Centuries-old customs that have kept women behind in Afghanistan also made sure they are the last to be rescued or not rescued at all after the deadly earthquake and massive aftershocks reduced scores of buildings to rubble and have killed at least 2,200 people.
In the absence of many women rescuers, the women who have managed to survive but are trapped under rubble are either not being pulled out while the dead are being pulled out by their clothes because of prohibitions on men touching them.
Rescue efforts have been stumbling upon not only over rubble but also over gender rules in Afghanistan which is governed by the Taliban – known for imposing stringent restrictions on women – since four years.
“They gathered us in one corner and forgot about us,” a New York Times report quoted Bibi Aysha, whose village – Andarluckak in Kunar province – saw first rescue workers after over 36 hours of the earthquake ripping through eastern Afghanistan’s mountainous areas on Sunday.
No one offered the women help, asked what they needed or even approached them, according to the NYT report.
Dead women out by clothes
While emergency teams promptly pulled out injured men and children, 19-year-old Aysha and other women as well as adolescent girls were pushed aside, with some of them left bleeding.
Tahzeebullah Muhazeb, a male volunteer who traveled to Mazar Dara in the same province, said it appeared as if rescuers could not see women as members of the all-male medical team there were hesitant to rescue them from the rubble of collapsed buildings.
“It felt like women were invisible… the men and children were treated first, but the women were sitting apart, waiting for care,” the report quoted 33-year-old Muhazeb.
In the absence of male relatives, rescue workers dragged dead women out by their clothes, to avoid making skin contact, he said.
While the gender breakdown of casualties of the magnitude 6 earthquake is not known yet, more than 2,200 people have died and 3,600 others have been injured, according to figures released by Afghanistan’s government.
Women are deprived of basic freedom in Afghanistan, which came under the Taliban rule four years ago, promising a revamped version of itself than the one that ended in 2001 after the US invasion following the September 11 attacks.
Despite claiming to be not as oppressive as its first term, women face stringent restrictions including a ban on going to school beyond sixth grade.
Women in Afghanistan are also not allowed to travel far without a male companion and are prohibited from most jobs, including in nonprofits and humanitarian organisations, a ripple effect of which is being already seen in the current earthquake aftermath.
Afghan women working for agencies linked to the United Nations have faced harassment multiple times in the past, with threats prompting the groups to send the female female employees to temporarily work from home.
Afghanistan, scrambling to rescue survivors from Sunday’s quake, is also parallelly dealing with aftershocks. On Thursday, one with a magnitude of 5.6 struck the country.
