“No one offered the women help, asked what they needed or even approached them,” said Aysha, a 19-year-old from Afghanistan’s Kunar Province, describing how she and others were treated in the aftermath of deadly earthquake last week.
“Some of them bleeding, were pushed aside,” she added, recounting how women and girls trapped under rubble were ignored for hours as rescuers refused to touch them.
These searing testimonies from survivors highlight how Taliban-imposed rules – banning men from making physical contact with unrelated women – turned a natural disaster into a deeper tragedy for women.
Trapped, ignored, forgotten
Aysha’s words echo what many Afghan women faced: neglect, isolation, and a lack of medical care. With no female rescue workers available and male teams barred from assisting women, survivors say they were left to fend for themselves.
“They forgot about us,” Aysha repeated, summing up the experience of women who were gathered apart while men and children were prioritized for rescue and treatment.
“They gathered us in one corner and forgot about us,” Aysha added. “No one offered the women help, asked what they needed or even approached them.”
Death without dignity
Even the dead were not spared indignity. In some cases, when no male relatives were present, bodies of women were dragged by their clothes to avoid “skin contact.”
Muhzaheb, a 33-year-old male volunteer who travelled to Mazar Dara in Kunar Province said that it looked like women were invisible adding that that members of the all-male medical team there were hesitant to pull women out from under the rubble of collapsed buildings. Trapped and injured women were left under stones, waiting for women from other villages to reach the site and dig them out.
“It felt like women were invisible. The men and children were treated first, but the women were sitting apart, waiting for care,” he added.
Systemic neglect
The deadly earthquake that jolted Afghanistan on August 31 claimed more than 2,200 lives and injured nearly 3,600 others, flattening countless hamlets and villages, according to figures released by Afghanistan’s government.
The Taliban has not released a gender breakdown of casualties, concealing the scale of women’s suffering. But aid workers warn that Afghan women, already stripped of education and medical opportunities under Taliban rule, will “again bear the brunt of this disaster,” as UN Women’s Susan Ferguson noted.
With female doctors banned from training and many aid workers harassed into silence, the absence of women in relief operations has left earthquake survivors with one truth: calamity may strike everyone, but in Afghanistan, women are the last to be saved—if at all.
