Marking 1,000 days since girls in Afghanistan were banned from secondary school, a top official at the United Nations children’s agency UNICEF on Thursday used this milestone to urge the Taliban to allow girls to go back to school. “For 1.5 million girls, this systematic exclusion is not only a blatant violation of their right to education, but also results in dwindling opportunities and deteriorating mental health,” UNICEF Executive Director Catherine Russell said in a statement. The statement emphasized the far-reaching consequences of the ban, extending beyond the immediate loss of educatio…