At least eight people have been arrested in recent hours in protests in Kabul, the capital, after the Taliban announced that they are banning women from universities, in the most restrictive measure against their education since they took power just over a year ago.
Among those detained were three journalists covering the protests and five women demonstrating in Kabul, where Taliban security forces on Wednesday prevented hundreds of them from entering their study centers.
This Thursday groups of women had planned to protest again in front of the University of Kabul, however the itinerary had to be modified after the heavy security deployment imposed by the Taliban, which would have carried out more arrests, according to witnesses, reports Tolo News.
This is the strictest restriction against the education of women, who have already seen how girls and young women were excluded from secondary schools with the arrival of the fundamentalists to power in Afghanistan.
The Taliban’s Ministry of Education has argued that the presence of women in schools will be suspended until they are able to offer them a «suitable environment». In solidarity, fifty university professors have resigned, while their male colleagues have gone on strike with their pencils down.
Prior to the Taliban’s announcement banning women in universities, these centers had already been imposing discriminatory rules against them, with gender-segregated classrooms and entrances or female professors to teach the subjects.
The decision of the fundamentalists has once again attracted the rejection of the entire international community, even among Islamic countries such as Pakistan and Saudi Arabia, which said they received the news with «astonishment» and «disappointment».
Source: (EUROPA PRESS)
