Kabul: The Taliban have banned hairdressers in Afghanistan's Helmand province from shaving or trimming beards, a media report said.
"The Taliban have banned stylish hairstyles and shaving beards in Helmand province in southern Afghanistan," The The Frontier Post reported citing the Taliban's letter.
The publication further stated that officials from the Ministry of Islamic Orientation, at a meeting with representatives of men's hairdressing salons in the provincial capital, Lashkar Gah, advised against styling hair and shaving beards.
The order, distributed on social networks, also contains a request not to play music or hymns on the premises of hairdressing salons, The Frontier Post reported.
"The fighters keep coming and ordering us to stop trimming beards," one barber in Kabul said. "One of them told me they can send undercover inspectors to catch us."
Anyone violating the rule will be punished, Taliban religious police say. Some barbers in Kabul have said they also received similar orders, as per a BBC report. Another barber in the western city of Herat said that although he had not received an official order, he had stopped offering beard trims.
Meanwhile, the Taliban is re-imposing repressive laws and retrograde policies. They are imposing laws that defined their 1996-2001 rule when they enforced their version of Islamic Sharia law.
Amid reports of large-scale human rights violations by the Taliban in Afghanistan, the outfit earlier had put on public display the bodies of four people who were killed after they allegedly carried out a kidnapping in the western city of Herat.
It is been over a month since the Taliban captured Kabul after an aggressive and rapid advance against Afghanistan government forces amid the withdrawal of US and NATO troops from the country.
The country plunged into crisis last month after Kabul fell to the Taliban and the democratically elected government of former president Ashraf Ghani collapsed.
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