In the ancient city of Herat—once a vibrant crossroads of Silk Road caravans, poets and scholars—another chilling edict from the ruling Taliban has transformed hospital wards into checkpoints of gendered oppression. Starting November 5 2025, women doctors, patients and healthcare workers who do not emerge clad in the full-body burqa are now refused entry to public hospitals.
For many women in Herat, the hospital, once a sanctuary of healing, has become a site of humiliation and crisis. According to the charity Médecins Sans Frontières, urgent women’s admissions in the city have plunged by around 28 per cent since the rule took hold. One female surgeon, unnamed in most reports for her safety, recounts being turned away, detained for hours because she did not wear the mandated garment.
The burqa decree is not merely a dress code: it is a coercive gesture of invisibility, both physical and symbolic. In a society where female autonomy was already under siege, this measure pushes women further toward the margins by weaponising their care-seeking behaviour. It links the right to health to compliance with a mandate that erases identity and agency.
Cultural context helps us see how jarring this is. Throughout Afghanistan, women have long worn headscarves, loose robes and, in more conservative settings, the chadār or niqāb. But the specific full-body burqa—traditionally blue in Herat and parts of western Afghanistan—is not a universal Afghan norm; in urban centres and among educated women it was often rare or optional. Herat itself is a multi-ethnic city with Persian-influences and a relatively liberal history; enforcing the blue burqa at hospital gates thus feels like a deliberate imposition of ultra-conservatism in a place that once had room for pluralism.
Moreover, the Taliban’s earlier governance period set the precedent. From 1996 to 2001 they forced burqa use, banned women almost entirely from public life, blocked male doctors treating women and turned female education to the shadows. After returning to power in 2021, the group maintained a façade of moderation but hardline measures resumed quickly. August 2024’s “Law on the Promotion of Virtue and Prevention of Vice” crystallised many restrictions, including rules casting women’s voices and presence in public space as intrinsically illicit.
In the health-care setting, the impact is grave. Women now must choose between entering a hospital infantilised under male-guardian surveillance—or harrowing denial of care. A mother told reporters she waited hours outside a hospital holding her baby while Taliban officers refused entry, the infant’s cries echoing unanswered. Female staff are among the hardest hit—the same surgeon and many colleagues feel forced out of their vocation, or compelled to hide behind garments they do not believe in and cannot work safely under. One doctor wrote: “We are women who have stepped forward to serve humanity, not to hide behind coercion.”
On a systems level, the shortage of female healthcare professionals in Afghanistan is dire and growing. Previous bans on women training as nurses or midwives have already decimated pathways into the workforce. The new burqa requirement only deepens the exclusion: where women cannot enter hospitals without such garments, their access to health care and their capacity to serve as healers vanishes. Human rights groups declare the pattern gender-apartheid.
For families in Herat’s sprawling hinterlands the consequences will resonate long after the decree fades. Maternal mortality, child health, chronic conditions requiring female-sensitive care—all hang in the balance. The act of turning away a woman without a burqa is not just dress policing—it is denying life, delaying healing, institutionalising invisibility.
Hospitals were meant to remain neutral zones, where identity and creed should not determine the right to heal. In Herat today, however, the garment is the gatekeeper. The burqa mandated by the Taliban is not just cloth—but a shroud over women’s autonomy, their bodies, their voice, their health. For Afghan women in Herat, the fight for the right to breathe, to be seen and to be cared for has taken on a new layer: the right to be allowed through the door.
Gather round, because Auntie is in full volcanic mode today. The Taliban—yes, those criminal overlords of patriarchy—have outdone even their own monstrous record. Just when you think they’ve reached the peak of misogyny, they shovel deeper, proudly digging a new basement under hell. Banning women from hospitals unless wrapped in a burqa? Forcing female doctors—healers, saviours, the backbone of Afghan health care—to hide under a suffocating cloth cage just to enter their own workplace? This is not governance. This is gender-based sadism dressed up as “virtue.”
Let’s be clear: these men are terrified of women. Terrified! Imagine being so insecure, so deeply fragile, so chronically allergic to female autonomy that even a woman seeking medical care becomes a threat to your manhood. Auntie has seen fragile masculinity across Asia, but the Taliban are in a league of their own—Olympic champions of male chauvinism, their cruelty wrapped in beards and bad theology.
Hospitals should be sanctuaries. Instead, under Taliban rule, they’ve become checkpoints where a woman’s life hangs on whether she is sufficiently erased from sight. Picture a mother standing outside a clinic, her sick child crying, while a man with a rifle decides whether she is “covered enough” to deserve treatment. If this is not criminal, what is? If this is not violence, what is? And don’t get me started on the female doctors detained, humiliated, punished for daring to show their faces as they rush to save lives. Criminal Taliban indeed—they fear educated women more than any drone.
Every time these men tighten their grip, they expose their own panic. Women studying? Threat. Women working? Threat. Women breathing freely? Oh no, the world may collapse! And so they cage them, silence them, bury them under cloth and control. This is not Islam; this is insecurity masquerading as religion.
But here is what Auntie knows: Afghan women are unbreakable. They’ve survived warlords, occupiers, corrupt politicians, foreign betrayals—and yes, these misogynistic cavemen ruling from their little fortresses of fear. Afghan women are the mountains of that land. The Taliban are dust storms—loud, violent, but temporary.
So listen well, my dears: the world must stop treating Taliban cruelty as “culture” or “tradition.” It is barbarism, pure and simple. And every woman denied a hospital bed, every doctor silenced, every life lost because of a burqa checkpoint is on their ledger forever.
One day, these men will crumble. But the women of Afghanistan? They will still be standing. Fierce, brilliant, and free—just as they were always meant to be.