After the movement deprived them of education

Afghan girls defy the Taliban by attending secret schools

• The girls are taking a real risk on their daily commute to the secret schools.

  Reuters

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Nafisa discovered the perfect place to hide her textbooks from her Taliban brother, and it was the kitchen, where Afghan men rarely enter.

Hundreds of thousands of girls and young women, like Nafisa, have been out of school since the movement returned to power a year ago, but their thirst for education has never disappeared.

"Men have nothing to do in the kitchen, so I keep my books there," says Nafisa, who attends a secret school in a village in eastern Afghanistan.

"If my brother finds out, he will beat me," she says.

Since returning to power a year ago, the Taliban have imposed severe restrictions on girls and women, effectively removing them from public life.

When the Taliban took control, it promised a less strict rule compared to its previous rule between 1996 and 2001, which witnessed human rights violations, but the movement further tightened restrictions on the rights of Afghans, especially girls who were prevented from returning to secondary schools, and many jobs were deprived. the public.

Women across the country were forbidden to travel long distances without a mahram, and the authorities ordered them to cover their faces in public while preferring to wear a burqa.

With female secondary schools not being allowed to reopen in many parts of Afghanistan, secret schools have sprung up in standard home rooms all over the country.

A team of AFP journalists visited three of these schools and interviewed female students and teachers, whose real names have been withheld for their safety.

Decades of turmoil in Afghanistan have devastated the education system, so Nafisa is still studying secondary school, even though she is 20 years old.

Only her mother and older sister know about the matter. As for her brother, he fought for years with the “Taliban” against the previous government and the United States forces in the mountains, and returned home after the movement’s return to power, and he was imbued with the movement’s beliefs that the place of women is the home.

Her brother allowed her to attend a religious school to study the Qur'an in the morning, but in the afternoon she slipped out of the house to attend a secret class organized by the Revolutionary Association of Afghan Women.

"If we do not accept this risk, we will remain uneducated," says Nafisa.

"I want to become a doctor," she says. "We want to achieve something. We want freedom, serving society, and building our future."

When AFP visited the secret school, Nafisa and nine other girls were discussing freedom of expression with their teacher, sitting side by side on a carpet and taking turns reading a book out loud. An area inhabited mostly by Pashtuns, who make up the bulk of the "Taliban" elements.

If a Taliban fighter asks where they are going, the girls say they are registered in a sewing workshop and hide their books in shopping bags or under an abaya or burqa.

They not only take risks, but also make sacrifices, like Nafisa's sister who dropped out of school to reduce any suspicions her brother might have.

The Taliban still insists that it will allow classes to resume, but this issue has divided the movement, while several sources told AFP that a hard-line faction is advising the movement's supreme leader, Hebatullah Akhundzada, to oppose any education for girls, or at best, that Education is limited to religious studies or training classes such as cooking and embroidery.

However, the official position remains that the failure to resume the study is due to a "technical issue".

Female primary school students are still attending school until now, at least, and young female students are still attending universities, although the lectures are given to males and females separately, with some subjects being reduced due to a shortage of female teachers. The university, so the current female students may be the last batch of graduates in the country in the foreseeable future.

"Education is an inalienable right in Islam for both men and women," researcher Abdul Bari Madani told AFP. "If this ban continues, Afghanistan will return to what it was in the Middle Ages... a whole generation of girls will be buried."

This fear of the possibility of a lost generation is what prompted Tamkeen to turn her home in Kabul into a school, and this woman in her forties almost lost her future after she was forced to stop studying during the first Taliban rule between 1996 and 2001, when girls’ education was banned.

Tamkeen needed years of self-education to become a teacher, but she lost her job in the Ministry of Education when the Taliban returned to power last year.

With the support of her husband, Tamkeen initially converted a warehouse in her home into a classroom, then sold a cow that her family owned to raise money and buy books, because most of the girls who come to her come from poor families and cannot afford to buy them. Today, she teaches English and science to about 25 students.

Maliha, 17, believes that the day will come when the "Taliban" will leave power, adding: "We will use our knowledge for something useful."

On the outskirts of Kabul, in a maze of mud houses, Laila is also secretly given lessons, and after seeing the disappointment on her daughter's face after the decision to reopen high schools was cancelled, she knew she had to do something.

"If my daughter is crying, surely other girls are crying too," said the 38-year-old.

About 12 girls gather two days a week in Laila's house, which includes a courtyard and a garden where vegetables and fruits are grown.

"We are not afraid of the Taliban," says Kawthar, 18.

But the right to study is not the only goal of some Afghan girls and women, who are often married off to men who cruelly or severely restrict them.

Zahraa, who attends a clandestine school in eastern Afghanistan, was married when she was 14 and now lives with her in-laws, who oppose the idea of ​​her attending classes.

She takes sleeping pills to fight anxiety, as she fears that her husband will submit to his family and keep them at home.

"I tell them I'm going to the local market and I come here," Zahraa says of her secret school.

• Hundreds of thousands of girls have been deprived of school since the return of the "Taliban" to power a year ago, but their thirst for education has never disappeared.

• With girls' high schools not allowed to reopen in many parts of Afghanistan, secret schools have sprung up in standard home rooms all over the country.

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