Taliban edict on female aid staff pushes Afghan women deeper into the shadows

Save the Children is among the NGOs to have bowed to a regime ban in order to keep delivering some aid ... just not to women.

- By Hannah Lucinda Smith

In the deserts of western Afghanistan, the world's largest deportation programme is under way. Since the start of this year more than 1.5 million Afghans have been expelled from Iran and have arrived at the reception centre at the Islam Qala border crossing, a collection of shabby low-rise buildings and tents where returnees receive essential healthcare and aid.

At the height of the returns this summer, the centre was receiving 20,000 people each day, almost half of whom are women. Five months on, these women are caught in a standoff between the Taliban and international aid agencies forced to choose between delivering aid according to the dictates of the world's most misogynistic government, or not delivering aid at all.

While the Taliban runs Islam Qala and provides returnees with necessary documents and small stipends, humanitarian services are provided by a plethora of international NGOs funded by donors including the UK's Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Office (FCDO), creating a delicate balance of power between the UN and western governments and a brutal theological regime that is almost universally condemned and isolated for its human rights abuses, particularly against girls and women.

Earlier this month, the Taliban's Ministry for the Propagation of Virtue and Prevention of Vice, the body responsible for enforcing crushing restrictions on women, decreed that foreign female aid staff are banned from working at the Islam Qala centre, part of the group's widening effort to exclude women entirely from public life.