Our findings were that in the last grade of primary school, the dropout rate was 26.7% for girls and 22.2% for boys.

Lulu Garcia-Navarro speaks with Pashtana Durrani of LEARN, a nonprofit focused on women's education in Afghanistan, about the Taliban's exclusion of Afghan girls from secondary schools.

But it's unclear whether the hard-liners will relent and allow girls to attend secondary school because this pushback in particular by these Taliban-affiliated clerics is unprecedented.

Taliban officials said girls may return to school once security concerns allow, echoing their de facto ban on girls’ education in the 1990s.

Afghanistan's girls denied an education by the Taliban find learning in secret school June 8 marks 1,000 days since the Taliban banned girls over the age of 12 from all schools in Afghanistan. The ...

Now more girls go to school. “Taliban encourage their sisters and daughters to go (to school), my wife graduated from here,” said a local Taliban official in Khanaqa, another village in Jowzjan.

The future of the girls of Afghanistan hangs in the balance. "If the school doesn't open, I will choose whatever way there is to get an education," said Arezzo, who wants to become a pilot.