Taliban-appointed chancellor of Kabul University has barred women from attending classes or work at the varsity. The rule, said Mohammad Ashraf Ghairat, will be in place “until an Islamic environment is created”.

“As long as real Islamic environment is not provided for all, women will not be allowed to come to universities or work. Islam first,” Ghairat said in a tweet on Monday, reported CNN.

Around 70 members of the university’s teaching staff have resigned after the Taliban sacked PhD holder Vice-Chancellor Muhammad Osman Baburi and replaced him with Muhammad Ashraf Ghairat, a BA degree holder.

The appointment of Ghairat as VC in the biggest university based in Kabul even led to protests on social media. Critics have highlighted a tweet by Ghairat last year in which he justified the killing of journalists.

The university was named after former Afghanistan president Burhanuddin Rabbani, who was killed in a suicide attack in 2009, but the Taliban changed it to Kabul Education University. Local media reported that Afghanistan’s ministry of higher education said in a directive that universities are intellectual assets and should not be named after political or ethnic leaders.

Since taking over the reins in Afghanistan, Taliban have issued a number of diktats, most of them about confining the movements of women. Earlier this month, news agency Sputnik reported that the Taliban barred female employees from entering the ministry of women affairs in Kabul, allowing only males into the building.

The decisions taken by the insurgent group are making true the fears of the international community which said that Afghan women are most likely to face an uncertain future under the Taliban regime.

During the previous rule of the Taliban in the 1990s, women were largely confined to their homes. This time, they announced a new government sans any women.