Afghanistan (MNN) — Afghanistan’s Taliban regime is taking its oppression of women one step further. Now, women across the country are forbidden from baring their faces or even speaking in public.

The ruling came down in a set of new laws approved by the supreme leader at the end of August.

Denise Godwin with International Media Ministries (IMM) says the increasing censorship of Afghan women stands in stark contrast with examples in the Bible.

“When the Taliban says to women, ‘You have no voice. When you leave your home, you can’t even speak. We don’t want to see your face,’ and then you open the Bible, and you find out that an Iranian queen who had Jewish blood (Esther) stood up and spoke for all her people – that’s a pretty dramatic thing. God rescued people through that.”

IMM has been working on a television project called Women of the Bible, and several stories are complete in multiple languages.

“We had a lot of people who are working in the Middle East and North Africa who said, ‘Can you do some more for women? We need more products for women. We’d love dramas,'” says Godwin. “We discussed how about women from the Bible? Because that’s something we had done a lot of projects on.”

Please pray for Afghan women to find their voices and worth in the love of Christ Jesus. Ask God to open doors for these women to meet Christians and be exposed to Gospel resources like IMM videos.

Godwin adds, “We can all be…praying for the ministries that are inside these countries, for the ministries that are working secretly underground in the countries around them as people are able to get in and out.

“We can pray for the Christians that are under persecution in these places because we are their voice. They don’t have a voice. And we can pray for government changes because these regimes are extremely oppressive and these are not what these people want.”