KABUL, Afghanistan — One of Afghanistan’s proudest achievements has been getting millions of children, especially girls, back into school since the toppling of the Taliban. But that success is crumbling across the south and in other areas, where hundreds of schools have been forced to close.
Sometimes, the cause is fighting; sometimes, it’s intimidation from the Taliban. Sometimes, it’s both, as in the case of the Loy Manda high school in Southern Helmand province. When the Taliban waged an offensive over the winter, the school in the Nad Ali district was caught in the fighting between militants and the Afghan government.
“We had six rooms, books, chairs, but now everything is destroyed,” said Hekmatallah, the headmaster, who goes by one name.
He’s working to reopen but had to get permission from the Taliban or face retaliation. Taliban leaders said they would allow it, if only boys attend and if they are only taught a curriculum meeting the Taliban’s hard-line version of Islam.
Taliban mines from the fighting still surround the school, and government forces are stationed just 40 yards from the school, making it a potential target for extremist attack.
Between the damage and the danger, none of the school’s 650 students can attend. That’s the fate for an increasing number of children in the battlezone regions of Afghanistan.
In 2015, 615 schools in the country’s 11 most volatile provinces had to close because of violence, according to the Education Ministry. That was in addition to the 600 or so schools that remained closed from the year before in those areas.
Almost half the 2015’s closures were in the final months of the year, as the Taliban did not take their winter break. Violence escalated across the warmer southern provinces, which were the hardest hit by closures, ministry’s spokesman Mujib Mehrdad said. Last year, 105 of Helmand’s 545 schools closed, and in neighboring Kandahar, the figure was 150 of 545 schools The largest number of closures were in Zabul, where more half the province’s schools — 140 out of 242 schools — shut their doors.
The United Nations counted 25 students, teachers and other school staff killed in Taliban attacks or crossfire in 2015. In Eastern Nangarhar province, the Islamic State group seized control of several districts near the border with Pakistan, and terrorized women and girls, banning them from school and work, and in some case forcing them into marriage, according to residents who fled the area.
But extremists’ ideological hatred of the schools and girls’ education is not the only cause of school closures. Human Rights Watch, the New York-based monitoring group, reports the Afghan military continues to deploy weaponry in or around schools in battleground areas and uses them as fixed firing positions, even after President Ashraf Ghani banned the use of schools as military bases last year. That puts children at “grave risk of attack by insurgents who then see schools as military targets,” HRW’s Afghanistan researcher Ahmad Shuja said.
During their time ruling Afghanistan in the 1990s until their overthrow in the 2011 U.S.-led invasion, the Taliban banned girls from school and mandated that boys learn the Quran by rote. Once the Taliban fell from power, schools and universities welcomed women back as teachers and students. With funding from the international community, the number of children in school grew from 900,000 in 2001 to 8.3 million in 2011, according to figures from the U.N. assistance mission to Afghanistan. UNAMA reports girls account for 39 percent of the total, up from near zero under the Taliban.
But in districts where the Taliban have regained control or have enough power to intimidate residents, they have returned to barring girls from the classroom and dictating curriculum for the boys.
The HRW report said that girls “often bear the brunt of these disruptions because parents are wary of sending daughters to schools occupied by armed men.”
