• Shortage of female doctors hampers women’s access to care.
• Restrictions force pregnant women, trauma victims into crisis.
• Thousands of women left injured, homeless by earthquakes.

ISLAMABAD: The World Health Organisation (WHO) has asked Taliban authorities to lift restrictions on Afghan female aid workers, allowing them to travel without male guardians and help women struggling to access care after a powerful earthquake killed 2,200 people in eastern Afghanistan.

“A very big issue now is the increasing paucity of female staff in these places,” Dr Mukta Sharma, the deputy representative of WHO’s Afghanistan office, told Reuters.

She estimated around 90% of medical staff in the area were male, and the remaining 10% were often midwives and nurses, rather than doctors, who could treat severe wounds. This was hampering care as women were uncomfortable or afraid to interact with male staff and travel alone to receive care.

The September 1 magnitude-6 quake and its aftershocks injured more than 3,600 people and left thousands homeless in a country already dealing with severe aid cuts and a slew of humanitarian crises since the Taliban took over in 2021 as foreign forces left.

The Afghan health ministry and a spokesperson for the Taliban administration did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

The Taliban have previously said they would ensure women could receive aid.

Its administration in 2022 ordered Afghan female NGO staff to stop working outside the home. Humanitarian officials say there have been exemptions, particularly in the health and education sectors, but many said these were patchwork and not sufficient to allow a surge of female staff, particularly in an emergency situation that required travel.

That meant aid organisations and female staff faced uncertainty, Sharma said, and in some cases were not able to take the risk.

“The restrictions are huge, the mahram (male guardian requirements) issue continues and no formal exemption has been provided by the de facto authorities,” she said, adding her team had raised the issue with authorities last week.

“That’s why we felt we had to advocate with (authorities) to say, this is the time you really need to have more female health workers present, let us bring them in, and let us search from other places where they’re available.”

Sharma said she was extremely concerned about women in the future being able to access mental health care to deal with trauma as well as for those whose male family members had been killed, leaving them to navigate restrictions on women without a male guardian.

Peer Gul from Somai district in Kunar province, which was severely hit by the quakes, said many women from his village had experienced trauma and high blood pressure after the earthquake and were struggling to reach medical care.

“There is no female doctor for examinations; only one male doctor is available,” he said.

Sharma noted the growing shortage of Afghan female doctors as the Taliban have barred female students from high school and university, meaning a pipeline of women doctors was not being replenished.

The UN estimates around 11,600 pregnant women were also impacted by the quakes in a country with some of the highest maternal mortality rates in Asia.

Funding cuts, including by the US administration this year, had already left the health system reeling. Around 80 health facilities had already closed in the affected areas this year due to US aid cuts and another 16 health posts had to be shuttered due to damage from the earthquake, Sharma said.

• Survivors camp outdoors fearing aftershocks, lack tents.
• More than 2,200 dead, helicopters delivered aid.
• Children face trauma, disease risks.

Haunted by the fear that aftershocks could bring rocks crashing down from the mountains, the survivors of Afghan earthquakes vowed not to return to destroyed villages but camp in fields and on riverbanks instead, even without tents to keep off the rain.

“We have no shelter, not even a tent,” said 67-year-old farmer Adam Khan, leaning on a stick outside his ruined home in the village of Masud in Afghanistan’s eastern province of Kunar, devastated last week by earthquakes and subsequent aftershocks.

“It rained last night, we had no place to take cover,” he added. “Our biggest fear is the big rocks that could come down at any moment.”

Two earthquakes on September 1 killed more than 2,200 people and injured over 3,600 across the region, flattening thousands of homes, while aftershocks brought fresh landslides, leaving families trapped between unstable mountains and swollen rivers.

Aid groups sped in food and supplies by helicopter, but survivors say help is patchy and slow.

Afghanistan’s poverty and inadequate infrastructure maroon many villages hours from the nearest road, while most homes, built of mud and stone, crumbled instantly in the tremors.

Families cluster in makeshift camps dotting the area. In the village of Shaheedan, farmer Shams-ur-Rahman, 40, said he lost six relatives and fled with his family of nine. Now they sit in the open beside a road, flanked by their few possessions.

“The tents they gave us cannot even accommodate our children,” he said. “On the way down from the mountain, I had no shoes for my son, so I shared mine with him in turns as we walked down.”

For some, the displacement looks set to be permanent. In the harsh glare of the sun, Gul Ahmad, 51, stood beside his relatives, the women of his family crouched in the shade of a wall as their pop-up tents flapped in the dust nearby.

“Even if there is no earthquake, a simple rainfall could bring rocks crashing down on us,” he said. “We will not go back. The government must provide us with a place.”

