The Taliban has announced the reopening of secondary schools in Afghanistan for boys only, effectively banning high school education for girls in the country.

The majority of Afghan schools welcomed students back today for the first time since the militant group swept to power last month.

Announcing the move on Friday, the Taliban said that “all male teachers and students should attend their educational institutions” from Saturday, the start of the Afghan week, but made no mention of girls and female teachers.

Girls have been able to attend primary school in some of the classrooms that have managed to remain open during the chaos of the past two months, but high schools for girls have remained shuttered since the fall of Kabul in mid-August.

Meanwhile, Abdul Baqi Haqqani, the minister of higher education, said earlier this week that women could continue to study in universities and postgraduate programs, but only in gender-segregated classrooms and in appropriate Islamic dress.

The announcements threaten to confirm suspicions that life under the Taliban will spell the return of a brutal regime.

When the group last ruled Afghanistan, between 1996 and 2001, most women were barred from going to work and girls were denied the right to an education beyond the sixth grade.

It comes despite Taliban officials insisting in a recent charm offensive that the group has reformed in the 20-year interim and that a new Islamic Emirate would respect women’s rights.

The promises have largely been viewed as part of an attempt to court international favour as the Taliban tries to secure emergency funding after inheriting a country on the verge of economic collapse.

Separately on Friday, the militant group announced the opening of a ministry for the “propagation of virtue and the prevention of vice” in the building that once housed the Women’s Affairs Ministry.

Video footage shared online showed women who were previously employed at the ministry protesting outside their former workplace because the Taliban had banned them from entering the building.

Several reports suggested female demonstrators have been beaten by Taliban members in Kabul and other Afghan cities in recent weeks.

The UN highlighted in late August, when the Taliban were still fresh in power, that it had seen “credible” reports of human rights abuses at the hands of the Islamist group, including “summary executions” of civilians and restrictions on women.

UN Human Rights High Commissioner Michelle Bachelet said that women’s rights were a “fundamental red line”, and that “access to quality secondary education for girls will be an essential indicator of [the Taliban’s] commitment to human rights”.

Women in Afghanistan have already been ordered to stay at home while the group establishes a new government.

Zabihullah Mujahid, a spokesman for the Taliban, said the order was “a very temporary procedure” that would remain “until we have full security in place”.

“Our security forces are not trained [in] how to deal with women — how to speak to women [for] some of them,” he added.

Increasing signals that the Taliban will soon revert to its previous tactics prompted members of Afghanistan’s national women’s football team to flee across the border into Pakistan earlier this week.

According to Pakistan’s Information Minister Fawad Chaudhry, the players entered the country through the northwestern Torkham border crossing holding valid travel documents.

Experts have warned that Afghan women are experiencing “cultural genocide” amid strict dress codes and stay at home orders under Taliban power.

Dr Bahar Jalali, an Afghan historian who started the hashtag #DoNotTouchMyClothes, told i she was “gravely concerned that in the next few decades nobody is going to know what Afghanistan was, the heritage might die.”

https://inews.co.uk/news/world/afghan-girls-denied-education-secondary-schools-reopen-boys-only-1206502?ITO=newsnow

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