From the Telegraph / Yahoo!News:
"Afghan women die in rubble as male rescuers refuse to touch them
Afghan women were left to die in the wake of the country’s 6.6 magnitude earthquake because of Taliban rules forbidding unrelated men from having contact with them, The Telegraph has been told.
The quake killed thousands of people and devastated homes across the country’s mountainous areas on Sunday, with two powerful aftershocks on Friday raising fears of more death and destruction.
Survivors say the Taliban’s draconian restrictions – as much as the tremors – have cost Afghan women their lives.
It took rescuers 20 hours to reach Devagarh village on Monday in one of the worst-hit areas. When they did arrive, the women hid behind the broken walls of their houses after seeing the all-male rescue team, one rescuer told The Telegraph.
“We can’t speak with the women or try to contact them because it’s prohibited. Touching even a dead woman will have consequences,” he said, seeking anonymity.
Afghan cultural norms, strictly enforced by the Taliban even in emergencies, barred the male rescuers from pulling out female survivors.
The strict rules also ban women from being employed as rescue workers themselves.
“Taliban has not allowed women to rescue, but a few women from the UN aid agencies are on the ground,” said a senior journalist in Kunar on condition of anonymity. “There are complete restrictions on any negative news.”
In Mazar Dara village, emergency workers carried away men and children, but left behind several women. “They pushed us aside and took men for the treatment,” said a woman, who Telegraph spoke with through a women’s rights activist, Humaira Alim.
“We were left bleeding. No one offered help,” she said.
Hamid Badshah, a resident of Kunar Province, said injured women were left under the collapsed houses because the members of the all-male medical team were hesitant to pull them out.
Mr Badshah described women fleeing the tremors, then turning back midway for headscarves. “I heard women turning back midway looking for hijab after fleeing from tremors and then came under the collapsed houses,” he said.
More than 2,200 people have been killed and several thousand injured in the earthquake in Afghanistan’s eastern province of Kunar.
Kunar is a conservative area, so for cultural reasons women might end up being treated later. It’s feared some women may have chosen to stay, or to wait for daylight to be taken to hospital by their families.
At Jalalabad’s provincial hospital, doctors admitted that in the initial hours, female patients were refused treatment by male staff.
A Community Health Worker confirmed to The Telegraph that more than three pregnant women died because they were not treated by men. “I believe their number could be too high, in hundreds,” he said.
During a major 2023 earthquake in Herat, western Afghanistan, nearly six out of ten of those who lost their lives were women, and nearly two-thirds of those injured were women."
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Isn't Islam beautiful, especially if you are a woman? By the way, Yahoo has not allowed comments to this article.
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