KABUL, Oct 30: Another girls’ school has been torched in Afghanistan, which is battling insurgents loyal to the ousted fundamentalist Taliban regime that banned education for women, an official said on Sunday.

The primary school, 65 kilometres from Kabul in Logar province, was under renovation and the girls were studying in tents, provincial criminal investigation director Qudratullah Arabzai told AFP.

“The school, the tents, the chairs, generator and a vehicle were destroyed in the fire,” Arabzai said.

The building, torched late on Saturday, was the fourth to be burnt in the same district since the collapse of the Taliban regime in late 2001, he said.

The official blamed the attack on the “enemies of Afghanistan”, a term usually used to refer to Taliban.

A string of similar incidents in southern and south-eastern Afghanistan has been blamed on loyalists of the Taliban, which banned girls from going to school. They were ousted by US-backed forces in late 2001.

Four years after the Taliban were removed, school enrolment among girls remains among the lowest in the world, with less than 10 per cent of girls enrolled in secondary schools, according to a UN report this month.—AFP