As earthquakes devastated parts of Afghanistan in late August, Taliban officials asked aid agencies to send more female health workers to assist female survivors. They also briefly barred female U.N. staffers from reaching earthquake-devastated areas.
The flurry of contradictions in the wake of the earthquake did not end there.
Amid the aftermath, as aid groups and Taliban bureaucrats were assisting those injured and left homeless by the earthquake, other Taliban officials twice suspended most internet and cellular reception throughout Afghanistan, complicating aid efforts.
The incidents highlight the contortions of the Taliban four years after seizing power of Afghanistan.
Hardliners are firmly in control, but more pragmatic factions appear to be constantly trying to find workarounds to govern — like urging female aid workers to head to earthquake-struck zones.
"It's an ongoing struggle," said a senior analyst, who requested anonymity because the Taliban has cracked down on people perceived as critical of them.
(That individual, like more than a dozen people that NPR spoke to for this story, including senior representatives of international charities, local residents and respected analysts, asked that NPR not use their names. Others requested we only use their first names. Some of the people were worried their organizations would be punished if they were even perceived as being critical of the Taliban or were concerned about denials of visas for foreign staff or losing the right to continue operations.)
That to-and-fro could be seen in the Taliban's response to the deadly earthquake, which was most devastating in the isolated mountains of the eastern Kunar province in late August. Mud-and-stone homes clinging to steep mountainsides collapsed upon their sleeping inhabitants. From the vantage point of a helicopter, it looked like entire villages "had just been scraped off the sides of hills," said Richard Trenchard, acting humanitarian coordinator for Afghanistan.
The U.N. estimates some 2,200 people were killed and more than 3,600 people were injured. The majority were women and girls — partly because there are more females than males in any given population, because the area is known for men migrating to find work and because women and girls were more likely to sleep inside structures that collapsed.
Where were the women?
In the first days after the earthquake struck, the Taliban shared a stream of videos of their defense forces choppering out the wounded from isolated villages. The wounded in these reels were all men, as if the Taliban had landed in villages with no female inhabitants.
A local aid worker, who goes by one name, Wahidullah, told NPR that women were airlifted out, but in compliance with the Taliban's rules and cultural norms, they were not filmed and were segregated inside the helicopter. One video, filmed by a local aid group, accidentally showed women being rescued: They were huddled in the back of one chopper, most clad in burkhas.
And two senior aid workers said Taliban officials encouraged them to send more female workers to help women and girls impacted by the earthquake because of Afghanistan's deeply conservative culture that limits male contact with females, and the Taliban's own rules that demand strict gender segregation. "They were encouraging and requesting us to provide more, particularly in the case of medical support to women," said Trenchard. Another senior aid worker told NPR, "The Taliban were asking for women doctors, they were asking for female medical teams, all female medical teams. We didn't have the resources available to give."
The Taliban's request for more women workers came despite the ratcheting restrictions that the group has been imposing since they seized power four years ago. That includes preventing most women and girls from study and work.
Who is behind the restrictions?
Based on NPR's reporting since the Taliban seized power, those restrictions appear to have been ordered by the group's spiritual leader. Hibatullah Akhundzada lives in near-total secrecy in the southern Afghan city of Kandahar and rarely makes public appearances. Analysts point to how the restrictions have held, despite high-level pushback by other prominent clerics, and multiple attempts on the ground to sidestep the rules.
That pushback included the former deputy foreign minister Sher Abbas Stanikzai, who left Afghanistan in February after publicly criticizing the ban on girls studying beyond grade six multiple times. The Taliban's first higher education minister turned a blind eye to women attending university — even after a decision to let girls attend high school was dramatically rescinded in March 2022 — after girls had been told they could attend, and had to be pushed out of classrooms. (By December 2022, the Taliban had stopped most women from attending university.)
After Afghan women were evicted from universities, the ministry of public health appeared to push back, creating a years-long nursing and midwifery course for Afghan women so they could help other women. "It made hardliners uncomfortable," said the analyst who spoke on condition of anonymity, who saw it as "a workaround to our ban." The nursing and midwifery course was junked in December last year, only months after it began, apparently on the orders of the Taliban's supreme leader, Haibatullah Akhundzada. The move highlighted how "the most ultraconservative bit of the movement is in control and is increasing control," said Kate Clark, co-director of the Afghanistan Analysts Network, a prominent research group.
