The Taliban banned Afghan girls from school 1,000 days ago, but some brave young women refuse to accept it.

June 8th marks 1,000 days since the Taliban banned girls over the age of 12 from all schools in Afghanistan. The ban, issued just days after the group regained control of Afghanistan in 2021, it has left hundreds of thousands of girls with little hope of a formal education.

Human Rights Watch said in a statement marking 1,000 days that Afghan society “will never fully recover” from the loss of so many future female professionals, especially in a country already struggling with low youth literacy rates.

The United Nations accuses the Taliban of imposing a “gender apartheid” with its draconian decrees, policies and system of discrimination against women and girls, calling Afghanistan under the rule of hard-line Islamists a “cemetery of buried hopes.”

A last, risky hope for education

Despite the risks, however, many Afghan girls refused to give up hope and turned to unofficial schools, hidden from the eyes of the Taliban, to continue studying. Their hope is that if the Taliban regime collapses or is forced, through international pressure, to relax its restrictions, their clandestine schooling will keep them on par with their international peers and allow them to pass exams.

Many of the unofficial clandestine schools in Afghanistan operate with limited resources – both materials and educators. They get support from women’s rights and education activists outside the country, who send monthly funding for textbooks and teachers’ salaries.

The Pohana Fund is one of many private groups that support secret schools, mainly in Afghanistan’s southern and eastern provinces. The organization’s founder, Wazhma Tokhi, who left Afghanistan and now lives in Europe, told CBS News that the network of schools supported by her group has about 1,300 teenagers as students.

“My goal in establishing these schools is to help girls continue their education, especially those in remote and underdeveloped provinces who are deprived of their basic rights to study beyond the sixth grade,” Tokhi told CBS News.

Sherin, whose real name CBS News is not using due to the nature of her work in Afghanistan, is a human rights activist and the only teacher at one of the clandestine schools in Pohana in southern Helmand province — the ancestral home of the Taliban. She was a teacher before the Taliban ban and has continued her work clandestinely since then. She told CBS News that she still teaches many of her former students, offering two sessions a day, each with 20 students, with financial assistance from the Pohana Fund.

“Teaching 40 students in two sessions is a challenge, but I am committed to helping these girls who have been through a lot,” Sherin told CBS News in a phone interview. “I do this for my students, who are under immense mental pressure, who faced severe mental health problems after the Taliban closed their schools.”

Its students range from seventh to 11th grade, and the subjects they study include some completely excluded from the new Taliban-approved curriculum, including for boys. According to students who spoke to CBS News, Sherin’s classes are their last hope to escape the mental anguish of being denied an education. Some said continuing education was a way to avoid marriage in their families.

“It’s a risky choice to educate these girls, but I chose this path,” Sherin said. “The Taliban will punish us if they discover this school, because I am teaching girls who should be at home, according to Taliban orders, and because I receive funding from abroad.”

Najiba, whose name CBS News also changed, is 15 years old and would be in ninth grade this year if his school were still open. Instead, she attends Sherin’s secret school, hoping and preparing for a better future, and refusing to give up on her dream of becoming a neurosurgeon.

“When I heard that the Taliban opened schools just for boys in the 2024 school year, I felt humiliated, because women are worthless in the eyes of the Taliban,” she told CBS News by phone.

Inconsistent Taliban enforcement

Most of Afghanistan’s secret schools operate, at least on the surface, as Islamic religious schools, or madrasas. The Taliban’s regulation of madrasas, and even unsanctioned schools, varies significantly depending on location and the local authorities involved, according to teachers from three different provinces who spoke to CBS News.

In some provinces, especially traditional Taliban strongholds in the south and east, local authorities impose a strict ban on girls’ education. In other areas, however, there are tacit understandings between local authorities and teachers.

Some teachers said they run schools from their homes, made to look like religious schools, and some said they had even been warned by local authorities about possible visits from auditors from the Taliban-run Ministry of Education.

“The Taliban in our region know that we also teach school subjects,” said a teacher in the capital, Kabul. “I can’t hide this from them anymore… Somehow they help us by warning us before the auditors visit.”

But the inconsistency and quick punishment for anyone who dares to disregard the Taliban’s strict rules, it means that many thousands of girls continue to be denied basic rights.

“Every day, more dreams die”

Lima, 17, is a student at another clandestine school for girls in Afghanistan.

“I felt like I was deprived of my human rights just because I was a woman in Afghanistan,” she told CBS News. “I wanted to be an independent woman and decide my future, but the Taliban took those rights away from us.”

She had to interrupt the conversation, overcome by her emotions.

While these young women are still finding ways around the Taliban’s internationally condemned crackdown on their basic human rights, it is widely expected that Afghanistan will continue to see many of its educated and professional women flee to countries with more opportunities.

“Afghanistan will never fully recover from these 1,000 days,” Human Rights Watch associate director for women’s rights Heather Barr said in the group’s statement. “The potential lost in this time – the artists, doctors, poets and engineers who will never be able to lend their skills to their country – cannot be replaced. With each passing day, more dreams die.”