Taliban officials remain divided over the ban on girls education
The Taliban's ban on girls' schooling has led to at least one minister leaving Afghanistan and forced families to move for their daughters' education.
PESHAWAR, Pakistan — Rifts are growing among Taliban officials over the group's decision to ban girls from secondary education, leading at least one minister to leave Afghanistan and forcing families to move so their daughters can continue their schooling.
As religious police patrol large parts of the country to ensure that rules are enforced, the restrictions have become so repressive that some senior members of the militant group have called for them to be rolled back in recent months, three Taliban officials told NBC News, which agreed not to identify them so they could speak candidly.
All three said there was a growing divide between ultra-conservative Taliban members in the southern city of Kandahar, where the group’s supreme leader, Haibatullah Akhundzada, lives, and more moderate members from the capital, Kabul. The three officials have been affiliated with more hard-line wings of the Taliban, but they said their thinking on girls’ education differed, adding that it had been a mistake to bar them from going to school.
Some Taliban officials “openly expressed their views in support of girls’ education, believing that it will have some impact on the leadership,” an official told NBC News this year. “Unfortunately, rather than welcoming their suggestions, some people took it negatively as if they were against the top leadership.”
Taliban spokesperson Zabihullah Mujahid denied that there were any tensions within the government, although he said there was occasionally a “difference of opinion among the people.”
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