Taliban erasing women from public life and creating health crisis

Five years after the US withdrawal from Afghanistan, the Taliban's return to power has brought a systematic erasure of women from public life and a deepening health crisis, according to rare access gained by journalists inside the country.

In northern Afghanistan, a Taliban governor, Abdullah Sarhadi, a former Guantanamo Bay inmate, was seen dispensing decrees in a local court. One case involved an 18-year-old woman seeking divorce from an abusive husband. Under Sharia law, a woman initiating divorce often needs her husband's consent and may have to repay the dowry. The husband demanded four times the amount, and the governor ruled she should not seek divorce, only warning the husband against further abuse.

A woman who protested in the week the Taliban came to power now meets in secret. She said: "I think the Taliban are scared. They are scared of educated women. They know educated women won't give birth to ignorant beings such as the Taliban. They restrict women so they won't be able to raise wise men because that would be the end of the Taliban."

The Taliban promised to respect human rights and allow women to work and study, but five years on, the country is run by men for men. The BBC's reporter asked a Taliban official why they failed to keep that promise, but received no clear answer.

Sky News focused on the health crisis. In Afghanistan's largest pediatric hospital, doctors struggle to save children like Suleiman, a 10-month-old who later died. Both his older siblings had already died of hunger. The hospital sees multiple baby deaths a day, with shortages of medicines and infectious diseases rampant.

Women face severe restrictions: they cannot leave home without a male guardian, making it hard to seek medical help. The country has stopped training female health workers, leading to a serious shortage of female doctors and midwives. A gynecologist, Dr Roshan and Wardak, warned: "If there is no doctor, no nurse, no midwife, who will help them? The men? Their family will not allow the ladies to go and deliver their babies with a man. A man doctor. So what do you expect will happen? Catastrophe."

The Taliban have issued more than 800 edicts in five years, at least 100 focused on women. They have shut down shelters for abused women, banned girls from education beyond age 12, and excluded women from public spaces. Some women have set up home-based sewing businesses, and one former human rights lawyer now manages a shop, having sold her jewellery to survive.

A female student studying online to become a radiologist acknowledged some security improvements but said: "The other is not good. Like, don't permission to the girls to go to outside, to work, to continue their education. This is the bad point of the Taliban."

The UN calls it gender apartheid. The Taliban's pariah status and cuts in international aid have hit the most vulnerable hardest. As an insurgency, the Taliban proved it could survive; the question now is whether it can govern a country in crisis and for how long.