Thread by @AfghanHistorian

Aug 1998: Physicians for Human Rights publishes “The Taliban War on Women: A Health & Human Rights Crisis in Afghanistan” 2 years after Taliban took Kabul.

Report includes survey of 160 Afghan women, 40 case testimonies & interviews. LINK: rb.gy/gfoazb 🧵 Key findings

PHR's researcher visiting Kabul in 1998, “saw a city of beggars -- women who had once been teachers and nurses now moving in the streets like ghosts under their enveloping burqas,” begging so as to feed their children. Taliban had banned women from working.

“It is difficult to find another government or would-be government in the world that has deliberately created such poverty by arbitrarily depriving half the population under its control of jobs, schooling, mobility, & health care,” says report by Physicians for HR about Taliban.

Aug 1998: “The health care and education infrastructure has been virtually destroyed by war & ‘brain drain’ of more than 100,000 ofthe country's educated and technically trained elite who have resettled abroad.

In Kabul, an estimated 80 percent of the population is unemployed.”

“In January 1997, Taliban officials announced a policy of segregating men and women into separate hospitals.”

“All female hospital personnel, including female physicians, nurses, pharmacists & technicians, also were banned from working in Kabul's 22 hospitals,” says PHR report.

“On June 25, 1998 the Taliban reissued & amplified an edict forbidding physicians to treat women who are not accompanied by an appropriate male relative. Also, public baths for women have been ordered closed, eliminating what was once an important facility for women's hygiene.”

“When Taliban authorities shut down most of the health services for women and transferred all of the women into one facility,” the Rabia Bakhi hospital.

Testimony of 2 Afghan health workers:

“A physician PHR interviewed reported that a female child died of measles because authorities didn't allow a male doctor to visit children's ward, which is located within a designated female ward of hospital.”

Taliban banned male doctors from seeing & touching female patients:

PHR study found “virtually 100% of Afghan women surveyed not only disagreed with Taliban orders, but believed such orders do not represent requirements or teachings of Islam, makes a profoundly important statement that should not be lost”

Thank you Dr @viacopino1 & PHR — MariamA