In Lashkar Gah, the fears and despair of Afghan nurses

LETTER FROM KABUL

At the start of November, almost three months after the fall of Kabul to the Taliban, many Afghan cities, like Lashkar Gah, still bear the scars of the war. This capital of the province of Helmand (south) was, for many years, at the center of the fighting between the new masters of the country and the army of the old regime.

In this city, many broken windows have still not been replaced. Walls, old checkpoints, large statues placed in the center of the main city squares are still riddled with bullets. In the Boost hospital, supported by the French NGO Médecins sans frontières (MSF), some rooms still bear the scars of the fighting. In August, due to hostilities, Afghan nurse Habiba was stranded in the hospital, until Lashkar Gah fell to the Taliban. “Whenever the fighting got intense, we went downstairs. Since then, the war is over, but we are afraid, because with the Taliban, being a woman is a problem, even if they say that we women can still work in the health sector ”, explains this young nurse wearing a green scarf.

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Even though the Taliban have not yet prohibited the outing of single women without a male member of their family (the rule during their first reign, between 1996 and 2001), Habiba, like many other of his colleagues, did not dare to venture outside alone. “I’m just afraid”, she explains. That’s why this 25-year-old single woman comes to work with five or six other female colleagues in a rickshaw. She is all the more afraid when she hears that, in some provinces, the Taliban are forcing single women to marry their fighters. A rumor that has been running since the summer.

“So much the better that I didn’t have a child!” “

Vahida, another nurse, aged 26, is married, childless. “These days, unlike before, I say to myself: ‘So much the better that I didn’t have a child!’ because the people have become very poor, miserable. There is no work and many do not even have bread to eat in the evening ”, laments the young woman who sports a pink scarf. Since the Taliban’s return to power, the Afghan economy has been in virtual bankruptcy, in particular because of the blocking of the reserves of the Afghan central bank in the United States and the freezing of a large part of international aid, on which Kabul deeply depends. .

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