RASC News Agency: In yet another devastating blow to Afghanistan’s fragile education sector, the Taliban regime has reportedly eliminated over 3,000 teaching positions in Kandahar province alone, further accelerating the collapse of state institutions under its rule. Local sources within Kandahar’s Department of Education have confirmed that the list of dismissed educators was officially shared with school administrators on Monday, July 28. A significant portion of these terminated posts, sources indicate, belonged to female teachers, once considered the backbone of primary and secondary education in urban centers. Officials in Kandahar’s education department noted that while nearly 6,000 permanent teaching posts previously existed in the city’s schools, more than half of them have now been abolished leaving the province’s classrooms severely understaffed and its students increasingly neglected.
This mass dismissal appears to be part of the Taliban’s broader and deeply destructive policy of “downsizing” state institutions a policy that has gained momentum since the suspension of international aid by the United States and other donors earlier this year. According to credible reports, nearly 90,000 positions in the Ministry of Education alone have been scrapped, resulting in the forced removal of thousands of skilled professionals. The Taliban’s campaign of institutional reductionism, however, is not limited to the education sector. A directive issued by the group’s reclusive leader, Mullah Hibatullah Akhundzada, mandated the dismissal of at least 20% of all civilian and military employees across the country. Most of those targeted in the purge are former civil servants and professionals associated with the previous government. The heaviest cuts have occurred in the Ministries of Defense, Interior, National Security, Education, and Higher Education.
In a particularly alarming development, all female employees within the Ministry of Higher Education including university professors have also been terminated. As a result, women’s participation in Afghanistan’s formal educational institutions has all but vanished. Education for women and girls, already under siege since the Taliban’s return to power, is now teetering on the edge of absolute erasure. The eradication of thousands of teaching positions especially in a nation already grappling with financial collapse, systemic fragility, and entrenched gender discrimination signals a catastrophic deterioration of Afghanistan’s educational landscape. Alongside the Taliban’s ongoing bans on girls’ education and their aggressive exclusion of women from academic spaces, these actions point to a grim and regressive future for schooling under their regime.
Far from strengthening governance or streamlining bureaucracy, the Taliban’s sweeping purges and ideological restructuring of education are setting the stage for generational illiteracy and institutional decay. International watchdogs have repeatedly warned of the impending collapse of Afghanistan’s education system, but the Taliban continues to expedite that collapse through calculated defunding, political cleansing, and anti-women decrees. What remains of the education sector is now a hollowed-out framework, stripped of its most capable teachers and stripped of inclusivity, equity, and purpose. In the name of “Islamic governance,” the Taliban have not reformed the state they have hijacked it, turning schools into symbols of exclusion and silence.
