By: Rukhshana Media
Badakhshan university female students protested after the Taliban forces did not allow their fellows to enter the university due to a lack of burqas on Sunday morning, October 30, but were violently dispersed with physical and verbal abuse.
The protesters chanted slogans against the Taliban.
“The Taliban forces did not allow us to enter the university due to a lack of burqas and colourful clothes,” Samira*, one of the protesters said.
“The mask cannot be used as a hijab,” she says the Taliban forces told the girls. “The mask is produced by foreigners; you must wear burqas.”
According to Samira, the Taliban forces beat and threatened to kill them as they violently dispersed the protesters.
She says that several protesters were assaulted and whipped who tried to open the gate of the university.
She adds that after the incident, they held a protest rally near the university and chanted slogans against the Taliban.
Samira says that the Taliban forces also did not allow a few female professors to enter the university because they did not wear burqas.
Parwana*, another protester, says that the Taliban try to impose restrictions on women and girls, especially female university students so that they themselves give up to come to the university.
Another source, who spoke on the condition that we don’t use her name, told Rukhshana Media that the protest rally ended with the intervention of the president of Badakhshan University, and they were told to observe their hijab in the following days.
After seizing control in Afghanistan on August 15 last year, the Taliban opened the universities with gender segregation, but they banned girls’ schools above the sixth grade.
With chanting “Fearless Education”, dozens of Afghan women and girls gathered in front of different schools in Kabul on Saturday, October 29 to advocate for the reopening of girls’ schools above grade six.
*Note: The names of the students interviewed have been chosen as pseudonyms at their request.
