Following the Taliban’s ban on women attending universities, the group has now also barred Afghan women from living in private hostels – leaving thousands of female students with nowhere to go.
Zahra is one of many women who have been deprived of their basic right to education; she came to Kabul from Badakhshan province and was living at a private hostel in the capital. The Taliban’s ban on women at hostels forced her to stay at a mosque overnight.
She stated that female students have been under tremendous pressure since the Taliban takeover; “we accepted all the restrictions so that the university remained open to us, so we could pursue our studies. Unfortunately, the Taliban took away our hopes.”
Zahra said that she was scared when the Taliban announced the suspension of women’s education; “the next day, the Taliban came and told all the girls to evacuate the dormitory. Some of the girls went to their relatives’ homes and some others went to rent rooms. Most of us had no money and spent the night in the mosque.”
A female student from the Engineering Faculty of the Polytechnic University, who wished to remain anonymous, told Amu TV: “Our house is in one of the remote villages of Ghazni province, and I was staying in a private hostel in Kabul city. When the public dormitory was closed, my friends and I were forced to stay on the street in this cold weather and we didn’t have money to return to our province.”
Currently, all public and private hostels have been closed to female students. Many students have returned to their provinces while others have stayed in Kabul as they do not have the money to get home.
The Taliban on Tuesday closed one private hostel, Fanous, in the Dasht-e-Barchi area of Kabul, leaving dozens of female students on the streets in the bitterly cold weather.
Students said the Taliban has proven that they have not changed their approach to women’s rights following their takeover in August last year.
After taking control of the country, the group dissolved the ministry of women’s affairs and replaced it with the ministry for the propagation of virtue and the prevention of vice; they forced Afghan women to wear a burqa and barred them from traveling without a male guardian.
In the months that followed these early restrictions, many more have been imposed – including the latest move, which bans women from working for NGOs.
