The Taliban’s pledge to rule Afghanistan with a gentler hand collapsed as quickly as the government they toppled once the United States left, with the terrorist regime once again subjecting girls and women to their terrifying interpretation of Sunni Islam.
Just as they did when they ruled the country in the 1990s, the Taliban 2.0 seem content to govern through fear and intimidation. The terrorist tactics have raised concerns over the future of life and education for the millions of women and girls still trapped in the Middle Eastern country.
Over the weekend, teenage Afghan girls weren’t allowed to return to school as classrooms across the war-torn country reopened for the first time since the extremist group took over last month.
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The absence of girls in classrooms followed a Taliban decree on Friday ordering male students and their teachers to return to religious seminaries.
The director of an all-girls high school in Kabul has been trying to pin down the Taliban’s plans for girls’ education, but she’s been denied entry to the weekly meetings on education because they are strictly for men.
“They say, ‘You should send a male representative,'” the director of the school told the New York Times. The Taliban bombed her school, Sayed Ul-Shuhada High School, in May, killing 90 schoolgirls.
The harsh reality emerging is that the freedoms and education enjoyed by women and girls for more than two decades since the Taliban were last in power are almost over.
When schools reopened on Saturday, girls in grades seven through 12 stayed home. Some did so out of fear, while others indicated to the media that they were confused about the detail-less directive.
Young girls in grades one through six were allowed back to school, though classes were segregated by gender in grades three through six.
Nazife, a teacher at a private school in Kabul that taught young boys and girls in the same classroom before the Taliban takeover, told Reuters they had changed their policy.
“Girls study in the morning and boys in the afternoon,” she said. “Male teachers teach boys and female teachers teach girls.”
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When the Taliban were last in power, they outlawed all girls from receiving an education. Female students started getting opportunities following the U.S.-led invasion in 2001. Some of the women have gone on to careers in business and government. Others have become teachers, lawyers, and doctors. By 2018, the female literacy rate in the country had hit 30%, according to a UNESCO report.
But since returning to power on Aug. 15, the Taliban have forced older female students to steer clear of school. They have also mandated Islamic hijabs, which cover a woman’s hair, head, face, and body.
On Friday, the compound that housed Afghanistan’s Ministry of Women’s Affairs was converted into offices for the Ministry of Invitation, Guidance and Promotion of Virtue and Prevention of Vice, a religious morality police group that violently enforced the Taliban’s restrictive interpretation of Shariah Law two decades ago.
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Staff of the World Bank’s $100 million Women’s Economic Empowerment and Rural Development Program, which was run out of the Women’s Affairs Ministry, were escorted off the grounds, program member Sharif Akhtar said.
Mabouba Suraj, who heads up the Afghan Women’s Network, said she’s been blindsided by the number of new orders released by the Taliban restricting the rights of women and girls.
“It is becoming really, really troublesome,” she told the Associated Press about the decision to keep middle and high school girls out of schools. “Is this the stage where the girls are going to be forgotten?”
