Al Jazeera :
The Taliban’s ban on girls’ education will not last forever, Nobel laureate Malala Yousafzai has said, emphasising that Afghan women now know what it is to be “empowered”.
The armed group, now ruling Afghanistan, closed girls’ secondary schools just hours after reopening them this week, prompting a small protest by women and girls in the capital Kabul.
“I think it was much easier for the Taliban [to enforce] a ban on girls’ education back in 1996,” Yousafzai, who won the 2014 Nobel Peace Prize for her fight for all children’s right to education, told the Doha Forum in Qatar on Saturday.
“It is much harder this time – that is because women have seen what it means to be educated, what it means to be empowered. This time is going to be much harder for the Taliban to maintain the ban on girls’ education. This ban will not last forever.”
The Taliban stopped girls from attending school during its rule of Afghanistan from 1996 to 2001, when it was removed by the US-led invasion.
Afghan women and girls take part in a protest in front of the Ministry of Education in Kabul demanding that high schools be reopened for girls [Ahmad Sahel Arman/AFP]
It returned to power as US forces withdrew in August last year. The United States said on Friday it had cancelled planned talks in Doha with the Taliban after the schools were shut this week.
