Afghanistan’s Taliban Ban Women From Universities

Female university students said their schools had informed them to stop attending classes, starting Wednesday.

“I haven’t eaten since this morning, I can’t stop crying. This is the worst loss of my life. Girls of Afghanistan might as well go back to the stables and raise cattle,” said one female economics student at the private Dunya University in Kabul. “Coming to university was my only hope after the fall of Kabul to the Taliban. Unfortunately, this small hope has also been taken from Afghan girls.”

The United Nations deputy envoy to Afghanistan, Ramiz Alakbarov, said the U.N. was “deeply concerned” about the decision.

The Taliban’s ban on education for women and girls is likely to widen rifts inside the movement. The issue has pitted a relatively small group of die-hard conservatives close to the group’s leader, Mullah Haibatullah Akhundzada, against a younger generation of members, as well as most of the Taliban leadership.

Many Taliban members say they are in favor of the education of girls and women. Some moved their families back to Afghanistan from exile in Pakistan after the capture of Kabul last year, hoping to send their daughters and sisters to school.

After the Taliban seized control of Afghanistan in August 2021, they closed schools across the country. Most schools eventually reopened, but girls in secondary school were told conditions weren’t yet ready for them to return to classes. That ban on secondary schools has since remained in place.

Female university students were allowed to attend classes until now. Less than three months ago, thousands of female students took university entrance exams. Primary schools remain open to both boys and girls.

The Taliban have imposed a raft of rules to bring female behavior in line with their fundamentalist interpretation of Islam, which squeeze Afghan women out of public and professional life.

The Taliban have banned women from traveling more than 48 miles without a male guardian and often demand that women are accompanied by a male chaperone for basic tasks such as entering government buildings, seeing a doctor or taking a taxi.

When and how these rules are enforced is up to the Taliban’s morality police, a much-feared institution during their first government in the 1990s that has been revived since the Taliban’s return to power last year.

During Taliban rule in the 1990s, girls and women were banned from schools. The opposition to girls’ education is rooted in conservative cultural beliefs about women’s role in Afghan society. In rural areas, particularly in the south where the Taliban has a cultural stronghold, many girls rarely leave their homes after they reach puberty.

The decision to ban girls’ education has drawn global condemnation and been an obstacle to the Taliban achieving international recognition for their government. It also has stopped the country from receiving desperately needed financial assistance amid a calamitous humanitarian crisis.

In a move that further strained relations with donor countries, the Taliban last week evicted approximately 20,000 displaced people from makeshift camps in the northern Badghis province, as temperatures dropped below zero, according to the Norwegian Refugee Council, an aid group. Taliban authorities in the province insisted that the families, who had been displaced by years of fighting and drought, return home so the settlements could be dismantled, although many had lost their original homes and would struggle to find work.

The NRC said the Taliban also had begun evicting displaced families from makeshift settlements in the western Herat province that housed an estimated 30,000 families—or as many as 200,000 people.

Write to Sune Engel Rasmussen at sune.rasmussen@wsj.com