The Taliban Ban Medical Treatment for Women Who Do Not Wear the Burqa

Photo: Wakil Koahsar/AFP

In Taliban-controlled Afghanistan, even medical treatment has become forbidden for women who do not wear the chadari or burqa.

In the latest incident, on Wednesday (5 November), the Taliban in Herat prevented women and girls without burqas from entering the province’s central hospital. The move once again demonstrates that the Taliban have not only shut women out of social and educational life but are now closing the doors of hospitals to them as well.

Jan-Gul, a woman who had come to the hospital for her daughter-in-law’s delivery, told Zan News:

“My daughter-in-law was due to give birth and was bleeding heavily. I told the Taliban that if she wasn’t allowed to go inside, she would die. One of them said, ‘Not wearing the hijab is death itself; dying is better than being without it.’ I cried and begged, but it was no use.”

This painful account reveals the true face of the cruelty and inhumanity behind the Taliban’s so-called “Islamic law”; policies that, in reality, sacrifice women’s lives to a narrow and oppressive interpretation of religion.

Suraya, another girl from Herat, who sought treatment at the hospital’s neurology department, said she waited for hours outside the gate of Herat Regional Hospital hoping to be allowed in, but eventually had to return home in despair.

“In the Taliban’s culture, a woman is seen as an unnecessary and imprisoned being. I was ill, but they did not allow me to see a doctor. The constant pressure and humiliation have broken me mentally, and now I cannot even go to a doctor,” she said.

These incidents are only part of the long chain of oppression against women in Afghanistan. From banning girls’ education to removing women from government offices, closing university doors, and now denying them the most basic human right, access to medical care; the Taliban appear determined to erase women from social and human existence.

In the society the Taliban have built, a woman cannot be a patient, a student, an employee, or even a mother in labour. She must hide, remain silent, and die, lest her very presence disturb the male order of the Taliban.