That increasing control has come to the detriment of women and girls. They are mostly banned from being attended to by male doctors and medics. That's left women's health care in the hands of a diminishing number of women.
At the time, a prominent researcher on Afghanistan, Heather Barr of Human Rights Watch, put it this way: "If you ban women from being treated by male health care professionals, and then you ban women from training to become health care professionals, the consequences are clear: Women will not have access to health care and will die as a result."
There is no country-wide data for Afghanistan, but it appears that not only are no new women coming through the Afghan health care system, there are fewer qualified women still working. Some appear to be leaving Afghanistan. The Afghanistan Analysts Network, also reported others were leaving amid plummeting salaries and deteriorating conditions. The network also reported female health workers saying that their newer colleagues were likely to be unskilled women who came from Taliban-loyal families.
Why aid workers faced obstacles
The lack of qualified female workers became one of the many obstacles that aid workers grappled with as they sought to reach the dead and wounded hours after the earthquake devastated parts of Afghanistan on September 1.
Another obstacle hindering the rescue of women was that the Taliban prevented female U.N. workers from reaching devastated areas. In a September 11, statement, the U.N. also said Afghanistan's Taliban rulers had prevented female U.N. staffers and contractors from entering their workplaces in the capital Kabul, the western city of Herat and the northern city of Mazar-e-Sharif.
Trenchard, the acting U.N. humanitarian coordinator, said Taliban authorities did ultimately allow women working for the U.N. to assist earthquake victims in the field after negotiations, but they have not been allowed to return to their offices. Taliban authorities did not respond to multiple requests for comment.
All this meant that few female aid workers were available to treat women and girls injured by the earthquakes. Even to reach them, aid workers walked for hours on perilous roads on steep mountainsides. One female rescuer told the U.N.'s news service how they were "dodging falling rocks every time there was an aftershock." The female health workers were expected to walk in headscarves and long loose robes. They also needed a mahram, a male guardian — a man related by blood whom a woman cannot marry, like a brother or nephew, or her own husband. That mahram has to be licensed by the Taliban.
Aid workers said it was hard to entice their female staff to head to devastated areas, partly because their mahrams did not want to go, and partly because the conditions were so daunting. As a result, there were initially few women available to help other women, said Gharshin, a 50-year-old health worker who goes by only one name. She said female aid workers in the field did they best they could, including one midwife who trekked six hours to help a woman give birth.
In some cases, it appears that women who were injured in the earthquake were left unattended, until female health workers arrived. Aid workers said it wasn't just the Taliban's prohibitions on men treating women. Local communities also did not allow men, whether rescuers or medics, to help their female relatives. "They were very strict and did not allow us to even see the wounded," said Omid Haqjo, a volunteer who hiked nine hours to lend a hand in an area known as the Mazar Dara Valley. He said it was a devastating sight, because "most of the injured were children and women."
Some women and girls had not received any health care, even two weeks after the earthquake, said aid worker, Fereshteh, who had been assigned to help females shifted to tents after their homes were destroyed.
Gharshin, the 50-year-old health worker, said what frustrated her was that the conservative Afghan traditions — alongside the Taliban's rules — meant that women could not be attended to except by other women. "Imagine," she said, during the last earthquake, "that women's clothes came off, or maybe their clothes were torn. They may be in a situation where it is difficult for a male rescuer to dare to pick her up. So it is natural that there should be a woman doing the rescuing."
Why did the internet go down?
But if there was any hope that Taliban authorities might relax their prohibitions on women studying, if only to help other women, it was dashed just two weeks after the earthquake struck.
On September 15, Taliban authorities rolled out a suspension of operations of the fiber optic cable that provides affordable and fast internet to most Afghans. The move was to "prevent evil," according to Haji Zaid, spokesperson for the northern city of Balkh. But one of the casualties was the thousands of women and girls, who were studying online after being denied physical access to school.
Access was resumed in most places, until it was shut down again for 48 hours on September 29, alongside mobile cellular reception.
During the first internet suspension, one father described to NPR how his daughters were quiet, pale and withdrawn after the internet was cut off. They were studying through an online university. He requested anonymity for the safety of his daughters. "It's the same frustration," he said of four years under the Taliban, "and the same darkness."
Akbari reported from Paris. With additional reporting by Ruchi Kumar in Istanbul.
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