BERLIN -- In Kabul, a teacher runs a secret school posing as a religious learning center, or madrassa, in defiance of a Taliban ban on formal secondary education for girls in Afghanistan.
When she started a school at her home in a Kabul neighborhood, the teacher, who asks to be identified only by the initial letter of her first name "R," had just 10 students. Today, R teaches more than 60 girls of all ages, as well as their mothers, to help continue the education denied them by the Taliban since the extremist Islamic movement took over the nation in August 2021.
