Summer holidays: Taliban season to revive combat movement

Nahla Abdel Moneim

Children usually prepare for summer holidays by planning a round of games and hobbies to be improved. But Taliban changed that by organizing obligatory trips for children to camps in order to train them on violence and fighting.

Kandahar police chief Tade Khan said the Taliban had stepped up their terrorist attacks on southern Afghanistan in conjunction with summer holidays for schoolchildren. The movement used to force children to attend its private schools in Pakistan, which teach children martial arts and religious teachings.

It also stressed that the summer is a season to attract students, pointing out that the lack of schools and moderate educational seminars in Afghanistan and Pakistan are pushing children to the schools of the Taliban in their desire to achieve the goals of the alleged jihad.

In addition, the police chief believes that the Taliban do not want peace and does not seek it. At a time when the world is striving to establish peace and security in the region, the movement is launching violent attacks.

Hate schools

Since the emergence of the Taliban in 1994 and its control over large parts of Pakistan and its neighbor Afghanistan, it is interested in the formation of new generations subject to it and apply the same ideology, as revealed in the newspaper The diplomat.

The newspaper said that the Taliban began the era of the nineties with banning secular education and replacing it with religious schools which are under the control of the religious side and the military.

According to the newspaper, the group stopped teaching English language in schools and prevented male students from wearing Western clothes, in addition to preventing teachers from using books containing pictures of humans, allowing only images of the dead, with the removal of Afghan flag from the pages of books.

But the newspaper referred to the statements of the movement’s spokesman, Zabihullah Mujahid, on the curricula of the Taliban, saying: “The movement did not modify many of the curricula, but it only amended or deleted the sections that talk about culture and music, denying that playing instruments is the real culture of the country.

In the same context, a study by the Institute for Strategic Studies in Afghanistan showed that the number of unregistered schools in the country increased strongly in 2017, likely to be Taliban schools, according to the testimony of a number of students who attend.

Closed schools

The terrorist groups used to present themselves as the only face of religion. In light of this, the movement has been working to close and disrupt other schools which are under government control in Pakistan and Afghanistan.

In August 2018, the movement claimed responsibility for a bomb attack on 12 schools, eight of which were for girls. In light of these repeated incidents, parents are forced not to send their children to school for fear of them, leading to the leak of a large number of students.

In addition, the movement prohibits the education of girls and attacks any center that provides female educational services. In a report published on December 5, 2018, the Guardian said: “Girls go to secret schools that were opened for that purpose but in secret, on the backdrop of the difficulties they face to get proper education.”

On the difficulties of the educational process in Afghanistan and Pakistan, a study by the United Nations said that the fragility of government systems play a pivotal role in the weak structure of education in those countries, and the absence of political will hamper the efforts of civil society in this file.