Afghan girls (file photo)

By RFE/RL’s Radio Azadi
December 8, 2023

Hundreds of thousands of sixth-grade girls in Afghanistan attended the last day of the school year, many with tears in their eyes as they face an uncertain future because of Taliban policies that forbid them from further schooling and restrict their basic human rights.

“These last few days of our studies are very stressful and difficult,” Kainat, a sixth-grader in Kabul, told RFE/RL’s Radio Azadi on December 8, the last day of the current school year before the winter break. “We all cried because none of us will be able to study further. Our teachers tried to console us by saying that school doors might reopen for us some day.”

But for Kainat and the rest of the war-torn country’s females, that day may not come for some time.

Despite pledges of a less-authoritarian rule than in their previous time in power, Taliban militants have sharply restricted the rights and freedoms of Afghan girls and women since taking over the government as international troops withdrew following two decades of intervention.

The ultra-fundamentalist Islamist Taliban rulers have since banned girls from attending school from grade seven onward. They have severely curtailed their employment prospects, mobility, and any public role in society, defying international pressure, domestic protests, and efforts to persuade the militants from rescinding their brutal policies.

The ban on education was prompted by the religious views of the Taliban Chief Justice Abdul Hakim Haqqani and endorsed by the group’s supreme leader, Mullah Haibatullah Akhundzada.

Fatima Siddiq, a primary school teacher in Kabul, told Radio Azadi that the hopelessness felt by girls as they leave the school is haunting.

“I am also a mother of three daughters who will no longer be able to continue their education,” she said. “How is it possible that the [Taliban] government is unable to fulfill its promise of reopening schools?”

The Taliban’s policies are deeply unpopular among most Afghans. Even though dissent is often met with a harsh response by authorities, some people are still willing to criticize the government because the policies are seen as destructive.

In the Muslim nation of some 40 million people, activists and rights advocates accuse the Taliban of implementing “gender apartheid” by denying women education, work, freedom of movement, and deciding how they can appear in public.

But it’s not only females who are bearing the brunt of the government’s policies.

In a new report released on December 6, the global rights watchdog Human Rights Watch (HRW) said that education for boys in Afghanistan under the Taliban rule is at risk, too.

The report, titled Schools Are Failing Boys Too, says curriculum changes, the firing of female teachers, corporal punishment, and other practices risk their education over the longer term as well.

Sahar Fetrat, a women’s rights researcher at HRW and the author of the report, says the Taliban has caused “irreversible damage” to the education of both Afghan boys and girls.

“By harming the whole school system in the country, they risk creating a lost generation deprived of a quality education,” she said.

Copyright (c) 2023. RFE/RL, Inc. Reprinted with the permission of Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty, 1201 Connecticut Ave NW, Ste 400, Washington DC 20036.

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