Reuters :
To fill her days and keep her mind occupied, university student Hawa sits by the window in her Kabul home and pores over a book.
Like hundreds of thousands of other Afghan girls and young women, the 20-year-old Russian literature undergraduate has not been allowed to return to her studies since the Taliban seized power in mid-August.
And like many of her peers, she is feeling a mixture of frustration and anger that her aspirations to study and work are being thwarted.
“We are not born to sit at home,” Hawa told Reuters in her family’s house in the Afghan capital, where she has been cooped up spending her days drawing, reading and doing chores.
“If we can nurture babies we can provide for our families too. In this situation, I do not see my dreams coming true.”
The hardline Islamist Taliban movement, which stormed to power earlier this year after ousting the Western-backed
government, has allowed all boys and younger girls back to class, but has not let girls attend secondary school. Most public universities are not functioning at all, or only partially.
Officials have tried to assure Afghans and foreign donors that people’s rights will be honoured, including allowing girls to go to school and women to study and work once details on how to do so in accordance with Islamic law are thrashed out.
They have also blamed the international community for cutting off aid, making it harder to fund the reopening of schools and universities for all.
More than three months into their rule, that has not happened, and some are skeptical of a group that, when it was last in power from 1996-2001, banned all girls from school and women from paid employment.
Fewer than 40 percent of Afghan girls attended secondary school in 2018 even though it was allowed then, according to the most recent figures from UNESCO.
Much of the country remains deeply conservative, despite 20 years of Western-backed rule and billions of dollars in foreign aid aimed partly at promoting equality and civil rights. But in urban centres in particular, girls and women have enjoyed greater freedoms since 2001, and they are reluctant to let them go.
