Girls are not allowed to go to school beyond the sixth grade, women are not allowed to board planes if they are traveling unaccompanied by a male relative.  Men and women can visit public parks only on special days and the use of mobile phones in universities is prohibited.
It does not stop there.
International media broadcasts – including the BBC’s Persian-language Pashto and Persian-language services – have been off the air since the weekend.  The same goes for foreign drama series.
Ever since the Taliban seized control of the country in mid-August, during the last chaotic weeks of US-NATO withdrawal after 20 years of war, the international community has been worried that they will impose the same strict laws as when they previously ruled Afghanistan. .
The latest attack on women’s rights came earlier this month when the Taliban government, which was exclusively male and religious, broke its promise to allow girls to return to school after the sixth grade.  The move surprised many people – and many in Afghanistan – especially since the Taliban gave all the “necessary assurances” that this was not going to happen.
The United Nations has called the ban on international media “another repressive step against the people of Afghanistan.”  The BBC’s website Pashto said it was “a worrying development in a time of uncertainty and turmoil”.
“More than 6 million Afghans consume the BBC’s independent and impartial journalism on television each week and it is important that they are not denied access to it in the future,” Tarik Kafala, the BBC’s language chief, said in a statement on Sunday.
On Monday, members of the Taliban’s virtue ministry and rival stood outside government ministries, ordering male employees without traditional turbans and beards – considered a symbol of piety – to go home.  An employee who was told to go home said he did not know if and when he could return to work.  He spoke on condition of anonymity, fearing for his safety.
According to a senior Taliban official and Afghans familiar with the Taliban leadership, the impetus for a return to the past – which led to the decrees – came from a three-day meeting last week in the southern city of Kandahar, the Taliban’s birthplace.
The decrees are said to have come from the demands of the Taliban’s hardline supreme leader, Haibatullah Ahmadinejad, who is apparently trying to take the country back to the late 1990s, when the Taliban banned women from education and public places and imposed illegal music.  TV and many sports.
“The younger Taliban do not agree with some of these decrees, but they do not feel comfortable opposing the older ones,” said Torek Farhadi, an analyst who has served as an adviser to previous Afghan governments.  Farhadi, who has been in contact with Taliban officials since their return to power, did not provide further details.
The most pragmatic among the Taliban are resisting the decrees – or at least ignoring them silently, Farhadi said.
Since conquering the country, the Taliban have struggled to move from insurgency and war to governance, with hardliners increasingly at odds with pragmatists over how to run a country in the midst of a humanitarian crisis and a free-falling economy.
The Taliban leadership today is different from the one-man government of Mullah Mohammad Omar, the isolated founder of the Taliban movement in the mid-1990s, who reigned heavily.  A gap is growing between some within the old guard, who support the harsh rule of the past, and a younger generation of Taliban leaders who see the future of engagement with the international community.
The younger generation sees rights for both men and women, although it is still within its interpretation of Islamic law – but what the school allows for girls and women in the workforce.
“The younger Taliban need to talk,” Farhadi said.
However, Akhundzada has set the example for Mullah Omar, preferring to stay in remote Kandahar, out of the public eye, rather than rule from the Afghan capital, Kabul.  It also conforms to the customs of the Pashtun tribe – traditions where women hide and girls marry in adolescence.
Ahunazanda ran a madrassa, or religious school, in Pakistan’s border areas before emerging in 2016 as the new Taliban leader.  Those familiar with Ahunazada say he is not worried about international outrage over the Taliban’s latest restrictive decrees and growing resentment and grievances from Afghans, who are becoming increasingly outspoken.
It was Ahunazanda who reportedly vetoed the opening of schools for girls after sixth grade, as the Taliban had promised to do in late March, at the beginning of the new school year.  On Saturday, dozens of girls protested in Kabul, demanding the right to go to school.
Ethnic Pashtuns elsewhere have resisted Taliban tribal laws.  In Pakistan, where Pashtun ethnic groups also dominate border areas, movements such as the Pashtun Rights Movement have emerged to challenge backward tribal traditions and denounce Taliban interpretations of Islamic law.
Manzoor Pashteen, the movement’s leader, has been a staunch opponent of the Taliban, accusing them of hijacking ethnic Pashtun sentiments and falsifying their traditions – and misinterpreting them as religious rulings.
Akhunzada’s attack on progress comes at a time when the health of Taliban-appointed prime minister, also a hardliner, Hasan Akhund, is reportedly deteriorating.  Akhund did not meet with Chinese Foreign Minister Wang Yi last week when the top Chinese diplomat paid a surprise one-day visit to Kabul.
Farhadi hopes that the younger, more realistic Taliban leaders will find their voice and be asked by Islamic countries and scholars, as well as Afghan scholars and politicians, to approach them.
“The Taliban movement needs reform,” Farhadi said.  “It is slow to come and it is frustrating for everyone involved. But we must not give up.”