Afghanistan suffered third earthquake in a week, which killed more than 2,200 people and injured thousands, has revealed not only the destruction of homes and villages but also the deep human tragedy faced by women under Taliban rule. According to the reports, many women were left to die under rubble because male rescuers were forbidden from touching them.
As per the strict Taliban-enforced Islamic rule, ‘no skin contact with unrelated males’, only a woman’s close male relatives, her father, husband, brother, or son, are allowed to touch her.
This has made rescue efforts nearly impossible in communities where female rescue workers are almost absent, since women have been barred from medical education and most public roles for years.
Women trapped beneath collapsed buildings were often ignored, while men and children were pulled out first. Some female victims were left waiting until women from nearby areas could arrive to help. In other cases, bodies of women were dragged out by their clothes to avoid physical contact.
“They gathered us in one corner and forgot about us,” said Bibi Aysha, a survivor from Kunar Province, recalling how rescue teams arrived after more than 36 hours but offered no direct help to injured women.
A male volunteer, Tahzeebullah Muhazeb, told media that women appeared “invisible” during rescue operations. He described how male rescuers hesitated to pull out trapped women, fearing cultural backlash. “It felt like women were just invisible for the rescue teams,” he said.
Shortage of female medical staff left many women untreated
Reports from quake-hit areas show a clear pattern: men and boys received immediate medical attention, while women sat apart, untreated and in pain. Hospitals in some provinces were overwhelmed, with few or no female doctors available because of Taliban restrictions on women’s education and employment in healthcare.
United Nations officials have warned that women and girls will bear the worst consequences of this disaster. Susan Ferguson, UN Women’s representative in Afghanistan, stressed: “Their needs must be at the heart of the response and recovery.” Yet, in reality, women remain at the margins of both rescue and aid efforts.
The Taliban-run Ministry of Health acknowledged the lack of female medical staff but insisted women were serving in hospitals across affected provinces. However, the accounts of survivors indicate otherwise, pointing to a shortage that left many female victims untreated.
The deadly earthquake has only highlighted a much broader reality: Afghan women are suffering under some of the harshest gender restrictions in the world. For the past four years, the Taliban have enforced a rigid interpretation of Sharia law that has stripped women of education, work, and freedom of movement.
Girls are prohibited from attending secondary schools and universities. Women cannot work in most professions, including NGOs and international organisations. They cannot travel long distances without a male guardian. Even public spaces like parks and gyms have been shut to them.
This extreme environment meant that when disaster struck, women had no safety net, no female rescue workers, no female doctors, and no rights to demand equal treatment.
Taliban’s Sharia law has erased Afghan women
What happened during the earthquake rescue efforts is not an accident, it is the direct outcome of four years of Taliban’s brutal system of control. Their version of Sharia law has one goal: to make women invisible.
Since 2021, when the Taliban seized power, Afghan women have been pushed out of schools, jobs, and public life. The regime’s bans have closed classrooms to girls beyond the sixth grade, barred women from universities, and forced female employees out of offices.
Humanitarian organisations, which once relied on Afghan women to reach vulnerable communities, have been crippled because women staff are no longer allowed to work.
Officials have reportedly shut down beauty salons run by women in their homes and women’s radio stations in various provinces, UNAMA said.
In the province of Kandahar, de facto inspectors asked shopkeepers in a market to report women unaccompanied by a guardian (mahram) and deny them entry into their shops.
At one hospital, authorities ordered staff not to provide care to unaccompanied female patients.
The Taliban claim to rule by “Islamic law,” but this is their own narrow and violent interpretation. Across Islamic history, Sharia has been debated, interpreted, and practised with compassion in many traditions. The Taliban’s version is neither universal nor inevitable, it is a political tool of oppression.
And the results are brutal. Afghan women today are prisoners in their own country. They cannot travel freely, they cannot study freely, and they cannot even be rescued if they are dying under rubble.
Increasing number of forced conversion
Taliban authorities have also increased enforcement of repressive restrictions on media outlets, ramped up corporal punishment, and the clampdown on religious freedom and re-education.
Between 17th January and 3rd February, in Badakhshan province in northeastern Afghanistan, at least 50 Ismaili men were taken from their homes at night and forced to convert to Sunni Islam under the threat of violence, the report says.
More than 180 people, including women and girls, have been flogged for the offences of adultery and practicing homosexuality during the reporting period, in public venues attended by Taliban officials.
Public punishments and fear
The Taliban’s so-called Sharia has also revived violent punishments. Public floggings, amputations, and even executions have returned. During their first rule from 1996 to 2001, such punishments created a climate of fear. The same pattern is emerging again.
Women are told they must remain silent and hidden. Men are told to enforce these rules on their mothers, sisters, and wives. In every way possible, women are treated as property of men, not as independent human beings.
And when women resist, by trying to protest or demand rights, the Taliban’s morality police crack down with arrests, threats, and violence. Even Afghan women working with the UN have faced escalating harassment, forcing agencies to ask them to stay home.
Country’s economy can’t recover without women contribution
The earthquake was a tragedy of nature. But the deaths of women who were left buried under rubble because men “could not touch them” were a human-made disaster. This is what happens when ideology trumps humanity.
Afghan women are not invisible. They are not burdens. They are human beings worthy of the same dignity, the same rights, and the same opportunity to survive as men.
Until the Taliban see this, or until the world puts enough pressure on them to make them change, women in Afghanistan will keep dying, not just from earthquakes or starvation, but from the suffocating brutality of laws intended to wipe them out.
The security situation in the country has also deteriorated since the group’s takeover in 2021, with the nation growing increasingly isolated and impoverished.
Afghanistan is suffering under the burden of this Islamic oppression. Almost half of the country is starving. Families are living off a single meal per day. With women excluded from work and education, the economy has no chance to recover. Aid is harder to deliver, because half the workforce, Afghan women, is banned from helping. Essentially, the enforcement of Sharia has put women in a lose-lose position. Since women are barred from getting an education and joining the work force, there are no women doctors or caregivers in Afghanistan. And since there are no women in the work force, women, crushed under the debris, are doomed to die because Islam does not permit equal rights for women.
