A senior Taliban figure has urged the group's leader to end the education ban on Afghan women and girls, saying there is no excuse for them, in a rare public rebuke of government policy.
Sher Abbas Stanikzai, political delegate at the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, made the comments in a speech in the southeastern province of Khost on Saturday.
He told an audience at a religious school ceremony that there was no justification for denying education to women and girls, “just as there has been no justification for it in the past and there should be no justification for it at all.”
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The government has excluded women from education beyond the sixth grade. Last September there were reports that authorities had also halted medical training and courses for women.
In Afghanistan, women and girls can only be treated by female doctors and health workers. Authorities have yet to confirm the ban on medical training.
“We once again call on the leadership to open the doors of education,” Stanikzai said in a video shared on his official account on the social platform X. “We are committing injustice against 20 million people out of a population of 40 million, depriving them of all their rights. This is not in Islamic law, but in our personal choice or nature.”
Stanikzai was once the head of the Taliban team in talks that led to the complete withdrawal of foreign troops from Afghanistan.
It is not the first time he has said that women and girls deserve education. He made similar comments in September 2022, a year after girls' schools were closed and before the introduction of a university ban.
But the latest comments marked his first call for a change in policy and a direct appeal to Taliban leader Hibatullah Akhundzada.
Ibraheem Bahiss, an analyst at Crisis Group's South Asia program, said Stanikzai had periodically made statements calling girls' education a right of all Afghan women.
“However, this latest statement appears to go further in that it publicly calls for a change in policy and questions the legitimacy of the current approach,” Bahiss said.
In Pakistan's capital Islamabad earlier this month, Nobel Prize winner Malala Yousafzai urged Muslim leaders to take the Taliban to task on education for women and girls.
She was speaking at a conference organized by the Organization of Islamic Cooperation and the Muslim World League.
The UN has said recognition is virtually impossible as long as the ban on women's education and employment remains in place and women cannot go out in public without a male guardian.
No country recognizes the Taliban as the legitimate rulers of Afghanistan, but countries like Russia have built ties with them.
India has also developed relations with the Afghan authorities.
In Dubai earlier this month, a meeting between India's top diplomat, Vikram Mistri, and Foreign Minister Amir Khan Muttaqi demonstrated their deepening cooperation.
