A top Taliban official said that the group is banning girls from secondary school until it enacts a new education policy: BBC report

• A top Taliban official confirmed girls are being banned from secondary school, the BBC reported.
• It's the first acknowledgment by an authority in the regime that it's barring girls from education.

The head of the Taliban's education commission has confirmed a ban on secondary school education for girls, the BBC reported.

Acting Deputy Education Minister Abdul Hakim Hemat told the media outlet that girls in Afghanistan who want to attend secondary school will have to wait until a new education policy is enacted at the start of 2022.

The announcement marks the first acknowledgment by Taliban authorities of such a ban. The hardline Islamist group has repeatedly vowed it would allow girls to return to school and university, part of its promise that women under its new rule would be treated differently compared to when it ran Afghanistan from 1996 to 2001.

Some areas of Afghanistan have allowed girls to return to secondary school, but they are a select few.

Teachers and teenage girls from 13 provinces, out of Afghanistan's total 34, told the BBC that they are still barred from classrooms.

The Taliban announced on September 17 that schooling for boys would resume, several weeks after it declared victory in the capital of Kabul, though it didn't make any mention of girls.

It also said that month it would allow women to to attend university, but require them to do so in gender-segregated classrooms while abiding by the Islamic dress code.

In late September, a Twitter account claiming to be the chancellor of Kabul University wrote that women would not be allowed to go to school or work. The Taliban said the tweet was fake, and the owner of the account later revealed himself as a student frustrated with the group's rule, CNN reported.