After the Taliban banned women from attending university in Afghanistan, Afghans launched a campaign on the social media platform Twitter with the hashtag letherlearn, to raise the voice for Afghan women, standing against brutality.
On Tuesday, the Afghan government led by the Taliban higher education ministry said that female students would not be allowed access to the country’s universities until further notice, in a new step towards more restrictions on Afghan women.
The hashtag “LetHerLearn” became a global sensation, with over thousands of tweets so far in support.
Videos are circulating on Twitter of young women being stopped this Wednesday morning at the gate of their school.
In Nangarhar, eastern Afghanistan, male students protest in solidarity with female students. Other male students refuse to take their exams in protest of the Taliban’s new decisions.
One of the video clip show women weeping and consoling each other.
One clip shows men joining a crowd of women holding up signs and chanting in protest of the sexist ban.
“Acquiring knowledge is a must. There is no doubt that women make up half of society,” tweeted Rashid Khan, the former captain of the Afghanistan cricket team.
Samim Arif, once a deputy spokesman for former Afghan President Ashraf Ghani, tweeted, “My 18 yo sister Wurranga worked extremely hard to make it to engineering school.”
“Now Taliban banned her from attending school. Her dreams are shattered, our family is devastated,” he added.
“We came to the university at 6:30 in the morning, the boys were allowed to enter and they pointed guns at us and told us to go home,” Tamana Aref tweeted.
Many Afghan professors resigned in solidarity with Afghan women.
Obaidullah Wardak announced his resignation on social media, stating he did not want to continue teaching “where girls are not allowed to study”.
“To mark my protest against the unjust and immoral ban on girls’ education by the current regime in Afghanistan, I have resigned from my position as a faculty member at Kabul University. I am opposing this brutal clampdown on girls’ education even if I have to stand alone,” Obaidullah tweeted.
“I have served the faculty of mathematics and its students for over 10 years but despite rich experience and a doctorate I don’t wish to continue working somewhere where there is organized discrimination against innocent and talented girls of this country by those in power,” he added.
This comes after imposing restrictions on pre-university education for girls and banning women from entering parks in the capital, Kabul, or swimming pools and gyms.
The Taliban seized power in Afghanistan on August 15, 2021, coinciding with the withdrawal of the United States and NATO forces from the country.
After the Taliban seized power, universities were forced to implement new rules that included separating classrooms and entrances between the sexes, and only female professors and older men were allowed to teach female students.
On March 23, 2022, girls across the country were banned from secondary education, severely reducing the number of them in universities.
