RASC News Agency: The United Nations Assistance Mission in Afghanistan (UNAMA) has revealed that the Taliban regime has extended its draconian restrictions on girls’ education beyond public schools and universities to include religious institutions a decision that analysts say marks a new and dangerous phase in the group’s systematic effort to erase women from Afghanistani society.
According to UNAMA’s latest report, released on Tuesday, October 28, agents from the Taliban’s so-called Ministry for the Promotion of Virtue and Prevention of Vice forcibly shut down three girls’ religious schools in Kabul earlier this year. The closures, carried out in early September, are described by UN officials as part of a broader campaign to suffocate every remaining space where women and girls could learn, think freely, or participate in public life.
UNAMA’s findings indicate that the Taliban justified these actions by accusing the schools of admitting girls above the sixth grade and of teaching “non-religious” subjects such as mathematics, physics, chemistry, and biology. Since their return to power, the Taliban’s ultra-conservative ideology has treated these sciences as threats to their medieval control, branding them “un-Islamic” to deny girls access to intellectual and professional development. By banning even the study of mathematics and science, the regime exposes not religious devotion but an existential fear of educated women women capable of questioning tyranny and dismantling ignorance.
In the northeastern province of Badakhshan, the Taliban’s local Directorate for the Promotion of Virtue and Prevention of Vice in the district of Zibak has ordered that girls older than 13 are no longer permitted to attend religious schools. This decree, observers say, unmasks the group’s deliberate attempt to banish women from every form of knowledge, including spiritual learning, which the Taliban now manipulate as a tool for political control rather than faith.
A similar directive has been enforced in the southeastern province of Paktika, where the Taliban’s education department ordered all religious schools to reject girls above the sixth grade. UNAMA confirmed that this ban was soon implemented nationwide further proof that the repression of women’s education is not an isolated act of extremism but a meticulously coordinated policy imposed by the regime’s central command.
In its statement, UNAMA condemned the Taliban’s measures as “a flagrant violation of fundamental human rights and a betrayal of Islamic principles that emphasize education for both men and women.” The mission urged the Taliban to immediately repeal their gender-based restrictions and to restore women’s equal access to learning a demand that the group continues to ignore despite international outcry.
Human rights organizations, including Human Rights Watch and Amnesty International, have warned that the Taliban’s campaign against education is an assault on Afghanistan’s future. By closing the gates of schools, universities, and now madrasas, the regime is deliberately plunging the nation into intellectual darkness, ensuring that half of its population remains voiceless, powerless, and dependent. Analysts say this deliberate destruction of women’s potential is not merely social repression but a calculated act of political survival: a strategy to maintain control through ignorance.
Observers in Kabul describe the atmosphere as one of despair and quiet defiance. “Even religious learning has become forbidden for our daughters,” said one Kabul resident in an interview with RASC News Agency. “The Taliban are not protecting Islam they are destroying it from within by using it as a weapon against women.”
UNAMA’s latest report adds to a growing body of evidence that the Taliban’s so-called Islamic Emirate has become synonymous with gender apartheid a regime built not on faith, but on fear of educated women. The continued silence of the Taliban leadership in the face of international condemnation, observers note, underscores the regime’s determination to sustain a theocratic dictatorship where ignorance is sanctified, and women are condemned to invisibility.
