Saudi Arabia to build 600 madrassas in Afghanistan

The schools would be constructed by the rural development communities instead of private sectors, English-language Afghanistan Times Daily reported Sunday, citing the Afghan embassy in Riyadh.

Earlier, chairman of the Afghan senate Fazal Hadi Muslimyar said Saudi Ambassador to Kabul Jassim bin Mohammed al-Khalidi had supported building 100 madrassas and one “college” in the Nangarhar province.

The plan has been met with widespread reaction across social media, with users asking whether the centers will be presided over by the Afghan Education Ministry instead of having their curricula and procedures dictated by Riyadh.

Afghanistan Times Daily said the schools, to be propped up across Afghanistan, would be "monitored by an independent watchdog organization,” suggesting they would not be answerable to the education ministry.

The madrassas, blamed for preaching hatred against various religions and sects among their pupils, have earned notoriety for being “nurseries of extremism.”

Last year, Pakistan agreed to start reforming its roughly 30,000 radical centers, mostly funded by Saudi Arabia, which are the target of global outcry for their role in training future terrorists.

Saudi Arabia is widely known for exporting its extremist ideology of Wahhabism worldwide through the so-called educational centers.

Wahhabism forms the mindset of Takfiri terrorist groups across the world, which consider subscribers of other faiths to be worthy of nothing but death.

The most violent of those groups to date that ran amok across Iraq and Syria from 2014 to late 2017 is the Daesh terrorist outfit.

The Saudi envoy’s expression of support for the creation of a “college” in Nangarhar is curious because the province is hosting the largest number of Daesh terrorists who have fled Syria, Iraq and other countries.