Taliban forces barred women including female doctors from entering Herat Regional Hospital on Wednesday. The ban order was issued because they were not wearing the Taliban-mandated blue burqa, local sources told Afghanistan International. Witnesses said several women were beaten.
According to sources, dozens of women including patients, healthcare workers and visitors were turned away at the hospital gates for failing to comply with the requirement. Videos obtained by Afghanistan International show large groups of women standing outside the entrance, many already wearing full-body coverings; however, only those in the traditional blue burqa were allowed to enter.
A female doctor at the hospital wrote to Afghanistan International: “We are women who have stepped forward to serve humanity, not to hide behind coercion.”
She added that although she works to heal others, she herself is “wounded every day by the pain of being unseen.”
Another source said Taliban officials at the Herat Civil Registration Office also blocked women without burqas from entering on the same day.
The doctor said: “We have been forced to wear the burqa not out of choice or belief, but out of command and compulsion.”
Since returning to power more than four years ago, the Taliban have imposed sweeping restrictions on Afghan women, including banning girls’ education above the sixth grade, limiting women’s movement without a male guardian and barring them from most public spaces and workplaces. The Taliban’s Ministry for the Propagation of Virtue and Prevention of Vice has declared women’s voices “awrah” forbidden to be heard and ordered the segregation of men and women in hospitals and workplaces.
The latest ban on entry for women without a burqa marks a further escalation in the Taliban’s systematic crackdown on women’s rights in Afghanistan.
