Taliban sends daughters to school despite closing classrooms for other female students

Taliban officials are sending their daughters to schools despite keeping classrooms closed to female students. 

High ranking officials are sending their children to overseas state schools and universities while depriving schooling to millions of girls in Afghanistan since seizing power according to a report by the Afghanistan Analysts Network (AAN). 

One member of the Taliban's negotiating team in Doha said they had started to educate their children in school in Qatar: “Since everybody in the neighbourhood was going to school, our children demanded that they go to school too."

The daughter of one current Taliban minister and former member of the group's leadership council is currently studying medicine at a Qatari university, according to AAN.

Two members of the  Taliban’s Qatar office are said to have left their children in Doha when they returned to Kabul so that their education would not be disrupted.

“Taliban members and their families who live here [in Qatar] have strong demands for modern education and no one opposes it for either boys or girls – of any age,” a Taliban official formerly based in Qatar told the AAN.

Some officials are opting to send their children to schools which combine ‘western’ learning with religious teaching, known as the Iqra system, in neighbouring Pakistan where many Taliban leaders spent the last two decades exiled.

Other Taliban officials have enrolled their children in private Pakistani-run schools in Qatar, which follow a Pakistani curriculum but still teach lessons in English.

Afghanistan has been ravaged by poverty since the Taliban seized power. Millions of children are suffering malnutrition according to the World Health Organization while the United Nations has warned that 97pc of Afghans are set to live below the poverty line. 

The Taliban has banned girls in Afghanistan from attending school beyond the age of 12 in over two-thirds of the country’s 34 provinces.

 However, some militants are said to be concerned with the impact of school closures in Afghanistan on their children's futures.

“The Iqra system is very good for Taliban who are looking to educate their boys and girls. It’s an Islamic educational system that teaches both modern school subjects and madrasa subjects,” a Taliban official in Pakistan, told the AAN.

“Most of our friends were looking for this kind of mixed system, and after this system was established in some cities like Karachi and Quetta, they were sending their boys and girls to these schools.”

Other Taliban officials in Afghanistan have clandestinely enrolled their daughters in private schools and universities where they take lessons in subjects considered foreign, including English and computer literacy.

Meanwhile Taliban leaders have been looking for educated second wives since the group returned to power.

“In the past, it was not common practice because very few women were literate but now you can find well-educated women everywhere,” one Taliban minister told the AAN.

“Education allows them to live a good life. They know the rights of a husband better and can better train your sons and daughters. This is why a literate wife is a necessity nowadays.”

In particular, officials who have spent time in Afghanistan’s larger cities, like Kabul and Kunduz, and in exile abroad, are now said to have become accustomed to spending time with women who are educated. Teachers and nurses are said to be two of the preferred professions for a new bride.

The Taliban’s spokesperson, Zabihullah Mujahid, has said girls will be able to return fully to schools from March 21 for the new school year, although lessons will be segregated.

On February 2, around 150 public universities opened their doors for the first time since August but female attendance was low. 

Many said they were too scared to attend – out of fear of retribution from local Taliban leaders. At least six female Afghan women’s activists have disappeared since January and the United Nations has called for their release.

Last month, senior Taliban officials were told by western diplomats in Oslo that aid to improve Afghanistan’s humanitarian crisis would only arrive if the group improved its human rights record.

This included ensuring that schooling would be accessible for both boys and girls from March.

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