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Bennett describes IEA as united but divided over girls’ education
The UN’s Special Human Rights Rapporteur for Afghanistan, said on Sunday at the Doha Forum that the Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan (IEA) has a unified vision, but is divided on the issue of women’s education.
According to Richard Bennett, a former Minister of Higher Education of the Islamic Emirate was dismissed for supporting women’s education.
He did not name the dismissed official, but before Nada Mohammad Nadim, Acting Minister of Higher Education, Abdul Baqi Haqqani was acting minister of higher education.
“The unity of the Taliban (Islamic Emirate) is one of their strengths, because they consider unity to be very important. But in the matter of education, I don’t think they have this integrity. We have seen this difference in some statements,” Bennett said.
He also said that in a meeting with the former minister of education, the official talked about providing education for girls in universities in separate classes.
“We had detailed technical discussions about the education of women and girls,” Bennett said. However, the minister was removed from his post a few months later, Bennett said.
Bennett said it was probably because “Kandahar saw his views on education as very open and progressive.”
At the same time, the special representative of the US for Afghanistan’s women’s affairs and human rights also said in this meeting that the Islamic Emirate’s policies towards women have no religious or economic basis.
Rina Amiri, criticized the restrictions imposed on women’s right to education, work, travel and political participation, and said that these restrictions have no economic basis. According to the United Nations assessment, due to the unemployment of women in Afghanistan, $1 billion dollars of income has decreased and the work ban and ban on women’s education has had a destructive effect on families.
“I don’t think it has an economic basis, certainly not,” said Amiri.
She said the United Nations has “estimated that Afghanistan has lost more than $1 billion dollars in income, and this is actually destroying Afghanistan.”
Emphasizing that banning women’s education and work has no religious basis, Amiri said that 57 countries in the world said at the meeting of the Islamic Organization that banning women’s education and work is in conflict with Islamic values.
“I don’t think it has anything to do with religion,” she said. “I was earlier at the conference of the Organization of Islamic Cooperation of Women in Jeddah, where 57 countries participated and said that this is against the holy religion of Islam, this is politics.”
The Islamic Emirate, however, says that human rights and women’s rights are provided within the framework of Sharia law and they do not allow outside interference in internal matters.
The Embassy of Japan in Afghanistan announced on Friday that the country has allocated $19.5 million in humanitarian assistance to Afghanistan.
In a statement, the Japanese Embassy said it hopes the aid will help bring positive change to the lives of vulnerable Afghans.
According to the statement, the assistance will cover the basic humanitarian needs of vulnerable communities in Afghanistan.
The embassy added that the aid will be delivered through United Nations agencies, international organizations, and Japanese non-governmental organizations operating in Afghanistan.
Japan’s total assistance to Afghanistan since August 2021 has reached more than $549 million.
Security forces at the Islam Qala border in Herat province prevented hundreds of young Afghans from illegally entering Iran.
Officials from the 207 Al-Farooq Army Corps said that around 530 people attempted over the past two days to illegally enter Iranian territory through areas of Kohsan district in Herat, but border forces detained them and transferred them back to their original areas.
Meanwhile, officials in the local administration of Herat said that due to severe cold along the illegal migration route to Iran, three Afghan migrants have lost their lives in the Kohsan district of the province, and a shepherd has also died there for the same reason.
Mohammad Yousuf Saeedi, spokesperson for the Herat governor’s office, said that some statistics and images shared on social media regarding the incident are not reliable.
According to him, further investigations are underway to determine whether any individuals have died on the other side of the border.
President Donald Trump suspended the green card lottery program on Thursday that allowed the suspect in the Brown University and MIT shootings to come to the United States.
Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem said in a post on the social platform X that, at Trump’s direction, she is ordering the United States Citizenship and Immigration Services to pause the program, the Associated Press reported.
“This heinous individual should never have been allowed in our country,” she said of the suspect, Portuguese national Claudio Neves Valente.
Neves Valente, 48, is suspected in the shootings at Brown University that killed two students and wounded nine others, and the killing of an MIT professor. He was found dead Thursday evening from a self-inflicted gunshot wound, officials said.
Neves Valente had studied at Brown on a student visa beginning in 2000, according to an affidavit from a Providence police detective. In 2017, he was issued a diversity immigrant visa and months later obtained legal permanent residence status, according to the affidavit. It was not immediately clear where he was between taking a leave of absence from the school in 2001 and getting the visa in 2017.
The diversity visa program makes up to 50,000 green cards available each year by lottery to people from countries that are little represented in the U.S., many of them in Africa. The lottery was created by Congress, and the move is almost certain to invite legal challenges.
Nearly 20 million people applied for the 2025 visa lottery, with more than 131,000 selected when including spouses with the winners. After winning, they must undergo vetting to win admission to the United States. Portuguese citizens won only 38 slots.
Lottery winners are invited to apply for a green card. They are interviewed at consulates and subject to the same requirements and vetting as other green-card applicants.
Trump has long opposed the diversity visa lottery. Noem’s announcement is the latest example of using tragedy to advance immigration policy goals. After an Afghan man was identified as the gunman in a fatal attack on National Guard members in November, Trump’s administration imposed sweeping rules against immigration from Afghanistan and other counties.
While pursuing mass deportation, Trump has sought to limit or eliminate avenues to legal immigration. He has not been deterred if they are enshrined in law, like the diversity visa lottery, or the Constitution, as with a right to citizenship for anyone born on U.S. soil. The Supreme Court recently agreed to hear his challenge to birthright citizenship.
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