(Keep) Five public secondary schools for girls have reopened in an eastern province of Afghanistan, at the insistence of hundreds of students who were previously banned from such schools by the Taliban, an official said Thursday. provincial.
Posted at 8:11 a.m.
Officially, the Taliban have banned secondary education, college and high school, for girls. But this order was ignored in some regions of Afghanistan far from the capital Kabul and Kandahar, the cradle of the Taliban regime.
In the province of Paktia (East), around 300 girls have returned to school since last week, despite the absence of an official decision on the subject, Mohammad Wali Ahmadi, director of Shashgar high school, told AFP. in the city of Garde.
Groups of girls wearing headscarves and hijabs (scarves covering the head and neck) were seen going to school on Thursday morning by an AFP photographer.
“Since the girls came on their own, we didn’t send them back,” Ahmadi said. But if the Ministry of Education ordered it to close, it would do so “immediately”, he stressed.
“A few days ago, female students approached the directors of five schools to ask for the reopening of their establishments. Since then, classes have resumed and these schools are now operational,” Paktia’s head of information and culture, Khaliqyar Ahmadzai, confirmed to AFP.
Four of them are located in the capital of the province of Paktia, and one in the district of Samkani.
Education Ministry officials in Kabul were not immediately available to comment on the information.
According to Mr. Ahmadzai, other schools in the province are likely to follow suit.
“If students coordinate with principals, then this process of reopening schools will continue in the province,” he said.
Since taking power in August 2021, the Taliban have placed severe restrictions on girls and women to conform to their ultra-rigorous view of Islam, effectively excluding them from public life.
In March, they ordered all secondary schools for girls to close, just hours after they reopened for the first time since returning to power.
The Taliban have since maintained that the ban was only linked to a “technical problem” and that classes would resume once a program, based on Islamic precepts, had been defined.
Some public schools nevertheless continued to operate in certain regions of the country, under pressure from local notables and families.