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.

Travellers run the gauntlet of Taliban checkpoints, fighting, robberies, kidnappings, and pressure-plate bombs targeting government officials and security forces. Road trips are a dangerous, and often ...

An Afghan woman, wearing a burqa, visits a hospital in Herat with her child. In early November, agents of the the ministry for the prevention of vice and promotion of virtue fanned out across Herat's ...