ITV News International Affairs Editor Rageh Omaar reports on the unexpected U-turn
The Taliban was shocked Afghanistan after they unexpectedly canceled the opening of schools for girls over 11 years of age.
The movement relinquishes a promise made when it took over the country to reassert its hard-line base at the expense of the further alienation of the international community.
It is bound to disrupt the Taliban’s efforts to gain recognition from potential international donors at a time when the country is embroiled in a worsening humanitarian crisis.
The international community has called on Taliban leaders to reopen schools and give women their right to the public sphere.
The decline was so sudden that the Ministry of Education and several schools were monitored on Wednesday. Some girls in higher grades are back in school, only to be told to go home.
Aid organizations said the movement has exacerbated uncertainty surrounding the future of Afghanistan as the Taliban leadership appears to be fighting to get on the same page as it is changing from fighting to governing.
Waheedullah Hashmi, external relations and donor representative with the Taliban-led administration, said the decision was made late Tuesday night.
“We are not saying they will be closed forever,” Hashmi added.
The religiously driven Taliban administration fears continuing to enroll girls over the sixth grade could alienate their rural base, Hashmi said.
“The management did not decide when and how they would allow the girls to return to school,” he said.
While he assumed that urban centers mostly supported education for girls, much of rural Afghanistan was opposed, especially in Pashtun tribal regions.
In some rural areas, a brother will fire a city-dwelling brother who allows a daughter to go to school, Hashmi said, adding that the Taliban leadership is trying to decide how to educate girls over the sixth grade in total. Land opens.
Earlier in the week, a statement from the Ministry of Education urged “all students” to return when classes resume on Wednesday.
On Tuesday, Mawlvi Ministry spokesman Aziz Ahmad Rayan said all girls should be allowed back into school, although the Taliban administration would not insist on those areas where parents are opposed or where schools are not. be separated.
He was reluctant to give details, but promised if schools could meet these conditions, “it would be no problem for them” to start classes for girls in the higher grades.
“In principle, there is no issue on the part of the ministry, but as I said, it is a sensitive and cultural issue,” he added.
The decision to post the return of girls to higher levels seems to be a concession to the rural and deep pillars of the hard-line Taliban movement, which in many parts of the country is reluctant to send their girls to school.
US Special Representative Thomas West tweeted his “shock and deep disappointment” over the decision, calling it “a betrayal of public commitment to the Afghan people and the international community.”
He said the Taliban had made it clear that all Afghans had a right to education, adding: “For the future of the country and its relations with the international community, I would urge the Taliban to honor their commitments to their people.”
The Norwegian Relief Committee, which spends about $ 20 million a year to support primary schools in Afghanistan, is still awaiting the Taliban’s official statement on the cancellation of classes for girls over 11 years of age.
Berenice Van Dan Driessche, advocate manager for the committee, said her representatives did not officially receive word of the change as of Wednesday evening, and that girls in the 11 provinces where they work went to school but were sent home.
The committee’s staff in the provinces “reported a lot of disappointment and also a lot of uncertainty” about the future, she said. It said that in some areas teachers have said they will continue to hold classes for girls until the Taliban issue an official order.
The girls have been expelled from school over the sixth school year – corresponding to year seven in Britain – in most of the country since the Taliban’s return.
Universities opened earlier this year in much of the country, but since the takeover, Taliban edicts have been irregular.
While a handful of provinces offer all further education, most provinces have closed educational institutions for girls and women.
In the capital of Kabul, private schools and universities have been operating continuously.
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