'They forgot about us': Afghan women denied earthquake aid as Taliban rule bans rescuers from touching them

The quake has exposed the consequences of Taliban-era restrictions that have gutted Afghanistan’s healthcare system.

When the first emergency teams reached 19-year-old Bibi Aysha’s village in Kunar Province more than 36 hours after Sunday’s 6.0-magnitude earthquake, she thought help had finally arrived. Instead, the sight of an all-male team filled her with dread.

“They gathered us in one corner and forgot about us,” Aysha told The New York Times, describing how wounded men and children were carried out while women,  some bleeding, some buried under debris, were left unattended.

Afghan cultural norms, strictly enforced by the Taliban, forbid physical contact between men and women who are not related. That meant no male rescuer could touch Aysha, her neighbours, or the other female waiting in pain under the rubble.

“It felt like women were invisible”

In nearby Mazar Dara, volunteer Tahzeebullah Muhazeb said he watched female survivors remain trapped beneath rubble because the all-male medical teams hesitated to pull them out.

“It felt like women were invisible,” the 33-year-old told The New York Times. “The men and children were treated first, but the women were sitting apart, waiting for care.”

When no male relative was present, he added, bodies of women were dragged by their clothes to avoid direct skin contact.

The death toll, and a gendered disaster

More than 2,200 people died and 3,600 were injured in the quake that flattened villages across eastern Afghanistan. But aid workers and women on the ground told The New York Times the disaster has laid bare Afghanistan’s gender apartheid in the starkest way yet.

“Women and girls will again bear the brunt of this disaster,” said Susan Ferguson, UN Women’s special representative for Afghanistan, in a statement. She urged that their needs must be at the heart of response and recovery.

A system already stacked against women

The quake has exposed the consequences of Taliban-era restrictions that have gutted Afghanistan’s healthcare system. Last year, women were banned from medical education, worsening the shortage of female doctors and rescue workers.

Girls are barred from studying beyond sixth grade. Women cannot travel without a male companion. They are excluded from most jobs, including with aid organisations. Even female employees of the United Nations have faced such harassment that agencies told them to work from home.

The result: when disaster strikes, women have nowhere to turn. A New York Times journalist who visited Mazar Dara saw no women among the medical or rescue teams. In one district hospital, not a single female staff member was present.

Taliban response

The Taliban-run Ministry of Health admitted there was a lack of female staff in quake-hit areas. Spokesman Sharafat Zaman said the government was “deploying the largest number of female doctors and nurses” in hospitals across Kunar, Nangarhar and Laghman provinces.

But survivors told New York Times that on the ground, help for women remained elusive. In Aysha’s village, no female aid worker had arrived even four days after the quake.

Aftershocks and afterthoughts

Eastern Afghanistan continues to shudder with aftershocks, one measured 5.6 on Thursday. For women like Aysha, the trauma goes beyond tremors.

She and her 3-year-old son have spent nights out in the open, soaked by rain, unable to reach shelters. Her husband works in the city. “God saved me and my son,” she told The New York Times. “But after that night, I understood, being a woman here means we are always the last to be seen.”