A senior Taliban figure urged the group’s leader to step down ban on education for Afghan women and girlssaying there was no excuse for them, in a rare public rebuke of government policy.

Sher Abbas Stanikzai, political deputy in the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, said this in a speech on Saturday in the southeastern province of Khost.

He told the audience at the religious school ceremony that there was no reason to deny education to women and girls, “just as there was no justification in the past and there should be none.”

The government banned women from education beyond the sixth grade. Last September, there were reports that the authorities had also halted medical training and courses for women.

In Afghanistan, women and girls can only be treated by doctors and health workers. The authorities have yet to confirm the ban on medical training.

“We are once again calling on the leadership to open the doors of education,” Stanikzai said in a video shared by his official account on social media platform X. “We are doing injustice to 20 million people out of a population of 40 million, depriving them of all their rights. This is not in Islamic law, but our personal choice or nature.”

Stanikzai was once the head of the Taliban team in the negotiations that led to the complete withdrawal of foreign troops from Afghanistan.

It is not the first time that he has said that women and girls deserve education. He said the same thing in September 2022, a year after the closure of girls’ schools and months before the study ban was introduced.

But the latest comments marked his first call for a change in policy and a direct appeal to Taliban leader Hibatullah Akhundzadi.

Ibraheem Bahiss, an analyst with the Crisis Group’s South Asia program, said Stanikzai has occasionally made statements calling girls’ education a right for all Afghan women.

“However, this latest statement appears to go further in that he is publicly calling for a change in policy and questioning the legitimacy of the current approach,” Bahiss said.

In Pakistan’s capital, Islamabad, earlier this month, Nobel Peace Prize laureate Malala Yousafzai called on Muslim leaders to stand up to the Taliban on the issue of women’s and girls’ education.

She spoke at a conference organized by the Organization of Islamic Cooperation and the Muslim World League.

The UN said recognition is nearly impossible while bans on women’s education and employment remain in place, and women cannot go out in public without a male guardian.

No country recognizes the Taliban as the legitimate rulers of Afghanistan, but countries such as Russia are building ties with them.

India is also developing relations with the Afghan authorities.

In Dubai earlier this month, a meeting between India’s top diplomat Vikram Mistry and Foreign Minister Amir Khan Muttaqi showed their deepening cooperation.