A 100% male start to the school year.

Only Afghan middle and high school students were allowed to go back to school on Saturday, a measure deplored by Unicef, which urged the new Taliban regime not to "leave the girls behind".

Ten days after the reopening of the country's private universities, the Ministry of Education announced Friday that "all male teachers and secondary school students" would return to their establishment, without making any mention of teachers or college girls.

This vagueness risks fueling even more the concern of part of the Afghan population and the international community who fear to see the same scenario reoccurring as when the fundamentalists first came to power, between 1996 and 2001. The Islamist movement had pursued a particularly brutal policy towards women, who were not allowed to work, study, play sports or go out alone in the street.

No woman in the new executive

"Unicef ​​welcomes the reopening of secondary schools in Afghanistan, but stresses that girls should not be left out," reacted Friday the executive director of the UN agency, Henrietta Fore. "It is essential that all, including the oldest, can resume their education without further delay, and that teachers can also continue to teach", insisted Unicef ​​in a statement, recalling the "considerable progress in the countries over the past two decades ”. In the space of twenty years, the number of schools has tripled and the number of children attending school has increased from 1 million to 9.5 million, according to the UN agency.

Since their return to power, the Taliban have tried to reassure the international community by ensuring, among other things, that women's rights would be respected.

But these claims have been weakened in recent weeks by several decisions taken by the new Afghan executive.

Our Afghanistan dossier

Women certainly retain the right to study at university, but for this they will have to wear an abaya and a hijab and classes will be carried out as far as possible in single sex.

No woman is also included in the new provisional executive presented in early September.

As for the Ministry for the Promotion of Virtue and the Prevention of Vice, feared for its fundamentalism during the first Taliban episode, it now seems to occupy the premises of the former Ministry of Women's Affairs.

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