Taliban militants

Taliban militants have closed around 30 schools in one district of the south-eastern Afghan province Logar, a local official said Friday, with the shutdown affecting more than 11,000 students.

The closures are in retaliation to the killing of a Taliban commander in Charkh district by government forces, said Salim Saleh, a spokesman for the provincial governor.

Among the students who are no long able to attend school are 2,000 girls, he told dpa.

Tribal elders and the local government have been negotiating for days with the extremists to reopen the schools.

Similar reports of school closures are coming from the embattled northern province of Kunduz, where according to
Radio Free Europe more than half of the province’s 500 schools are not operating.

Since the beginning of the school year in mid-March, the Taliban have kept closed the schools in areas under their
control, said Ghulam Rabbani, a member of the provincial council.

The Taliban want the funding for schools in the areas under their control to go through them, Rabbani said.

The problem arose when the local government decided to deposit funds and salaries in bank accounts, instead of
paying in cash, said Sayed Sadat, another council member.

“This did not sit well with the Taliban.”

“We wanted to roll out the bank ID system and get rid of corruption,” said Mohammad Ahmadi, head of the education department of Kunduz, adding that there were some problems.

According a spokesman of the Education Ministry in the capital Kabul, a total of 1,057 schools are closed in 24
of Afghanistan’s 34 provinces.(dpa/NAN)