Taliban supreme leader appoints new education minister

As the Taliban hardliners continue to forbid girls from attending secondary school, the Taliban supreme commander has appointed a loyalist cleric as Afghanistan's minister of education. Since the Taliban retook control of the country a year ago, hundreds of thousands of girls and young women have been denied access to school.

In a cabinet move revealed by the government spokesperson on Tuesday, Habibullah Agha, a member of the inner circle of reclusive supreme leader Hibatullah Akhundzada, was designated the new minister of education.

"No plans can be made by us on our own. We avoid doing it. I'll instead follow the guidance provided by the supreme commander "68-year-old Agha told AFP on Wednesday. He declined to discuss his own opinions on girls' education and said he had not yet been given any directives. Many Taliban members who are orthodox Afghan clerics have doubts about contemporary schooling. Nishank Motwani, an Afghan expert and scholar at Harvard University's Kennedy School, claimed that the Taliban are boosting supporters who oppose the reopening of girls' schools by appointing Habibullah Agha.

Outgoing education minister Noorullah Munir was in charge when the government announced the reopening of girls' schools in March. Akhundzada blocked the decision in a move that upset the Taliban's political leadership in Kabul.

Munir was named the head of a body that issues religious edicts in the Tuesday reshuffle. The international community has made the reopening of secondary schools for girls a key condition for recognising the Taliban government.

Taliban officials say, the ban is temporary, but they have also wheeled out a litany of excuses for the closures-from a lack of funds to time needed to remodel the syllabus along Islamic lines.

Munir told local media this month that it was a cultural issue, claiming many male elders in deeply conservative and patriarchal Afghanistan were against their teenage daughters attending school.

Within weeks of seizing power last year, the Taliban began imposing severe restrictions on women to comply with their austere vision of Islam -- effectively squeezing them out of public life.

Apart from closing high schools for girls, the Taliban have barred women from many government jobs and also ordered them to cover up in public, preferably with an all-encompassing burqa. Agha, the new education minister, was a judge during the first regime of the Taliban between 1996 and 2001.