News Desk
Nobel Peace Prize winner Malala Yousafzai, who was shot by the Pakistani Taliban as a schoolgirl, has urged Afghanistan’s new rulers to let girls return to school.
It has been one month since the Taliban, who seized power in August, excluded girls from returning to secondary school while ordering boys back to class.
“To the Taliban authorities […] reverse the de facto ban on girls’ education and re-open girls’ secondary schools immediately,” Yousafzai and a number of Afghan women’s rights activists said in an open letter on Sunday.
Yousafzai called on the leaders of Muslim nations to make it clear to the Taliban that “religion does not justify preventing girls from going to school”.
“Afghanistan is now the only country in the world that forbids girls’ education,” said the writers, who included the head of the Afghan human rights commission under the last US-backed government Shaharzad Akbar.
