After twenty months of concealment, the Taliban have returned to their privileges this Tuesday, ordering the expulsion of women from the university with immediate effect. The girls, who were the majority in many faculties in Afghanistan, both public and private, will not be able to step on them again "until further notice."
The decision of the provisional government of the Islamic Emirate has been adopted this Tuesday. The spokesman for the Ministry of Higher Education has released the letter urging universities to close their doors to women "as soon as possible" and to notify the authorities.
Recently, the Minister for the Promotion of Virtue and the Prevention of Vice, Mohamed Khalid Hanafi, justified that adolescents were the only ones excluded from the classroom since the rise of the Taliban two summers ago. "The essential atmosphere of decency still does not exist," he would have declared.
Far from loosening up, his sharia-inspired movement has just extended the exclusion to its elders. However, a few weeks ago the national university entrance exams were held, with a notable presence of girls, either because they study at home, in semi-clandestine conditions or in private centers.
Although last October a Taliban spokesman considered the reopening of women's classrooms in public secondary schools "inevitable", since then all the changes for women have been for the worse. Today's is the last straw.
"We have remained silent," Madina, a student, has confessed to France Presse. "Hope has been taken from us and we don't know what awaits us." The real scope of the measure will not be seen until March, since the winter school holidays have already started.
What is certain is that other areas, such as clothing, are also tightening the fence for urbanites, while an increasingly strict sexual segregation advances in public spaces, such as parks.
Last month, it was the Taliban's Supreme Guide, the cleric Haibatulah Ajundzada, who urged judges to apply sharia in an exemplary manner for certain crimes. In this way, last week the public executions returned to the scene. Near Herat, several ministers wanted to witness, together with the crowd, how a father fired three shots into the head of the criminal who several years earlier had murdered his son. An atavistic eye for an eye that some prefer to the crime and corruption attributed to the previous government.
Although the Taliban have shown considerable leniency towards their former enemies during twenty years of war, when it comes to women they have definitely dropped the mask. Those who could do something for them, by their ascendancy over the fundamentalist movement - be it with the stick or the carrot - are also failing them.
Despite the fact that Afghanistan is bankrupt, the Taliban do not miss an opportunity to miss an opportunity, much to the frustration of several of their would-be backers. They do not include the United States. However, Washington celebrates the release, today, of two Americans held by the Taliban, of whom little has been revealed, beyond the fact that they are already traveling to Qatar.
The best thing that could happen to the Afghans is that today's macho outburst is just a temporary way to camouflage that assignment to the "great enemy", in exchange for who knows what. Because according to the State Department, "it is not a prisoner exchange," nor has there been "money involved." "We see this as a goodwill gesture by the Taliban," spokesman Ned Price said.
In fact, the only mosquito that disturbs the regime, without a military rival, are the bloody attacks of the self-styled Islamic State in Khorasan, an even more obscurantist and sectarian imported movement.
