The World Health Organization (W.H.O.) pleaded Monday with the Taliban junta in Afghanistan to lift its Islamist restrictions against female workers, so that women would be allowed to travel without male guardians and provide humanitarian relief for victims of the devastating September 1 earthquake.
“A very big issue now is the increasing paucity of female staff in these places,” noted the deputy W.H.O. representative to Afghanistan, Dr. Mukta Sharma.
Sharma told Reuters that 90% of the medical staff in the area affected by the earthquake are male, and few of the female staffers were fully qualified doctors. She felt more female doctors would help women in the quake area who were afraid to deal with male physicians.
Sharma also said the Taliban’s religious edicts against women traveling without male escorts were making it difficult for women to leave the quake area to receive hospital care.
India Today reported on Friday that “Taliban-imposed gender restrictions” are “compounding the tragedy for Afghan women” in other ways as well.
For example, under the Taliban’s version of Islamic law, women can only make physical contact with their husbands or close male relatives — which means a large number of women are still buried under rubble in villages collapsed by the earthquake, because male rescue workers cannot touch them, and females are not allowed to travel to the disaster area to help.
According to India Today, badly injured female survivors have been left trapped in the debris of collapsed buildings while dead bodies were recovered around them.
The New York Times (NYT) quoted women who said they were “pushed aside” and “forgotten” while men and boys received treatment for their injuries.
“It felt like women were invisible. The men and children were treated first, but the women were sitting apart, waiting for care,” a male rescue volunteer said.
There are not many qualified female rescue workers to go around, as the Taliban banned women from receiving education in medicine and other advanced fields in 2023. Foreign visitors have observed that hospitals in Afghanistan are almost entirely devoid of female staffers. The NYT said its reporters saw no women among the medical teams treating earthquake survivors.
Maternity care is particularly difficult to come by thanks to the Taliban’s restrictions, and the U.N. estimates there were at least 11,600 pregnant women in the earthquake zone.
The Taliban also banned women from working for foreign humanitarian groups and non-governmental organizations. Even female employees of the United Nations have been harassed and intimidated out of their workplaces.
“The restrictions are huge, the mahram issue continues, and no formal exemption has been provided by the de facto authorities,” Sharma told Reuters. Mahram is the name of the law that requires women to have male escorts when they travel.
“That’s why we felt we had to advocate with (authorities) to say, this is the time you really need to have more female health workers present, let us bring them in, and let us search from other places where they’re available,” she said.
The death toll from the September 1 earthquakes is now over 2,200, plus 3,600 injured. Countless homes were destroyed, leaving survivors to huddle in tents and other temporary structures. Many of the refugees are refusing to return home, now that they have seen how poorly the Taliban junta deals with earthquakes and landslides.
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