The Education City in Doha, Qatar, is a city in its own right. Spread over a vast area, it is home to branches of renowned American, British and French universities and schools, bringing together tens of thousands of students. With bike paths, libraries, cafeterias and dormitories, everything here is modern and impressive.

The Sholla Building, a narrow white structure, looks modest compared to those of the American faculties of Georgetown and the Ivy League or Qatar's Hamad Bin Khalifa University. Sholla is home to the American University of Afghanistan, now in exile in the Qatari capital. It brought with it the dreams of Afghan female students who have been denied the right to study and social life by the Taliban, who returned to power in Kabul in August 2021.

Inside the school, in a corridor leading to the classrooms, the walls are lined with photos from before the Taliban offensive: Young men and women sitting on the lawn of the Kabul campus, chatting and smiling.

American and Qatari funding

On a fall morning in 2023, a dozen female students were attending a mathematics course on solving quadratic equations, in English. From time to time, a voice emerged from the computer on the teacher's desk. They were students following the course remotely, from Afghanistan. A young Afghan girl was called to the board, and her classmates helped her find the solution. Once the equation was solved, the teacher asked everyone to applaud.

Teaching resumed in Doha over a year ago, in August 2022. Funded by Qatar and the US government, the institution has 184 students on site, including 118 women, and around 700 enrolled in online courses in Afghanistan. There are also 350 high school girls, also deprived of schooling in their own country, who are taking preparatory courses in literature and science via distance learning. The face-to-face and distance learning teachers are of 25 different nationalities, mostly American and Afghan.

If the American University of Afghanistan has been able to gain a foothold in Qatar, it is primarily because this US ally has been stepping up its initiatives over the last 10 years to establish itself as a key mediator in the Afghan issue. This is how the agreement on the American withdrawal from Afghanistan was signed, in February 2020, in this wealthy little Gulf emirate. In the months that followed the fall of Kabul, Doha became the obligatory point of passage for all stakeholders wishing to have an influence in the region.

"We're in Qatar because the country has offered us space for 200 students," explained Victoria Fontan, the French vice president of the university. "Many governments talk about the rights of Afghan women, but in the end, it is only Doha that has offered them sanctuary."

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