RASC News Agency: In an alarming escalation of its gender apartheid policies, the Taliban regime has issued a new directive targeting female health professionals in Kandahar, mandating that they must be accompanied by a Mahram a male guardian from the beginning to the end of their working day. Internal documents obtained by RASC confirm that the order applies to all women employed in the province’s healthcare sector, including doctors, nurses, and administrative personnel. This authoritarian decree has provoked sharp criticism from healthcare workers, who view it as a calculated attempt to strip women of their professional agency and economic independence. One female worker lamented, “Now we do the work of two people on a single salary,” alluding to the unbearable burden of coordinating constant male supervision while shouldering full-time responsibilities in understaffed medical facilities. Her words reflect a grim truth: the Taliban’s latest measure is not only impractical it is deliberately punitive.
This policy is not an isolated act but part of a systematic pattern. In November of the previous year, the Taliban had already mandated that female employees must wear specific forms of hijab and be accompanied by a male guardian during their commute. The new edict extends these restrictions further, requiring women who travel to rural districts for work to obtain written travel authorization from the Ministry for the Promotion of Virtue and Prevention of Vice. Previously, an identification card issued by the provincial health directorate was deemed sufficient. Now, even a basic right to movement for professional purposes has been converted into a bureaucratic ordeal. In an additional move aimed at institutionalizing gender surveillance, the Taliban have ordered the NGO “JAK” which operates in Kandahar’s public hospitals to verify and report the identities of all male guardians associated with its female staff. This demand represents an alarming intrusion into private lives and further blurs the line between governance and religious extremism. Female professionals are now treated not as citizens, but as subjects under total control.
For many, the objective behind these restrictions is painfully clear: to pressure women into leaving their jobs and retreating into forced domesticity. Health workers in Kandahar have described the new regulations as an undeclared campaign to expel women from the workforce under the guise of religious morality. “They are not even pretending anymore,” one nurse told RASC. “The message is simple: we are not welcome here.” The consequences for Afghanistan’s already fragile healthcare infrastructure are devastating. Kandahar’s public hospitals are facing acute shortages of female medical personnel an issue that directly endangers the lives of thousands of women and children who depend on gender-sensitive care. Under Taliban rule, hundreds of experienced female professionals have either resigned in protest or been driven out through intimidation and institutional harassment. The new restrictions will only accelerate this brain drain, further weakening essential services in a country teetering on the brink of humanitarian collapse.
Beyond the practical fallout, the Taliban’s actions represent a wholesale assault on the principle of women’s participation in public life. By imposing arbitrary and degrading conditions on female employment, the regime is engineering a dystopia in which women are barred not only from education and leadership, but even from serving their communities in vital professions like healthcare. What is unfolding in Kandahar is not merely a local policy change it is a stark manifestation of the Taliban’s broader vision for society: one in which women are erased from public spaces, stripped of their autonomy, and reduced to shadows in a theocratic order built on coercion and fear. These policies do not reflect religious virtue; they reflect a deliberate weaponization of religion to entrench patriarchal domination.
As international aid continues to flow into Taliban-controlled institutions under the guise of humanitarian assistance, the global community must confront a critical question: how long will the world subsidize a regime that systematically destroys the very fabric of civil society and silences half its population?
