KABUL, Afghanistan – The Taliban authorities on Tuesday ordered a nationwide ban on college training for females, because the hardline Islamists proceed to crush Afghan girls’s proper to training and freedom.
Despite promising a softer rule once they seized energy final 12 months, the Taliban have ratcheted up restrictions on all points of ladies’s lives, ignoring worldwide outrage.
“You all are informed to immediately implement the mentioned order of suspending education of females until further notice,” mentioned a letter issued to all authorities and personal universities, signed by the Minister for Higher Education, Neda Mohammad Nadeem.
The spokesman for the ministry, Ziaullah Hashimi, who tweeted the letter, confirmed the order in a textual content message to AFP.
The ban on increased training comes lower than three months after hundreds of women and girls sat college entrance exams throughout the nation, with many aspiring to decide on educating and drugs as future careers.
After the takeover of the nation by the Taliban, universities had been compelled to implement new guidelines together with gender segregated lecture rooms and entrances, whereas girls had been solely permitted to be taught by girls professors or previous males.
Most teenage women throughout the nation have already been banned from secondary faculty training, severely limiting college consumption.
The Taliban adheres to an austere model of Islam, with the motion’s supreme chief Hibatullah Akhundzada and his internal circle of Afghan clerics in opposition to fashionable training, notably for women and girls.
But they’re at odds with many officers in Kabul and amongst their rank and file who had hoped women can be allied to proceed studying following the takeover.
Women have been pushed out of many authorities jobs — or are being paid a slashed wage to remain at residence. They are additionally barred from travelling with out a male family member, and should cowl up outdoors of the house, ideally with a burqa.
In November they had been additionally prohibited from going to parks, funfairs, gyms and public baths.
In a merciless U-turn, the Taliban in March blocked women from returning to secondary faculties on the morning they had been speculated to reopen.
Several Taliban officers say the secondary training ban is simply non permanent, however they’ve additionally wheeled out a litany of excuses for the closure — from a scarcity of funds to time wanted to transform the syllabus alongside Islamic traces.
Since the ban, many teenage women have been married off early — usually to a lot older males of their father’s selection.
Coupled with financial strain, a number of households interviewed by AFP final month mentioned that securing their daughters’ future by way of marriage was higher than them setting idle at residence.
The worldwide group has made the precise to training for all girls a sticking level in negotiations over help and recognition of the Taliban regime.
“The international community has not and will not forget Afghan women and girls,” the UN Security Council mentioned in an announcement in September.
In the 20 years between the Taliban’s two reigns, women had been allowed to go to high school and girls had been in a position to search employment in all sectors, although the nation remained socially conservative. — Agence France-Presse
