Denied access to school due to the Taliban’s failure to reopen secondary schools for girls, one Afghan teenager has taken to the Internet to try to exercise her basic right to an education. But her self-driven online learning mission has not been easy.
The morning Rabia H.* watched her younger brother set off for his first day at school since the Taliban came to power was a difficult one for the Afghan teenager.
School reopened a month after the August 15 Taliban takeover, and the 15-year-old Kabul schoolgirl had already endured the most traumatic period of her young life.
Days after the August 31 US troop pullout, Rabia’s father fled for Pakistan. As a civil society activist from the persecuted Hazara ethnic minority, her father was in extreme danger under the Taliban. The family had hoped “until the last minute” that they would be evacuated from Kabul airport before the US withdrawal deadline, Rabia explained in a phone interview with FRANCE 24 from the Afghan capital.
But when that failed, her father was forced to cross the land border into Pakistan, leaving his wife and five children behind since the journey was too dangerous for women and kids.
