Tears and outrage as Afghan Taliban close women universities

• Wednesday, Kabul women protested the ruling.
• Taliban officials promptly put an end to the tiny protests.
• Three months ago, the Taliban decided to allow university entrance tests.

Girls and women all around Afghanistan had been dreading this decree ever since the Taliban made a comeback.

Girls wearing hijabs arrived at their university campuses on Wednesday, but Taliban security personnel prevented their entrance and turned them away.

As they are brought away, groups can be seen sobbing on camera.

Following a 16-month ban on girls attending the majority of secondary schools, the Taliban this week also outlawed women attending universities.

“They have destroyed the only bridge that could connect me with my future,” one Kabul University student told the Media.

“How can I react? I believed that I could study and change my future or bring the light to my life but they destroyed it.”

Authorities issued the directive on Tuesday; by Wednesday, other educational institutions, including Islamic religious schools and private universities in many regions, had begun to obey it as well.

The Taliban had prevented girls from attending private educational institutions in those three provinces, Takhar in the north, Ghazni in the south-east, and Kabul, the capital, according to sources who confirmed this to the Media.

It seems that women have no options for formal schooling at all.

Due to the Taliban’s history of imprisoning protestors, several women dared to demonstrate on the streets of Kabul on Wednesday. Taliban officials promptly put an end to the tiny protests.

This generation believed they were the fortunate ones because they were able to attend the same universities as their mothers, elder sisters, and cousins.

Instead, they are seeing the demise of their future.

When the Taliban, once a fundamentalist Islamist militant group, surged back to power in August of last year, they pledged to protect women’s rights in light of the atrocities of their previous rule from 1996 to 2001, during which women were prohibited from working or attending school.

But once US-led forces left Afghanistan and the Taliban retook control, their most recent decree once more revokes whatever meagre liberties and rights had been granted to women.

However, the Taliban had already agreed to let university entrance exams proceed just three months prior.

In provinces all around the country, thousands of women and girls took the exams. Many had studied covertly, either at home or by taking the chance to visit secret tutoring institutions set up for women.

The threat was always there. Bombers killed students while targeting schools during some of the exams. But the young women persevered still.

They persisted in attempting, with many submitting applications for teaching and medicine, even after the Taliban imposed last-minute limitations on subjects in November, prohibiting girls from program like economics, engineering, and media.

As another female student put it to the Media: “Why should we always be the victim? Afghanistan is a poor country. But women in this country have accepted poverty alongside every other problem and they still they have to suffer.”

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