US warns of ‘costs’ if IEA’s suspension of women from universities not reversed

US Secretary of State Antony Blinken has warned the Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan (IEA) of costs if it does not reverse its decision to suspend university education for women in the country.

Blinken said on Thursday that the IEA will not be able to improve relations with the rest of the world if it continued to deny Afghan women their fundamental rights.

“What they’ve done is to try to sentence Afghan women and girls to a dark future without opportunity,” Blinken said during an end-of-year news conference in Washington, DC.

“And the bottom line is that no country is going to be able to succeed – much less thrive – if it denies half its population the opportunity to contribute.

“And to be clear, we’re engaged with other countries on this right now – there are going to be costs if this is not reversed if this has not changed,” said Blinken, without specifying what the measures might include.

On Tuesday, IEA told universities across the country to suspend education for women until further notice.

In an interview with RTA on Thursday night, the minister of higher education Neda Mohammad Nadeem said there were a number of reasons behind the decision to ban women from attending university.

He said reforms imposed by the IEA on the higher education sector had not been implemented.

According to him, there were four key reasons for the decision. These were that female students were not observing the full hijab rule, that women living in dormitories were on their own and not accompanied by a male relative, that co-education of male and female students continued and that some faculties for women were not in keeping with Islamic laws.

IEA’s recent decision on female university students has been met with a global outcry. Not only have Western countries condemned the decision but Islamic nations, including Saudi Arabia, Qatar, the UAE and Turkey, among others, have also called for the decision to be overturned.