Without sufficient shelter, sanitation and food, the trauma will spread disease and poverty in one of the world’s poorest and most quake-prone nations, international aid agencies say.

Some of the worst affected are children. Twelve-year-old Sadiq was pulled out alive after being trapped for 11 hours under rubble, in which his grandmother and a cousin were killed beside him.

“I thought I would die,” he said, sitting quietly on a rope bed as cousins and uncles milled around the family’s shelter. “It felt like doomsday.”

• Russia unleashes biggest aerial barrage on Ukraine, killing four.
• Kyiv govt complex roof burns after direct Russian strike.
• Macron, Starmer, EU condemn strikes as “terror” and “cowardly”.

Russia fired its biggest-ever aerial barrage at Ukraine early Sunday, killing four people and setting the seat of the Ukrainian government in Kyiv ablaze in an attack President Volodymyr Zelensky warned would prolong the war.

The Sunday attack was the first to hit Ukraine’s cabinet of ministers, a sprawling government complex at the heart of Kyiv.

An AFP reporter saw the roof of the building in flames and smoke billowing over the capital.

Drone strikes also damaged several high-rise buildings in Kyiv, according to emergency services.

Russia has shown no sign of halting its three-and-a-half-year invasion of Ukraine, pushing hardline demands for ending the war despite efforts by the United States to broker a peace deal.

Residents in Kyiv spoke of their frustration following the strikes.

“This is already routine for us, unfortunately,” Olga, a 30-year-old resident of a damaged building told AFP.

The Russians first “grab the Shaheds (Iranian-designed drones), then the rockets come,” she said.

An AFP reporter saw helicopters dropping what buckets of water over its roof, as emergency services rushed to the scene.

European condemnation

Russia, which denies targeting civilians in Ukraine, said it had struck a plant and a logistics hub in Kyiv.

Its defence ministry said “no strikes were carried out on other targets within the boundaries of Kyiv”, explicitly denying responsibility for the government building strike.

Police cordoned off the area surrounding the building, the roof and upper floors of which sustained damage.

“We will restore the buildings. But we cannot bring back lost lives. The enemy terrorises and kills our people every day throughout the country,” Prime Minister Yulia Svyrydenko said.

She later posted a video from inside the damaged floor showing shattered offices and burned walls.

Russia fired at least 810 drones and 13 missiles at Ukraine between late Saturday and early Sunday, in a new record, according to the Ukrainian air force.

“Such killings now, when real diplomacy could have already begun long ago, are a deliberate crime and a prolongation of the war,” Zelensky said.

He discussed the attack in a call with French President Emmanuel Macron and said that France would help Ukraine strengthen its defence.

Macron, on X, condemned the attack and said Russia “is locking itself ever deeper into the logic of war and terror”. France stood by Ukraine, he said.

UK Prime Minister Keir Starmer and EU chief Ursula von der Leyen also slammed the attack.

“Once again, the Kremlin is mocking diplomacy,” von der Leyen wrote on X.

The “cowardly strikes” show that Russian President Vladimir Putin “is not serious about peace”, Starmer said in a statement.

Strikes kills four

AFP reporters heard explosions over the capital early Sunday.

A strike on a nine-story residential building in the west of Kyiv killed at least two people, a mother and her two-month-old son, prosecutors said.

More than two dozens others were wounded in Kyiv, according to the emergency service.

Among them was a 24-year-old pregnant woman, who delivered a premature baby shortly after the attack, and doctors were fighting for her life and that of her baby, state TV Suspilne reported.

Two more died and dozens other wounded in overnight strikes across the country´s east and southeast, authorities said.

The attack also killed seven horses at an equestrian club in Kyiv’s suburbs, according to Ukraine’s foreign ministry.

“The world cannot stand aside while a terrorist state takes lives — human or animal — every single day,” it wrote on X.

The barrage came after more than two dozen European countries pledged to patrol any agreement to end the war, some of whom said they were willing to deploy troops on the ground.

Kyiv insists on Western-backed security guarantees to prevent future Russian attacks, but Putin warns that any Western troops in Ukraine would be unacceptable and legitimate targets.

Efforts in recent weeks by US President Donald Trump to end the war have so far yielded little progress.

Meantime, on the front line in the east, Moscow continued to claim territory in costly grinding battles, capturing another village in the Dnipropetrovsk region. Russia occupies around 20% of the country in total.

Tens of thousands have been killed in three-and-a-half years of fighting, which has forced millions from their homes and destroyed much of eastern and southern Ukraine in Europe’s bloodiest conflict since World War II.