Inside Kabul's secret school for girls

How Britain helped 'guerrilla teachers' run underground classes for children under the noses of the Taliban

During the five years they ruled most of Afghanistan, the Taliban enforced the most extreme policy of sex discrimination in education ever dreamed up, eventually barring girls of all ages from learning anything involving books and letters at all, even the Koran.

But thanks to an extraordinary secret project, hundreds of thousands of girls across the country did in fact receive an education during these years. The courage of Afghan teachers and foreign and Afghan aid workers in defying or subverting the Taliban's wishes has been one of the untold stories of the Taliban era.

The full scale of education underground was revealed in Kabul this week by Dr Mukesh Kapila, head of the conflict and humanitarian affairs section of the UK's Department for International Development. Inside the old British embassy building he described how DFID had been providing what he called "underground" or "guerrilla aid" during the Taliban years.

"We supplied funds, books and other equipment to schools functioning in defiance of the Taliban," he said. "In some areas the proportion of children going to school increased from 5 per cent to 40 per cent as a result of these initiatives. One-third of those were girls.''

DFID was one of a number of organisations funnelling money and materials to the education resistance. Others included Save the Children Fund and Care, but the most prominent was the Swedish Committee for Afghanistan. Toughened by its experience during the mujahedin years (1992-96), when it set up schools in caves in the mountains for children whose families had fled the fighting in the cities, SCA fostered the creation of secret girls' departments attached to boys schools, and schools operating covertly in private homes.

"Following the edict forbidding education for girls beyond the age of nine, the Taliban closed the schools,'' said Abdul Kavir, a local staff member with SCA in Kabul. But "home schools" sprang up and continued to function, either because the Taliban did not know about them or because they ignored them. In some cases the local Taliban had their own children in these schools.

About 35,000 girls attended schools either run or supported by SCA in Taliban-controlled areas, some 24 per cent of the total number of pupils enrolled. And 1,000 of SCA's 5,000 teachers are women.

"When the Taliban came to power we had to go underground with lots of our girls' schools," said Sidney Petterson, SCA's country director. "Some were closed and we did not resist openly because the punishment for our local workers would have been severe. We switched them instead from our school buildings to home schools in the houses of female teachers. If a hard-line Taliban took control of a region or a village, we would also have to close down girls' schools in the village completely and move to more secure areas nearby hoping that some of the students could still reach the school.''

When the Taliban turned the co-educational secondary school where she was principal into a boys-only madrassa, a school for Koranic studies, Kamila Yastali retaliated by setting up a secret school for girls and boys in her home. By the time the Taliban left town last week, it had 180 students, 120 of them girls.

It's a modest, middle-class home on a dusty road in Khair Khana, Kabul. Inside, the hall was packed tight with small girls, all sitting cross-legged on the floor, quiet and docile, waiting for the lesson to start. The next room was the same, and a conservatory beyond was equally crowded. The youngest girls were five, the oldest 17.

This scene, or something like it, was played out every schoolday for most of the years the Taliban held power. "We started with four children: my son Anil, now 16, and the children of our neighbours,'' said Mrs Yastali. "It was like a secret campaign against the Taliban. The girls arrived in the morning one by one so they wouldn't be noticed.''

But they were noticed, and the Taliban tried numerous times to close the school down. "Many women came to the door to ask what we were teaching the girls," said Mrs Yastali. "They were spies for the Taliban, so I beat them and sent them away. One time Taliban fighters surrounded the house and fired in the air to terrify us." But Mrs Yastali would not be cowed.

But it was a strain. The 180 students, whose parents pay 20,000 Afghanis (33p) per month, study in three batches, the 120 girls in two shifts between 7am and 11.30am and all the boys after lunch.

Mrs Yastali is a firm but dynamic teacher and shares the duties with three other women. Subjects encompass the full range of an old-fashioned syllabus, including Dari (Persian) – Afghanistan's literary language – maths, science, religion and English. But there was no place for the children to play or do sports, and a cloak of secrecy around the school enhanced the feeling that knowledge was forbidden fruit. "We are so happy," Mrs Yastali said last week. "We don't have to be secret any more, and we can move to a bigger place."

Mrs Yastali's school was an unusually large and uncompromising defiance of Taliban bigotry, but smaller, more furtive, seminaries sprang up in homes across the country as parents and teachers struggled to keep the flame of learning alight.

Ulya, the 15-year-old daughter of a schoolmistress, attended a far smaller secret school for one hour every day to learn English. "There were 17 in the class," she said. "We went to the school wearing burqa and during the lessons we kept the Koran nearby, so if the Taliban came in we put it on our lap and the teacher explained we were studying Islam. I was scared because they are dangerous: three months ago the Taliban came and said bad words to the teacher and closed the school down – a neighbour had informed on her."

The secret schools were the frontline in a resistance movement set up across Afghanistan to thwart the Taliban's plan of reducing the entire population to their own levels of ignorance. Most of the Taliban's leaders were refugee orphans from Afghanistan's civil war, brought up in madrassas, where the only educational challenge was to memorise the Koran.

''They were trying to brainwash all the children,'' said Sayed Nabi Hashimi, chief pilot with Ariana Afghan Airlines. "It is very good that they have gone because if they had stayed they would have reduced the country to complete ignorance in a generation.''

The Taliban strictures applied right up through the system to university. "My nephew is studying to be a doctor,'' said Mr Hashimi. "He studies 40 hours per week but only 10 hours is medicine, 30 hours is Koran. I know boys whose knowledge of the scriptures is amazing, but if you ask them what is two times eight they haven't a clue.'' Mr Hashimi's own son Limar, aged seven, studies at home with a personal tutor, who is teaching him English. "I smuggled English textbooks from Pakistan to Kabul," Mr Hashimi recalls. "Smuggled them – in the same way as a kilo of heroin."

There are many ways to gauge Afghanistan's tragic disintegration as a country over the past 25 years. There are no functioning courts, no communications, the main roads have been reduced to goat tracks, millions of people have fled abroad. But the erosion of the education system is the most fundamental failure because, as Sayed Hashimi points out, it risks reducing the remaining population to barbarism. The cruel irony of the past five years is that the Taliban, who at least restored a minimum of order to Afghanistan, took an education system degraded by decades of war and tried to kill it off altogether. They were trying to recreate the entire nation in their own image – brutish, uncouth know-nothings with a veneer of religiosity.

The secret schools frustrated that ambition. But the challenge now is to reverse the process. One of the fundamental reasons for Afghanistan's failure to develop is that the proportion of the population receiving even a basic education has never risen above 10 per cent. To give every Afghan, girls as well as boys, the opportunity of an education would be the biggest service the outside world could do for the stricken country.