Education remains banned for Afghan girls. My heart broke when I saw my brother going to school.
Every day, I wake up with the hope of returning to school. The Taliban keep saying they will reopen schools, but it’s been almost two years now, and I don’t believe them. It breaks my heart.
Habiba, 17, blinks as she says this, bites her lip, and tries not to cry.
Habiba and her former classmates, Mahtab and Tamanna, are among the hundreds of thousands of teenage girls who have been barred by the Taliban in Afghanistan from attending middle and high school. Afghanistan is the only country in the world where such a ban on girls is enforced.
After a year and a half of being deprived of their right to a normal life, their sorrow is still fresh.
These girls say they fear that the global outcry over what has happened to them is fading, while they live with this pain every day—a pain that intensified this week with the start of a new school year without them.