Khaama Press: The Taliban members reportedly mutilated a traffic enforcer’s ear in Aybak city, the provincial capital of Samangan province in central Afghanistan, after the traffic officer stopped their car to avoid traffic congestion. A video that has also been made public and is making the rounds on social media shows the traffic officer wearing a blood-stained uniform. The Taliban reportedly cut off the traffic officer’s ear after he stopped the vehicle transporting their troops to ease a traffic bottleneck.
VOA: The Taliban have imposed yet more restrictions on girls’ education in Afghanistan as the group barred girls from choosing certain subjects in the country’s national university entrance exam this year. The form given to female students at the exam, received by the VOA Afghanistan Service, shows that female students did not have the option of choosing civil engineering, journalism, veterinary, agriculture and geology in this year’s exam held at the beginning of this month.
Global Citizen: Efforts to erase women and girls from everyday life in Afghanistan have only increased one year since the Taliban took over the government on Aug. 15, 2021. Women and girls continue to face restrictions on their basic human rights imposed by the Sunni Islamist militant group for the first time since 2001. Traces of two decades of women’s hard-earned rights hardly remain amid an economic crisis, drought, and oppressive mandates.
The Guardian: Last week, a suicide bomber killed at least 53 people – mostly girls from the minority Hazara ethnic group – outside an education centre in Kabul. Here, relatives and friends of four young women who died remember their loved ones.
France 24: A bomber blew himself up on Friday at a Kabul study hall as hundreds of pupils were taking tests in preparation for university entrance exams in the city’s Dasht-e-Barchi area. The western neighbourhood is a predominantly Shiite Muslim enclave and home to the minority Hazara community - a historically oppressed group that has been targeted in some of Afghanistan’s most brutal attacks in recent years.