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Afghan women and their children in Mazar Dara village after a 6.0 magnitude earthquake on August 31. More than 800 people were killed and more than 2,700 others were injured in eastern Afghanistan as a result of the earthquake and aftershocks. Vakil Kohsar/AFP/via Getty Images .

. Wakil Kohsar/AFP/via Getty Images

As earthquakes devastated parts of Afghanistan in late August, Taliban officials asked aid agencies to send more female health workers to help survivors. They also briefly prevented female UN staff from accessing areas devastated by the earthquake.

The wave of contradictions that followed the earthquake did not end there.

In the aftermath of the earthquake, while relief groups and Taliban bureaucrats were helping those injured and displaced by the quake, other Taliban officials twice suspended most internet services and cellular reception across Afghanistan, complicating relief efforts.

These events highlight the distortions of the Taliban movement four years after it seized power in Afghanistan.

Hardliners are firmly in control, but more pragmatic factions appear to be constantly trying to find alternative governance solutions – such as urging female aid workers to head to earthquake-stricken areas.

“It's an ongoing conflict,” said one senior analyst, who requested anonymity because the Taliban has cracked down on people seen as criticizing them.

(This person, like more than a dozen people NPR spoke to for this story, including senior representatives of international charities, local residents and respected analysts, asked NPR not to use their names. Others asked us to use only their first names. Some people were concerned about their organizations being punished if they were seen as critical of the Taliban or were concerned about foreign employees being denied visas or losing the right to continue operations).

This back and forth can be seen in the Taliban's response to the deadly earthquake, which was most devastating in the isolated mountains of eastern Kunar province in late August. Houses made of mud and stone clinging to the steep mountainsides collapsed on their sleeping residents. From the helicopter's perspective, it looked like entire villages had “just been removed from the hillsides,” said Richard Trenchard, the acting humanitarian coordinator in Afghanistan.

United Nations estimates indicate that about 2,200 people were killed and more than 3,600 others were injured. The majority were women and girls – partly because there are more females than males in any given population group, because the area is known for men migrating to find work and because women and girls were more likely to sleep inside collapsed buildings.

Where were the women?

In the first days after the earthquake, the Taliban shared a series of videos of their defense forces dismembering wounded people from isolated villages. The wounded in these reels were all men, as if the Taliban had camped in villages where there were no women.

A local aid worker, Wahidullah, told NPR that the women were airlifted, but in compliance with Taliban rules and cultural norms, they were not photographed and were isolated inside the helicopter. One video, filmed by a local aid group, shows women being rescued by mistake: They were huddled in the back of a single helicopter, most of them wearing burqas.

Two senior aid workers said Taliban officials encouraged them to send more female workers to help women and girls affected by the quake because of the ultra-conservative Afghan culture that limits male contact with females, and the Taliban's own rules demanding strict gender segregation. “They were encouraging us and asking us to provide more, especially in the case of medical support for women,” Trenchard said. “The Taliban were asking for female doctors, they were asking for female medical teams, all female medical teams. We didn't have the resources available to provide,” another senior aid worker told NPR.

The Taliban's request for more female workers came despite the severe restrictions imposed by the movement since it seized power four years ago. This includes preventing most women and girls from studying and working.

Who is behind the restrictions?

Based on NPR reporting since the Taliban took power, these restrictions appear to have been ordered by the group's spiritual leader. Hibatullah Akhundzada lives in almost complete secrecy in the city of Kandahar in southern Afghanistan, and rarely appears in public. Analysts point to how well the restrictions have held up, despite high-level pushback from other prominent clerics and multiple attempts on the ground to circumvent the rules.

This resistance included former Deputy Foreign Minister Sher Abbas Stanikzai, who left Afghanistan in February after publicly criticizing the ban on girls studying after the sixth grade several times. The Taliban government's first minister of higher education turned a blind eye to women's enrollment in university – even after the decision to allow girls to attend secondary school was largely reversed in March 2022 – after girls were told that if they could attend university, they had to be expelled from the classroom. (By December 2022, the Taliban had banned most women from attending university.)

After Afghan women were expelled from universities, the Ministry of Public Health appeared to back down, creating a years-long nursing and midwifery training course for Afghan women so they could help other women. “It made the hardliners uncomfortable,” said the analyst, who spoke on condition of anonymity, seeing it as “an alternative solution to the ban we imposed.” The nursing and midwifery course was canceled in December last year, just months after it began, apparently on the orders of the Taliban's supreme commander, Haibatullah Akhundzada. Kate Clark, co-director of the Afghanistan Analysts Network, a prominent research group, said the move highlighted how “the more conservative part of the movement is taking control and increasing its control.”

