Girls in Afghanistan are bypassing the fanatical Taliban’s cruel ban on education for young women by attending secret schools, some of them run by female teachers — an occupation the Taliban also banned after President Joe Biden’s disastrous withdrawal two years ago.
Australia’s SBS News counted “hundreds” of Afghan girls attending secret schools beyond the Taliban-imposed limit of sixth grade. The network of schools is run by the Massoud Foundation, a Sydney-based nonprofit organization that helped deliver education to poor Afghans before the Taliban takeover in 2021. The foundation now works with Afghan expatriates in Australia, the United Kingdom, and the United States and supports disaster relief programs in Afghanistan.
Massoud Foundation Executive Director Bilal Waheed told SBS News that one of the disasters his group has been quietly attempting to relieve is the Taliban’s education ban.
“I’ve been in touch with the girls on the ground. This is the form of resistance that they want to have to reinstate their rights of education, work and freedom,” Waheed said.
“We have taken every precaution in place to make sure we keep the risks very low. The classes are not run from one place. They are run from different places. This is to make sure that there are minimum risks, or no risks involved at all,” he said.
“I cannot go into details of how they are run because of their safety,” Waheed added.
Another network of secret schools is run by Gulghotai “Gula” Bezhan, an Afghan-Australian who decided to get involved after the Taliban banned secondary education for women in March 2022.
Gula created a secret school in an underground chamber beneath a charity home she operated in Kabul. She concealed her activities from the Taliban by telling them she was running a madrassa or Islamic religious school, which women are still permitted to attend. She has since opened more underground schools and has enrolled over a hundred students.
“Before, girls were staying at home and crying and doing nothing. Since we started, they are so happy to come back to school. They look forward to going to school every day too,” she said.
“Nelson Mandela said that the most powerful weapon you can change the world with is education,” she recalled.
Gula also founded a group called Afghan Women’s Organization Victoria, which provides English classes for Afghan refugees arriving in Australia.
Other clandestine efforts to help Afghan women obtain an education are conducted online. SBS News talked to a woman named Mitra Forugh who fled Afghanistan in 2021 and is now conducting art classes online for the women who stayed behind.
“The situation that they’re in, in Afghanistan, is extremely difficult and unbearable and this is our responsibility. I can’t sit idly by and just watch on,” Forugh said.
Afghanistan has become one of the world’s worst humanitarian and human rights crises in the two years since Biden’s withdrawal. In addition to forbidding secondary and higher education for women, the Taliban have banned women from attending public parks and gyms and from working for the U.N. or non-governmental organizations (NGOs).
The ban on women working for NGOs caused some much-needed humanitarian aid programs to be suspended, not only because the organizations were outraged by the Taliban’s barbaric treatment of women, but because they simply could not function without female employees in Afghanistan.
In early August, BBC Persian reported the Taliban made the ban on education for women even worse by forbidding girls over ten years of age from attending classes in some provinces — effectively cutting their education off at the third grade, instead of sixth grade.
Human rights organizations told Canada’s CBC News on Monday that the Taliban is unlikely to change its ways because of a few “strongly-worded statements” from the free world, as Women Leaders of Tomorrow Executive Director Friba Rezayee put it.
“What’s happening in Afghanistan now is that the Taliban have a monopoly over violence. They want to keep the public and the people uneducated and ignorant so that they can promote their ideology,” Rezayee said.
Human rights groups want the situation in Afghanistan to be labeled “gender apartheid” and formally classified as a crime against humanity under international law. The United Nations has used the phrase “gender apartheid” in some of its reports on Afghanistan, but the phrase currently has no legal significance at the International Criminal Court (ICC).
UPI noted on Friday that 54 of the approximately 80 edicts issued by the Taliban since it recaptured Afghanistan have targeted women and restricted their rights.