RASC News Agency: Harrowing reports from Kabul’s public hospitals reveal that Taliban enforcers from the so-called Ministry for the Promotion of Virtue and Prevention of Vice are halting critical surgeries and forcibly removing doctors from operating theaters in order to subject them to ideological “religious tests.” This policy, unprecedented in its recklessness, has directly endangered patients’ lives and exposed the Taliban’s contempt for both professional ethics and human dignity.
Multiple medical staff, speaking to RASC on condition of anonymity, confirmed that Taliban agents have stormed operating rooms in recent weeks. In several cases, surgeons were compelled to abandon patients under anesthesia, leaving life-saving procedures suspended mid-operation. Witnesses describe scenes of chaos and panic: patients left bleeding on the table, families in despair, and doctors humiliated as they were dragged out to prove their “religious commitment” to the regime’s rigid ideology.
“This is not governance; it is a grotesque display of power at the expense of human life,” said one Kabul surgeon. “They treat hospitals like seminaries and patients like disposable objects. No medical oath, no professional standard, and no basic humanity survives under their watch.”
The practice is part of the Taliban’s newly expanded policy of imposing compulsory religious examinations on all civil servants twice a year. Instead of evaluating competence or professional skill, these exams are designed to enforce loyalty, crush dissent, and instill fear among state employees. Hospitals, schools, and government offices have all reported similar disruptions, with officials barging into workplaces and halting services in the name of religious orthodoxy.
The human cost is already staggering. Patients who rely on fragile state healthcare many suffering from chronic illnesses or requiring emergency surgery are left untreated or face worsening conditions as operations are interrupted. Families report that their loved ones have endured excruciating pain and, in some cases, life-threatening complications because medical staff were compelled to leave them mid-procedure.
Civil society organizations have denounced the practice as a form of institutionalized cruelty, warning that it not only destroys public trust in hospitals but also drives highly skilled doctors to consider fleeing the country. “This is state-engineered negligence masquerading as morality,” said an Afghanistani rights activist. “The Taliban’s obsession with controlling minds and souls has crossed into actively endangering human life. It is an atrocity cloaked in piety.”
Human rights defenders further stress that such policies epitomize the Taliban’s destructive governance model: ideology above service, coercion above competence, and intimidation above humanity. By weaponizing religion, the regime reduces professional institutions to instruments of political control, eroding what little remains of Afghanistan’s public administration.
International observers note that these actions amount to a deliberate dismantling of the healthcare system. Already crippled by underfunding, sanctions, and brain drain, Afghanistan’s medical sector is now subjected to ideological terror that undermines its very capacity to function. “If a government interrupts surgeries to test dogma, it ceases to be a government it becomes a threat to the survival of its own people,” a regional health analyst told RASC.
The Taliban, desperate to project dominance, have chosen to sacrifice the sick and the vulnerable as collateral damage. In doing so, they have once again confirmed what millions of Afghanistani citizens already know: this regime thrives not on serving the people, but on humiliating them.
