Uncertainty hovers over Helmand’s schools as Taliban ban older girls

At Malalay school in Lashkar Gah, female staff struggle into work despite anxiety over their jobs and half their pupils missing

The walls of the Malalay school, in the centre of Lashkar Gah, Helmand, are pockmarked with bullets from the last weeks of bitter fighting between the Taliban and government forces, the glass in its windows shattered by a blast.

Its teachers have not been paid for two months and several say they were bombed out of their homes in the final battles, but they are staggering on, somehow, for their students, most of them girls.