Since 2021, the Taliban’s government’s response to the question of when school will reopen for girls has veered from one reason to another, landing now on deflection and silence.

Back in September 2021, in our first interview with a Taliban spokesman after they seized power, the spokesman said schools for girls would open, adding they were “working to improve the security situation”.

A year later, the answer was that “religious scholars have issues with the safety of girls travelling to and from school”, but they were working on the problem.

In 2024, the Taliban government’s deputy spokesman Hamdullah Fitrat told me: “We are awaiting the decision of the leadership.”

This month, I once again met Fitrat, who didn’t want to be pictured with a woman or sit across from me. I asked how they can continue to justify the ban on secondary school and university education for women.

He answered, pointing out “that around seven million boys and five million girls are currently studying”.

“The restriction on education beyond grade six is a separate issue,” he said, directing us to the ministry of education who would “hopefully… provide a satisfactory response”.

When I pressed further, saying women and girls in Afghanistan have told us they do not believe education will ever open under the Taliban government’s watch, his response once again was to ask the education ministry.

We did ask the education ministry the same question. They did not respond.

There are divisions within the Taliban government on the issue of women’s education which have been evident to us, but the supreme leader has only hardened his stance through the years.

The women and girls remember the day schools closed for them as clearly as it was yesterday.

“All I did was cry and sob the whole day and night,” Alia recalls. “I could not sleep for a week. I felt like I was walking around like a dead body.”

“When I see men my age who have graduated and are going to university – I feel very bad, I feel like I am burning in hell,” she adds.

Women face a slew of other restrictions imposed by the Taliban’s supreme leader, vigorously enforced in some places, with a bit more freedom in others.