Taliban forget about women at the inauguration of a new school year

The interim government of the Taliban avoided commenting on female education this Wednesday during an event to commemorate the beginning of the new school year, the third since they came to power in August 2021 and which begins without women in the classrooms.

“Education is a basic need,” said the Taliban’s Education Minister, Mawlawi Habibullah Agha, at an event in which he insisted that the Government would continue “to provide educational facilities for all, without any discrimination”, without referring to female students. Afghan women.

The seizure of Kabul in August 2021 by fundamentalists was followed by a series of restrictions against Afghan society, including a ban on secondary and university education for women.

Many Afghan women were forced to leave school overnight, while others who reached that age limit had to leave school, when their male classmates were allowed to continue their education.

One of them was Nazo, who is now 16 years old and told EFE that she still hoped that the Taliban would announce the re-entry of women into schools at the start of this new educational year.

“Despite not expecting anything from the Taliban, I still hoped for a miracle, our return to school and joining my classmates again, but it didn’t happen,” the young woman lamented.

Of the more than four million Afghan women who studied in Afghanistan before the conquest of Kabul, 1.2 million were secondary and higher education students, according to data from the Ministry of Education during the 2020-2021 academic year.

The Taliban justified this veto under the premises that they required time to adapt the educational content to Islamic law or Sharia, and although they insist on their commitment to the return of the classrooms, they still have not specified a date.

Today Afghanistan is the only country that prohibits education for women, according to the UN.

On the occasion of the new educational year, the UN mission in Afghanistan (UNAMA) today reminded the Taliban in X that “more than 900 days have passed since girls over 12 years of age were prohibited from attending schools and universities ” and asked them to “end this unjustifiable and harmful ban.”