A new Taliban decree orders Afghanistan's women to veil their faces in public, and if they don't comply, male relatives face punishment

• The Taliban ruled that Afghan women will have to cover their faces in public.
• If women do not comply, their closest male relative could face imprisonment or be fired from government jobs.

The Islamic regime of the Taliban has ruled that Afghan women will have to cover their faces in public in a decree passed Saturday.

According to the decree from Taliban supreme leader Hibatullah Akhundzad, Reuters reported, that the ideal face covering is the all-encompassing burqa.

If a woman does not comply with the new rule, her father or closest male relative will be visited and eventually imprisoned or fired from government jobs, a spokesman for the Ministry for the Propagation of Virtue and the Prevention of Vice said, in a press conference, per Reuters.

Most women in Afghanistan already choose to wear a headscarf but often do not cover their faces in urban areas like Kabul, Afganistan's capital.

Since taking control of Afghanistan in August of last year, the Taliban have introduced draconian laws imposing restrictions on women's freedom.

In March, the theocratic group closed girls' high schools and recently introduced rules limiting women's ability to travel without a male chaperone.

The strict new directives are reminiscent of their Muslim fundamentalist hardline rule in the 1990s, in spite of their claims to have reformed and become more moderate.

UN human rights experts warned in January that Taliban leaders are institutionalizing large-scale and systematic gender-based discrimination and violence against women and girls.

The experts criticized what they described as the Taliban's "attempt to steadily erase women and girls from public life."

In response to the takeover of Afghanistan, the US and other countries have cut development aid, frozen the Afghan government's reserves held in US bank accounts, and imposed strict sanctions on the group.