By Zahra Nader and Nargis Amini
Published in partnership between Rukhshana Media, an Afghan women’s media organization, The Fuller Project, a global nonprofit newsroom reporting on issues that affect women, and Foreign Policy.
BAMYAN, Afghanistan — On a note tacked to the wall of a health clinic in December, in the now Taliban-controlled district of Kahmard, there was a new directive: “From now on,” it reads, “no women can come to health centers without a mahram.”
A “mahram” is a male chaperone.
Restrictions like these are showing up all over the country. In the southern province of Ghazni, a 42-year-old midwife said the Taliban have been preventing doctors from examining women without a mahram present since November. (We are not identifying Afghans who spoke to us by name to protect their safety.)
“ BAMYAN, Afghanistan — On a note tacked to the wall of a health clinic in December, in the now Taliban-controlled district of Kahmard, there was a new directive: “From now on,” it reads, “no women can come to health centers without a mahram.” “they forced them out of the clinic and beat them with the butts of their rifles.” They had brought a sick infant in for a checkup.
The new requirements — officially announced by the Taliban Ministry of Vice and Virtue in late December — are preventing many Afghan women from seeking the healthcare they need at a time when the Omicron variant of Covid-19 is spiking across the country. At the end of January, Afghan health officials reported a 70 percent increase in positive Covid cases, with positivity rates reaching upwards of 47 percent (the World Health Organization says any positivity rate above 5 percent is dangerous).
Accessing Covid-19 vaccines, testing, and treatment, was already difficult in Afghanistan. The country’s healthcare system depended almost entirely on foreign aid for almost two decades. But when the United States abruptly withdrew in August and the Taliban re-claimed power, that aid dried up. As a result, almost all the programs designed to fight the coronavirus in Afghanistan have been forced to shut down.
On top of that, the United States froze Afghanistan’s central bank assets, plunging the country into a severe economic crisis. More than 90 percent of Afghans are now living below the poverty line, and many families are unable to afford enough food — compounding the healthcare crisis.
Despite hundreds of millions of dollars spent on developing Afghanistan’s healthcare system over the last 20 years, access to quality healthcare remains far below international standards. Those standards are particularly low for women, according to a report from Human Rights Watch.
“Women and girls struggle to access even the most basic information about health and family planning,” the authors wrote. “There is an unmet need for modern forms of contraception; prenatal and postnatal care is often unavailable; specialty care, such as modern cancer and fertility treatment, is largely nonexistent; routine preventative care such as pap smears and mammograms are almost unheard of; and a large proportion of births are still unattended by a professional.”
None of this, however, has distracted Taliban leaders from pursuing the kinds of gender apartheid policies that made them famous when they first ruled Afghanistan between 1996 to 2001. During that period, the Taliban issued edicts and decrees that banned women from work and education, denied their access to healthcare, and severely restricted their social mobility.
In his first press conference after re-taking power on Aug. 17, Taliban spokesman Zabihullah Mujahid reassured the world that the group would this time respect women’s rights within “the framework of Islam.”
But the promise of a changed Taliban faded quickly. A week later, the same spokesman urged women “to stay home because fighters haven’t been trained to respect them.” Since then the Taliban have tightened their restrictions on women with every passing day.
“Measures like requiring a mahram to escort women to health appointments or banning them from seeing male healthcare providers have a major impact on women’s ability to access care,” said Heather Barr, associate women’s rights director at Human Rights Watch. “Access to healthcare is one area where the Taliban have always claimed that they are committed to protecting women’s rights. But we see that their policies are still cutting many women off from urgent and sometimes life-saving care.”
In early February, at a health clinic in Afghanistan’s southeastern Ghazni province — the first province to ban women’s access to healthcare without a male chaperone — a local doctor said a pregnant woman in labor arrived on her own. After giving birth, fearing she’d be punished for not being married, she fled without her child.
Three days later, after local Taliban officials found out, they detained the midwife who delivered the baby, along with her husband, and are now moving to prosecute all 18 employees of the clinic, according to several healthcare workers connected to the clinic. The charge? Violating the order not to provide healthcare to women without male chaperones.
Taliban officials in Kabul, for their part, deny any of these stories are true. “I don’t confirm it, such a thing has not happened,” a spokesman for the Ministry of Vice and Virtue said.
The evidence, however, is overwhelming. Five months into the Taliban’s new rule, a group of UN human rights experts warned that the “Taliban leaders in Afghanistan are institutionalizing large scale and systematic gender-based discrimination and violence against women and girls.”
A healthcare professional who works in the city of Ghazni, southwest of Kabul, said Taliban leadership lacked coordination between departments and regions, and that each jurisdiction seemed to be operating its own set of restrictions.
In one way, however, he said the Taliban was consistent everywhere: “All their animosity is with women. Almost all their restrictions target women,” he said in a phone interview.
Zahra Nader reported from Toronto, Canada, for The Fuller Project. Nargis Amini reported from Afghanistan, and Shkiba Hakimi and Laila Yousufy contributed reporting from Afghanistan, for Rukhshana Media.