This increased control has come at the expense of women and girls. They are often prevented from caring for male doctors and paramedics. This has left women's health care in the hands of a decreasing number of women.

At the time, senior Afghanistan researcher Heather Barr of Human Rights Watch put it this way: “If you prevent women from being treated by male health-care professionals, and then prevent women from training to become health-care professionals, the consequences are clear: women will not have access to health care and will die as a result.”

There are no country-level data for Afghanistan, but it appears that not only are no new women coming through the Afghan health care system, but there are fewer eligible women still working. Some appear to be leaving Afghanistan. The Afghan Analysts Network also reported that others are leaving amid falling salaries and deteriorating conditions. The network also reported that female health workers said their new colleagues were likely to be unskilled women who came from pro-Taliban families.

Why do aid workers face obstacles?

A shortage of qualified workers has become one of the many obstacles faced by relief workers as they seek to reach the dead and wounded hours after the earthquake devastated parts of Afghanistan on September 1.

Another obstacle to rescuing the women was that the Taliban prevented female UN staff from reaching the devastated areas. In a statement issued on September 11, the United Nations also said that the Taliban rulers in Afghanistan prevented female UN staff and contractors from entering their workplaces in the capital Kabul, the western city of Herat, and the northern city of Mazar-i-Sharif.

Trenchard, the acting UN humanitarian coordinator, said Taliban authorities eventually allowed women working for the UN to help earthquake victims in the field after negotiations, but they were not allowed to return to their offices. Taliban authorities did not respond to multiple requests for comment.

All of this meant that few female aid workers were available to treat women and girls injured by the earthquakes. Even to reach them, aid workers walked for hours on perilous roads up steep mountainsides. One rescuer told the UN News Service how they were “dodging falling rocks every time there was an aftershock.” Female health workers were expected to walk wearing headscarves and long, loose gowns. They also need a mahram, a male guardian, a man related by blood whom a woman cannot marry, such as a brother, nephew, or husband. This muharram must be authorized by the Taliban.

Aid workers said it was difficult to entice female staff to go to devastated areas, partly because their male relatives did not want to go, and partly because conditions were so arduous. As a result, there were initially few women available to help other women, said Gershin, a 50-year-old health worker who uses only one name. She said aid workers in the field did their best, including a midwife who made a six-hour trip to help a woman give birth.

In some cases, women injured in the earthquake appear to have been left unattended until health workers arrived. Aid workers said it was not just the Taliban's ban on men treating women. Local communities also did not allow men, whether rescuers or paramedics, to help their female relatives. “They were very strict and did not even let us see the wounded,” said Omid Haqjo, a volunteer who traveled nine hours to provide assistance in an area known as Wadi Mazar Dara. He said it was a devastating scene because “most of the injured were children and women.”

Aid worker Fareshta, who was assigned to help the women, said that some women and girls did not receive any health care, even two weeks after the earthquake.

Jarshin, the 50-year-old health worker, said what frustrated her was that conservative Afghan traditions – combined with Taliban rules – meant women could only be cared for by other women. “Imagine, during the recent earthquake, women's clothes were torn, or maybe their clothes were torn. They might be in a situation where it would be difficult for a male rescuer to dare to pull them out. So it's natural that there would be a woman doing the rescue,” she said.

Why did the Internet decline?

But if there was any hope that the Taliban authorities would relax their ban on women studying, even to help other women, that hope was dashed just two weeks after the earthquake.

On September 15, Taliban authorities suspended operations of a fiber optic cable that provides fast, affordable internet to most Afghans. This step was taken to “ward off evil,” according to Hajj Zaid, spokesman for the northern city of Balkh. But one of the victims were thousands of women and girls, who were studying online after being denied physical access to school.

Access resumed in most places, until it was closed again for 48 hours on September 29, along with mobile phone reception.

During the first Internet commentary, one father described to NPR how quiet, pale, and withdrawn his daughters were after the Internet went out. They were studying through an online university. He requested that his identity not be revealed to protect the safety of his daughters. “It's the same frustration, the same darkness,” he said of four years under Taliban rule.

Akbari reported from Paris. With additional reporting from Ruchi Kumar in Istanbul.

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