In stop-start efforts since November, Taliban officials have cracked down on women and girls in the western city of Herat who have been ignoring the hardline group's rules by showing their faces. Enforcement agents are preventing them from entering hospitals and seminaries and pulling them out of public transport.

Initially, women and girls were punished for not wearing a burka — the Afghan burka is typically blue, has a netted opening for the eyes and drapes down around the body, largely constraining the woman wearing it. Later, after what residents described as pushback, officials enforcing the rules relented and allowed women to wear the typical conservative dress in this part of Afghanistan, a voluminous cloak known as a chaddar, along with a face mask.

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The crackdown was ostensibly for women and girls to follow an edict issued in May 2022 by the Taliban that effectively gave two options to women and girls who had reached puberty: they could wear a burka — or a black robe, headscarf, face veil and gloves, leaving only a slit for the eyes. Women's male guardians — their fathers, husbands, brothers or sons — were made responsible for enforcing those rules and were threatened with punishment if their female relatives did not obey. That was followed by more detailed rules issued in August 2024 that fleshed out the earlier edict, known as the Law on the Promotion of Virtue and Prevention of Vice. Women have been detained and even held for days in lockups for violating those rules — but they are implemented haphazardly.

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The two female health workers told NPR that the restrictions on women entering a minibus with men, and the higher price for women to ride in an all-woman bus, meant they simply walked to their hospital jobs: about an hour's march each way. One worker told NPR: "I think they want women not to leave the house at all."