The Taliban put a senior member of the Haqqani family in charge of higher education in Afghanistan on Sunday, soon after the Biden State Department’s astonishing, and verifiably false, assertion that the Taliban and the Haqqani Network are entirely separate entities.
The Haqqani education minister immediately announced girls will no longer be allowed to study in the same classrooms as boys.
The Taliban appointed Abdul Baqi Haqqani to run the Ministry of Higher Education on Sunday. The Biden State Department should make careful note of his last name, which clearly indicates he is both a senior Taliban official and a member of the Haqqani Network, the vicious terrorist organization and criminal gang responsible for some of the worst attacks against U.S. and NATO forces over the past two decades.
Abdul Baqi Haqqani has a long history of leadership with the Taliban. As the European Union indicated when imposing sanctions against him in 2012, he served the previous Taliban regime as both a regional governor and vice-minister of information and culture. After the old regime fell, he helped to organize militant activities against American and European forces.
At his first press conference after receiving his appointment as higher education minister for the new Taliban regime, Haqqani said the Afghan people “will continue their higher education in the light of Sharia law in safety without being in a mixed male and female environment.”
“Girls and boys will no longer be able to study together at universities and will, instead, study in separate classes in accordance with Islamic law,” he declared.
Haqqani added that boys and girls will also be separated in primary and secondary schools. No women were present at the meeting in which he handed down these edicts.
“The Taliban’s ministry of higher education consulted only male teachers and students on resuming the function of universities,” a female former university lecturer told AFP on Sunday.
The lecturer said this “systematic prevention of women’s participation in decision making” demonstrated a “gap between the Taliban’s commitments and actions.”
India Today noted that teachers in Herat, one of Afghanistan’s biggest cities, feared the small size of female-only classes at some universities would make it impractical to establish separate classrooms for women, dooming them to either second-class education or the elimination of women’s programs altogether.
The Hindustan Times observed that if men are not allowed to teach women, Haqqani’s edict “effectively will deprive women of higher education” due to the lack of instructors.