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KABUL (AP) — Taliban security forces used a water cannon to disperse women protesting Saturday over a ban on university education for women, eyewitnesses said, as the Taliban-led government’s decision continues to cause outrage and opposition in Afghanistan and beyond.
The development came after Afghanistan’s Taliban rulers on Tuesday banned female students from attending universities with immediate effect. Since then, Afghan women have demonstrated in major cities against the ban, a rare sign of internal protest since the Taliban seized power last year.
According to eyewitnesses in the western city of Herat, some two dozen women were on their way to the provincial governor’s house on Saturday to protest the ban, chanting “Education is our right,” when security forces drove them back, shooting water cannons.
A shared video shows women screaming and hiding in a side street to escape the water cannon. They then resume their protest, with chants of “Shameful!”
One of the protest organizers, Maryam, said between 100 and 150 women took part in the protest, moving in small groups from different parts of the city to a central meeting point. She did not give her last name for fear of retaliation.
“There was security on every street, in every square, armored vehicles and armed men,” he said. “When we started our protest, in Tariqi Park, the Taliban tore branches from the trees and beat us. But we continue our protest. They increased their security presence. Around 11 in the morning they took out the water cannon.”
A spokesman for the provincial governor, Hamidullah Mutawakil, said there were only four or five protesters. “They had no agenda, they just came here to make a movie,” he said, without mentioning violence against women or the use of the water cannon.
There has been widespread international condemnation of the university ban, including from Muslim-majority countries like Saudi Arabia, Turkiye, the United Arab Emirates and Qatar, as well as warnings from the United States and the G-7 group of major industrial nations that the policy will have consequences for the Taliban.
A Taliban government official, Higher Education Minister Nida Mohammad Nadim, spoke about the ban for the first time on Thursday in an interview with Afghan state television. He said the ban was necessary to prevent gender mixing in universities and because he believes that some subjects taught violate the tenets of Islam.
He said the ban would be in effect until further notice.
Despite initially promising a more moderate rule that would respect the rights of women and minorities, the Taliban have widely implemented their interpretation of Islamic law, or Sharia, since seizing power in August 2021.
They have barred girls from attending middle and high school, barred women from most labor camps, and ordered them to wear head-to-toe clothing in public. Women are also prohibited from entering parks and gyms. At the same time, Afghan society, while largely traditional, has increasingly embraced the education of girls and women over the past two decades.
Also on Saturday, in the southwestern Pakistani city of Quetta, dozens of Afghan refugee students protested a ban on female higher education in their homeland and demanded the immediate reopening of campuses for women.
One of them, Bibi Haseena, read a poem describing the grim plight of Afghan girls seeking education. She said she was not happy graduating outside of her country when hundreds of thousands of her Afghan sisters were deprived of an education.