four years has slowly suffocated the freedoms and dreams of Afghan women and girls. “Why are you doing this in Afghanistan? When will they be allowed to go back and get the right to education?” asked prominent independent journalist Smita Sharma.

Read more