UK: Taliban officials are sending their daughters to school despite keeping classrooms closed to female students. High-ranking officials are sending their children to overseas state schools and universities while depriving schooling to millions of girls within Afghanistan since they seized power, according to a report by the Afghanistan Analysts Network (AAN).
One member of the Taliban’s negotiating team in Doha said they had started to educate their children in school in Qatar: “Since everybody in the neighbourhood was going to school, our children demanded they go to school too.” The daughter of one current Taliban minister and former member of the group’s leadership council is currently studying medicine at a Qatari university, according to AAN.
Two members of the Taliban’s Qatar office are said to have left their children in Doha when they returned to Kabul so their education would not be disrupted. Taliban officials have enrolled their children in private Pakistani-run schools in Qatar, which follow a Pakistani curriculum but still teach lessons in English.
Afghanistan has been ravaged by poverty since the Taliban completed their seizure of power in August last year. Millions of children suffer malnutrition, according to the World Health Organisation, while the United Nations has warned that 97 per cent of Afghans are set to live below the poverty line. The Taliban has banned girls in Afghanistan from attending school beyond the age of 12 in more than two-thirds of the country’s 34 provinces.
However, some militants are said to be concerned with the impact of school closures in Afghanistan on their children’s futures.
- THE SYDNEY MORNING HERALD
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