By: Rukhshana Media
A government secondary school in Afghanistan’s major northern city Mazar-e-Sharif has asked families to no longer send their high school daughters to attend classes.
Mazar-e-Sharif is one of the few provinces where girls can go to school up to the twelfth grade.
The request from the Abdullah Shahid school principal was made in a meeting with parents on September 14, a source who was present at the meeting said.
The source, who wishes to remain anonymous, told Rukhshana Media that the school, located in Khaled Ibn Waleed project, is co-education and allows boys and girls to study at two separate times until the ninth grade.
The school principal insisted to parents at the meeting that they should stop their daughters from attending school in any way possible, and that this issue should not be discussed outside the school, the source said.
The principal threatened that the female students who continue to attend will be failed in the final exam and only a few would be allowed to pass. The source said that so far most families have not followed the principal’s request and their daughters are still attending.
The principal defended the request by saying that if the girls no longer attend school, no one could harass them on the way to school and ‘defame’ them. Furthermore, in other provinces, girls do not go to school above the 6th grade.
The principal suggested that after a few months the closure of girls high schools in Mazar-e-Sharif province will officially be enforced by the Islamic Emirate.
The Taliban has tried to close all high schools for girls since taking power on August 15 last year.
The ban on girls’ education by the Taliban has received widespread domestic and foreign condemnation, which forced the Taliban to promise to reopen the school in the new academic year. But on the day the school reopened in March, the Taliban announced again that the schools would remain closed until further notice.
On September 11, Noorullah Munir, the former minister of the Taliban for Ministry of Education said in Uruzgan province that people do not want their daughters to go to school.
Later, Afghanistan International reported from a source from within the Taliban of the cabinet that five Taliban officials, including Taliban leader Mullah Hebatullah and Mullah Hassan Akhundzada, the Taliban Prime Minister, are against any education for girls.
