Since the beginning of Afghan year 1392, the insurgents have killed about 100 teachers and education officials in Afghanistan. According to Ministry of Education (MoE), insurgents’ attacks on individuals involved in educating Afghan children have rose dramatically over the past few months. MoE spokesman, Amanullah Aiman said on Saturday August 10,2013 that militants are trying to instill fear in students, teachers and education employees through assassination of education employees across the country. This is going to cause huge damage to the nascent educational development in the country.

Educating Afghans has been one of the top priorities of the international community since the fall of Taliban regime in 2001. Millions of girls and boys are attending school today. Nonetheless, a major portion of Afghan population still do not have access to education as there is either no school or the schools have been closed down by Taliban. The UNICEF puts the number of Afghan children that are out of school to 4.2 million while according to Ministry of Education (MoE), three million children are deprived from attending schools. Of the 4.2 million Afghan children not getting any education, UNICEF estimates 60% are girls - and most live in rural districts and the southern and eastern provinces where NATO-Taliban clashes have been most fierce.

The education sector faces grave challenges including insecurity and lack of adequate female teachers and capacity in MoE offices. Target killing of teachers and MoE officials seem to be another heinous plan by Taliban and other groups of insurgents to create hindrance for an educated Afghanistan. No doubt, Taliban’s such actions are based in their narrow and extreme mindset towards the world. After their regime was toppled in 2001, they have intensively tried to prevent Afghans from getting education by acid/gas attacks on students, setting fire to schools and threatening people to keep their children away from education. In terms of death rates, Afghanistan had 439 teachers, education employees and students killed in 2006-9, one of the highest in the world. Lingering war in the country forms the biggest challenge for Afghanistan’s education sector to move ahead.

Regretfully, government’s position in preventing damages cause by Taliban to education sector of Afghanistan has been quite pathetic. At times when the international security forces are set to withdraw completely from Afghanistan by the end of 2014, one of the areas that will suffer the most, if the condition further deteriorates, is the education sector.