A senior Taliban minister, who publicly condemned the group’s ban on education of girls and women, has reportedly fled Afghanistan amid fears of arrest.
Sher Abbas Stanikzai, the Taliban’s political deputy at the foreign ministry, had called on other leaders to open schools for girls and women in January and said the edict forbidding them from schools was not in line with Sharia law as the hardline rulers claimed.
“There is no excuse for this – not now and not in the future,” Mr Stanikzai, a political studies and military school graduate, had said. “We are being unjust to 20 million people,” referring to nearly half of the Afghanistan population of girls and women.
His public remarks, made at a graduation ceremony in Khost province, were the first such against the Taliban’s education diktat and confirmed a rare sign of internal divisions around one of the flagship policies of Afghanistan’s de facto rulers.
For more than three years, the Taliban have imposed a strict nationwide ban on female education, preventing girls and women from attending school beyond the sixth grade despite international isolation.
Shortly after the speech, the Taliban’s supreme leader Hibatullah Akhundzada reportedly ordered Mr Stanikzai’s arrest and issued a travel ban against him, prohibiting him from stepping back in Afghanistan.
However, the Taliban leader had left for the United Arab Emirates before he could have been held, reported the news channel Afghanistan International.
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