A senior Taliban minister, who publicly condemned the group’s ban on education of girls and women, has reportedly fled Afghanistan amid fears of arrest. Sher Abbas Stanikzai, the Taliban’s political deputy at the foreign ministry, had called on other leaders to open schools for girls and women in January and said the edict forbidding them from schools was not in line with Sharia law as the hardline rulers claimed.
“There is no excuse for this – not now and not in the future,” Mr Stanikzai, a political studies and military school graduate, had said. “We are being unjust to 20 million people,” referring to nearly half of the Afghanistan population of girls and women. His public remarks, made at a graduation ceremony in Khost province, were the first such against the Taliban’s education diktat and confirmed a rare sign of internal divisions around one of the flagship policies of Afghanistan’s de facto rulers.
For more than three years, the Taliban have imposed a strict nationwide ban on female education, preventing girls and women from attending school beyond the sixth grade despite international isolation. Shortly after the speech, the Taliban’s supreme leader Hibatullah Akhundzada reportedly ordered Mr Stanikzai’s arrest and issued a travel ban against him, prohibiting him from stepping back in Afghanistan.
However, the Taliban leader had left for the United Arab Emirates before he could have been held, reported the news channel Afghanistan International. Mr Stanikzai also confirmed to the local media last week that he had left for Dubai but for health reasons. This is not the first time the senior Taliban leader, viewed as moderate within the Taliban ranks, called for restoring the education of Afghan girls and women.
In September 2022, a year after the Taliban took control of Kabul, Mr Stanikzai had said that no one has a religious reason which can justify depriving girls of education, calling schools and colleges obligatory for both genders. His escape to a neighbour ally comes amid reports of a growing rift inside the two factions of the Taliban leadership, with power centres situated in Kabul and Kandahar, from where the Taliban’s supreme leader assumes the powerful seat and rules without making any public appearance.
There is debate about the education ban inside Taliban leadership, according to the US’s Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction (SIGAR), an autonomous body overseeing the reconstruction of the war-battered nation. Last week, the Taliban’s deputy minister of interior Mohammad Nabi Omari was seen breaking down and reduced to tears in a public gathering in the same province of Khost as he spoke about the group’s strict ban on education affecting girls and women.
The video of the minister’s emotional outburst, during a ceremony at a school in the province, has been circulated widely on social media. “All I know is that even if [girls’ education] is not a religious obligation or tradition, it is at least permissible,” he said as he covered his face and broke down. “May God guide us. Religious studies are allowed, so modern sciences should also be permitted,” the deputy minister said, reported Afghanistan International.
