The Taliban’s decision to halt medical education for women and girls in Afghanistan has drawn criticism from the US government.
Secretary of State Anthony Blinken stated in a statement on Wednesday that this directive is an unjustified attack on women’s access to health care and education, and that it is the most recent in a series of initiatives that threaten the rights and lives of Afghan women and girls.
The Taliban have gradually reduced women’s rights since regaining control in August 2021 with the withdrawal of American-led forces, including prohibiting girls from going to school past the sixth grade. In an attempt to eradicate Afghan women and girls from public life, the Taliban drafted vice regulations in August that forbid women’s voices and bare faces in public.
One of the few remaining educational options for women in the nation was medical school, which included nursing and midwifery.
According to Blinken, these directives, when combined with the prohibition on women pursuing medical education, further endanger the lives, health, and safety of all Afghans, not just women and girls.
He urged the Taliban to revoke the directive and any earlier ones that prevented women from exercising their fundamental liberties and human rights.
Requests for response on Thursday were not immediately answered by a Taliban spokeswoman or a health ministry spokesperson. Although the Taliban have not publicly addressed the reports or formally verified the order, three Taliban officials who talked to NBC News under condition of anonymity due to the delicate nature of the subject matter attested to its veracity.
According to two Taliban officials and commanders interviewed by NBC News on Thursday, the order issued by Taliban supreme leader Hibatullah Akhundzada was not well received.
In the Afghan capital, Kabul, a top Taliban leader told NBC News, “Our senior leaders and religious scholars are engaged in meetings with [Akhundzada] to request and convince him to lift the ban because it caused a lot of unrest and panic in Afghanistan.”
A second commander, speaking from Kandahar, the Taliban’s home in southern Afghanistan, said officials were attempting to persuade the supreme leader to reconsider.
He claimed that when the Islamic Emirate learned of the most recent decision to deny Afghan women access to medical education, everyone was taken aback.
Afghanistan has one of the highest rates of maternal mortality in the world, therefore preventing women from pursuing medical school would have a significant impact on women’s health, according to Doctors Without Borders (MSF), a local organization.
The group’s country representative in Afghanistan, Mickael Le Paih, stated in a statement that a health care system cannot function without trained female healthcare professionals.
According to the group, the country’s lack of female healthcare staff and gender-segregated hospital wards already have an impact on the availability of healthcare.
According to Le Paih, all genders must provide critical services if they are to be accessible to all.
Human Rights Watch said in a statement last week that the new order will cause needless suffering, illness, and death for the women who are forced to forgo health care because there won’t be any female medical professionals to treat them because the Taliban have prohibited women from receiving treatment from male medical professionals in some provinces.
The United Nations Population Fund states that in order to satisfy demand, Afghanistan urgently needs 18,000 more midwives.
The Republican-led House Foreign Affairs Committee, whose members have harshly criticized the Biden administration’s handling of the catastrophic U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan, including a bombing at the Kabul airport that killed 13 U.S. service members and nearly 200 Afghans, heard Blinken’s statement on Wednesday.
According to Blinken, the disengagement agreement that President Donald Trump struck with the Taliban in 2020 during his first term was the cause of many of the disasters.
According to him, President Biden had to decide whether to escalate the conflict or put a stop to it. Attacks on our forces and friends would have resumed, and the Taliban’s onslaught on the nation’s major cities would have begun, had he not fulfilled his predecessor’s pledge.
Rep.Michael McCaul, R-Texas, the committee chair, and other Republican lawmakers accused the Biden administration of failing to anticipate how quickly the U.S.-backed Afghan government would collapse and ignoring warnings about it from lower-ranking U.S. officials, which Blinken denied.
According to McCaul, this disastrous incident marked the start of a failing foreign strategy that set the world on fire.
Taliban refugee minister Khalil Haqqani and two other people were killed in a suicide attack at the Ministry for Refugees and Repatriation in Kabul, the Afghan capital, on Wednesday. He was the most high-profile casualty of a bombing in Afghanistan since the Taliban s return to power and the first cabinet member to killed.
The Islamic State Khorasan Province, an affiliate of the Islamic State group, claimed responsibility for the attack.
Brian Cheng reported from Hong Kong, Abigail Williams from Washington and Mushtaq Yusufzai from Peshawar, Pakistan.
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