The earthquake that struck Afghanistan yesterday, killing 3,000 people and destroying buildings across several provinces, has laid bare the deadly impact of the Taliban’s rigid gender laws. Women trapped under rubble were left to suffer and die because men were forbidden from touching them unless they were immediate relatives.
The international media reported that in many villages, while men and children were pulled to safety, women bled and cried out but were ignored. Male rescuers, constrained by religious rules, refused to touch them. If no father, brother, husband, or son was present, the women were left until other women from nearby areas arrived. Some never made it out alive. In some cases, bodies were dragged out by their clothes simply to avoid physical contact.
Volunteer Tahsibullah Muhseb, who visited Mazar Dara, described the cruelty of the scene. Women were forced to sit aside while men and children received treatment. “Women felt invisible,” he said, adding that they were neither asked what they needed nor offered help. This deliberate neglect turned disaster response into a form of institutionalized discrimination.
The Taliban’s laws have not only denied women the right to rescue but also stripped them of medical care. Since the regime banned women from enrolling in medical education in 2023, the number of female doctors and nurses has collapsed. Hospitals in earthquake-hit areas have been left with no female staff at all. Reporters visiting one facility found not a single woman on duty, leaving female victims untreated or forced to wait.
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Sharafat Zaman, spokesman for the Taliban-led Ministry of Health, admitted there is a shortage of women in the medical workforce but insisted that hospitals in provinces like Kunar, Nangarhar, and Laghman had female staff. His statement, however, does little to conceal the glaring absence of care in many areas, where women suffer disproportionately in silence.
The impact of these laws is devastating. By excluding women from the workforce and banning men from rescuing or treating them, the Taliban has turned a natural disaster into a gendered massacre. The earthquake’s destruction was unavoidable, but the abandonment of women was not. It was dictated by rules that place ideology above human life.
Afghanistan’s women now face a grim reality that their survival depends not on rescue efforts or medical response, but on the Islamic laws that deny them dignity, visibility, and even the basic right to be saved.
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