On June 4, approximately 80 girls were poisoned and hospitalized in two consecutive attacks at their primary schools in the Sar-e-Pul region of northern Afghanistan, bringing the anti-women oppression in the Taliban-run country to a new low. The series of poisoning instances were confirmed to Associated Press by a local school authority. The education official claimed that the individual behind the poisoning had a personal vendetta but made no further mention of it.
In the Sangcharak area of Sar-e-Pul, a total of 80 female students were poisoned, according to Mohammad Rahmani, head of the provincial education department. He said that 60 children at Naswan-e-Kabod Aab School and 17 more at Naswan-e-Faizabad School had been poisoned. “Both primary schools are near to each other and were targeted one after the other,” he told Associated Press. “We shifted the students to the hospital and now they are all fine.”
Soon after assuming control, the Taliban forbade girls from continuing their education past the sixth grade
The Taliban regime in Kabul, which was deposed by democratically-elected President Ashraf Ghani in August 2021, has made it a policy to restrict the rights and freedoms of Afghan women and girls. But this is the first time that a poisoning attack like the ones that have recently been reported in Iran had been recorded in Afghanistan.
Soon after assuming control, the Taliban forbade girls from continuing their education past the sixth grade. The government outlawed women attending universities starting in December 2022. Afghan women living under the Taliban’s rule who were contacted by WION spoke of the terrifying events surrounding their expulsion from schools and institutions in December 2022.
Initial findings from the department’s ongoing investigation suggest that someone with a grudge paid a third party to carry out the attacks, according to Rahmani.
He made no mention of the girl’s injuries or the method by which they were poisoned. Rahmani stated they were in classes 1 through 6, but she did not specify their ages.