Prominent Taliban cleric Rahimullah Haqqani dies after bomb attack

The Taliban announced Thursday the death of one of their prominent religious clerics, Sheikh Rahimullah Haqqani, killed after a bomb attack on a madrassa where he was teaching a weekly in Kabul, the capital of Afghanistan.

One of the Taliban spokesmen, Bilal Karimi, has reported on his Twitter profile the death of Haqqani, who “has reached the highest position of martyrdom” after suffering the “brutal attack of a ruthless enemy.”

Haqqani was a well-known figure in Afghanistan, despite the fact that he practiced as a cleric and resided mainly across the border in the Pakistani city of Peshawar. A supporter of the Taliban, he had spoken out against the Islamic State Khorasan Province, the Afghan affiliate of that terrorist group.

In a recent interview for the British BBC, Haqqani said he was in favor of allowing women and girls access to education, contrary to the Taliban idea, which has been criticized by the international community.

For the cleric, who issued a religious decree to allow this access to schools for women and girls, “there is no justification in Islamic law to say that female education is not allowed.”

“There is no justification at all. All religious books have stated that female education is permissible and compulsory because, for example, if a woman gets sick, in an Islamic environment like Afghanistan or Pakistan, and she needs treatment, it is much better if she is treated by a female doctor,” he has argued.

The perpetrators of the attack are unknown at this time. Since the Taliban took control of Afghanistan in August 2021, there have been several attacks against the country’s new fundamentalist authorities. The most recent of these took place in Kabul in June, without it being known who was behind it.

The Islamic State terrorist group has been one of the main perpetrators of these attacks, as well as the National Resistance Front (NRF) militia, which a month after the takeover of Kabul called to arms and fight the Taliban, especially in Panjshir in the north of the country.