When the capital, Kabul, fell to the extremist Taliban in 2021, the chance of education for millions of girls went up in smoke. Literally, in the case of Basij-Rasikh's students: the first thing she did was burn all the school's papers, so that the Taliban would not be able to track students, parents or staff.
“We set fire to the students’ names. Their stories. Their identities. Everything went up in flames,” she writes on the school’s website.
The Sola school (short for School of Leadership, Afghanistan) was then described as the country's only boarding school for girls. But Basij-Rasikh and many of the hundreds of students have now fled their homeland.
Sensitive to bypass
With the help of, among other things, mediator Qatar, some of them were able to settle in Rwanda, 6,000 kilometres away.
“We welcome Sola,” the African country’s education ministry told the Anatolia news agency. “Out of respect for their need for confidentiality, we will not comment further.”
Five school years later, Sola's base in the capital, Kigali, has now become permanent, with a large shiny sign above the premises, writes the AP news agency's correspondent. However, the sign is only visible inside the school grounds, not from the street - circumventing the Taliban's ban is sensitive, even so far from home.
But Basij-Rasikh is happy about what the new sign means.
"It shows what this place means to us – a permanent home for the girls," she tells AP.
Enormous needs
On site, the operation includes students and staff totalling a few hundred people. But with financial support from, among others, the philanthropist Melinda French Gates, they have also started Sola X, an online school via WhatsApp that now has 41,000 students, mostly in Afghanistan but also elsewhere in the world.
But the needs are enormous, and initiatives like Sola cannot accommodate more than a fraction of all those who apply.
And although Basij-Rasikh is very grateful that countries like Rwanda are standing up, the long-term goal is different.
"Our mission is to get back to Afghanistan," she tells AP.
The Afghan girls we raise in exile, they will become leaders.
The Taliban is a fundamentalist movement, based on an extreme interpretation of Islam and the ancient cultural doctrine of Pashtunwali, named after the Pashtun ethnic group.
The movement ruled Afghanistan from 1996 to 2001, and regained power in 2021.
Citing Islam, the Taliban have brutally strict rules for interaction between women and men. And in 2022, the government in Kabul announced that this means that girls are only allowed to attend school up to the age of twelve.
Afghanistan's population is very young, so of the nearly 50 million inhabitants, up to 10 million are girls, the UN estimates. The Taliban's school ban for older girls can be circumvented to some extent through aid initiatives and local efforts, but according to a UN report in August this year, at least 2.4 million girls have so far been "systematically excluded" from schooling equivalent to high school and above.
