KABUL - Afghan children ran, skipped - and dawdled - to school on Saturday at the start of a new year with women teachers back in class and everyday subjects like maths replacing the Islamic dogma of the ousted Taleban regime.
In a symbolic break with Afghanistan's war-scarred past, primary and secondary school children opened new textbooks rushed to the country in recent days after they were written by Afghan scholars at United States universities.
Nine-year-old Maryam, who as a girl would not have been able to attend school if the Taleban had still been in power, shyly chatted with new friends at her central Kabul primary school.
"I'm so excited," she said as she proudly adjusted her school scarf.
Parents said they woke children early to brush their shoes, a somewhat vain attempt to send them to school looking perfectly smart after Kabul was hit by a hailstorm overnight.
"I'm very happy to be going to school so I can become a doctor or an engineer to serve my people," said 12-year-old Mohammed Rasul Bashir as he picked up his textbooks.
On the back covers were photographs of drug addicts and anti-drug slogans to discourage the use of narcotics in one of the world's leading opium producers.
"The Taleban were fanatics and had a serious problem with science and technology.
"They paid less attention to math and sciences because they saw no need for doctors, engineers or economists," Abdulnabi Wahedi, a senior Education Ministry official, said this week.
"They had their own agenda and tried to replace modern knowledge with their vision of Islamic learnings.
"We also teach about Islam, but with a view to modernism and progress," he said.
Despite 1.2 million children from the age of seven to 16 returning to school on time - a major achievement for interim President Hamid Karzai's fledgling Government - at least three times that number will not yet get the opportunity.
The unlucky ones mainly live in rural areas where schools have been destroyed and there are no teachers because they fled during the Taleban's harsh rule.
The Education Ministry has rehired about 7000 teachers sacked by the Taleban, including many women who were banned from working.
Over the coming year, Afghan authorities hope to absorb another two million children into the education system.
* Hundreds of former Taleban fighters have been freed in a goodwill gesture in the northern Afghan town of Shibarghan.
However, thousands were still held in appalling conditions in one of Afghanistan's harshest prisons.
Heavy prison gates were flung open and most of the 258 released captives poured out in a chaotic and jubilant mass from the prison of Shibarghan, where they had been kept for four months.
Groups of relatives, tears in their eyes, rushed to hug their emaciated but happy kinsmen, some of whom could not walk on their own and were supported or carried by their fellows.
Minutes earlier the inmates, soaked by rain and huddled in the muddy prison yard, had heard Deputy Defence Minister Abdul Rashid Dostum say that Karzai had ordered their release in a sign of reconciliation marking the spring holiday of Nauroz.
"Today is the happiest day in my life," Muhammaddin, 18, said before leaving the prison.
"We'll make sure we watch closely their fate after the release," Samuel Emomet, co-ordinating the Red Cross detention activity in the area, said.
Roughly 3000 other inmates remain in the crumbling, but well-guarded, prison.
- REUTERS
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