Taliban’s cruel cut: women with disabilities left without support amid rising hardships
Asieh* is one of thousands of civilians who were severely injured and left disabled as a result of war. Sixteen years ago, she lost her right eye when a mortar shell hit her home in the Sangin district of Helmand province in southern Afghanistan. Six years later, Asieh’s house was shelled again. That time, she lost her right hand and leg.
After her husband died of illness, it fell to her eldest son to provide for the family of 10. “Four months ago, he said, ‘Mother! my head and hand hurt so badly,’” recalls Asieh. “I had no money to take him to the doctor or get him a painkiller. He spent the night moaning in pain,” she explains to Zan Time during an in-person interview. By the next morning, the family had borrowed enough money to take him to hospital. It was too late. “In two hours, he was dead,” she says. “The doctors said, ‘You should have brought him on time – he had a stroke.’”
The tragedies that have afflicted Asieh’s life were deepened after the Taliban returned to power in August 2021. Previously, she’d received 60,000 afghani (US$860) a year in the form of a government disability benefit. She used that money to rent a room. But the Taliban stopped that payment. Now, the 65-year-old widow lives in an old, torn tent in Kandahar.
“My whole body hurts so much that I can’t sit straight and I can’t afford to buy medicine,” she says, wiping tears from her face while also coughing. Pointing to her tent, she adds that, in winter, she and her children “slept in wet blankets for three days and nights. We all got sick from the cold and damp.”
She’s tried and failed to get the Taliban to restart her disability payment. “I went to the people with disabilities office five times, the last time was nine months ago and I said, ‘I am an elderly widow, please help me.’ They said that some people come to us who don’t have both legs, so you don’t deserve it,” Asieh explains of her encounter with a Taliban official. “I begged them, but they threw me out of the office.”
Data on the exact number of people with disabilities is hard to find in Afghanistan but an Asia Foundation survey from 2019 suggests that almost 2.5 million adults in Afghanistan have “severe disabilities.” A 2020 Human Rights Watch report states that “Afghanistan has one of the largest populations per capita of persons with disabilities in the world” and estimates that one in five households have at least one family member with a disability. That this was such a big concern even before August 2021 had Zan Times wondering: How are people with disabilities doing under the Taliban, and in particular, women with disabilities?
Asieh is among several women with disabilities in Afghanistan who told Zan Times that the Taliban stopped their disability benefits. According to the last report issued in 2020 by the Ministry of Martyrs and the Disabled Affairs of the previous government, there were 156,791 people receiving disability benefits. At that time, the benefit was a fixed amount of 60,000 afghani per year for individuals considered fully disabled and 30,000 afghani for people with partial disabilities.
In August 2023, the Taliban put that overall number of people with disabilities at 180,449, including 30,777 women, according to Kabul-based ToloNews. That shows an increase of more than 23,000 people since 2020.
Then, in February 2024, the Taliban announced that they had removed 100,000 people including orphans and families of those killed during combat from the list of those receiving the government benefit. Kalimullah Afghan, the administrative and financial director of the Ministry of Martyrs and the Disabled Affairs, told ToloNews that they removed the names of people who were not entitled to receive the benefit. He also said that they have decreased benefits for people with disabilities.
Local media reported that the Taliban have diverted all those funds to its affiliates. Hasht Sobh newspaper has reported that deputy minister Abdul Hakim Haqqani distributed 45 million afghani to former Taliban soldiers who had been disabled during the past two decades. During his trip to Takhar province in May 2024, he gave 150,000 afghani to each of 300 former Taliban fighters, the equivalent of 2.5 years of a full disability benefit.
“People have told me that the Taliban’s treatment of people with disabilities in regards to the benefit is arbitrary. They pay people with disabilities who were with the Taliban differently than those who weren’t. They also pay women differently,” Benafsha Yaqoobi, an Afghan disability rights activist, tells Zan Times. Yaqoobi, also director of Rahyab Organisation that provides rehabilitation services for people with visual impairments, adds that some, including deaf people, are not receiving any benefit at all.
Once again, the Taliban are aiding their own by cutting benefits to women. At least 20 women in six provinces – Kandahar, Helmand, Logar, Balkh, Jawzjan, and Ghor – tell Zan Times that their disability benefits have been stopped or significantly slashed. All of the interviewees complain that the result of those cuts is poverty and an inability to provide their immediate needs, such as food and shelter. At least 6 of them confirmed to Zan Times that they were insulted and had their concerns dismissed by Taliban officials when they visited local offices of disabled affairs. In addition, several other women interviewed by Zan Times complain that they are being verbally abused by caregivers and are being given inappropriate treatment.
One of the women whose disability benefit was completely stopped is a 30 year-old women named Roshan*, who lives in Jawzjan province. After losing a leg in a motor-bike accident while a child, she used to receive 30,000 afghani a year. Her injury only became a permanent disability because her family was too poor to afford proper treatment. She’s a widow, having lost her husband to cancer, and now lives in her brother’s home, where 13 people cram into a small space. Her brother’s precarious income doesn’t cover their expenses.
“There is not much food. We only eat once a day and I spent my day sleeping. I use sleeping pills because I can’t do anything, I can’t even go to the washroom by myself,” says Roshan, lying in her bed in Jawzjan. The devastation of her life can be seen in the strain on her face, as well as her unwashed hair. “I went to the Taliban office three times with my sister-in-law,” she explains. “They said, ‘We will come to your house for a survey.’ We gave them our house address, but they never came,” she says, while crying. “The last time we went there, they threatened us with guns and threw us out.”
Another woman with a disability in Jawzjan province is 29-year-old Shazia*, who lost her two legs to childhood polio. For seven years, she received benefits from the previous government and had been recognized by the Taliban as a person entitled to continue receiving disability benefits. But the Taliban slashed her benefit almost in half, Shazia says: “During the republic, I received a total of 60,000 afghani annually, and now it is 36,000 afghani.” Even that amount isn’t paid regularly or on time, compared to the previous allowance, which was paid once a year.
For now, she survives with the 4,000 afghani that her brother sends back from Iran. “It barely covers food,” she says, noting that she regularly struggles to buy enough to feed her elderly mother and her aunt. She last went to the people with disabilities office in Jawzjan four months ago. The Taliban officials were rude to her and told her that the allowance payments hadn’t been distributed yet. “Out of necessity, I go there once a month. They look at me as a needy and helpless person,” she says. “They treat us like animals, and say brutally, ‘Get lost, get out of here, we are in trouble with you, lame people!’”
“Before the Taliban, people with disabilities were receiving the benefit as their right, but now the Taliban are treating it as a charity handout and many people are unhappy with this treatment,” says Yaqoobi, the disability rights activist. She explains that there is no system or structure in the Taliban regime designed to administrate the benefits on a regular basis and also there is no clarity on how they determine levels of disability and those who should receive the benefit. “I am hearing that the Taliban are sending someone to search the houses of people with disabilities to see what they have or not to determine whether they should receive the benefit,” she tells Zan Times.
Women with disabilities who are heading their households
“Women with disabilities, especially those heading their household, are being affected the most,” declares Yaqoobi. And that’s what Zan Times found during its investigation. Of the 20 women interviewed by Zan Times, seven are the sole providers of their families. All are struggling. One used to work in an NGO before the Taliban’s takeover but lost her job when the Taliban banned women from such work. Now, she is unable to feed her family.
Another sole provider is Qudsia*, who lost her husband to heart disease five years ago. She used to be able to put food on the table for her four children by working in people’s houses as a cleaner. But her life took a turn for the worse in May 2021 when a shell hit her home during heavy fighting between the Taliban and government forces in Maiwand district of Kandahar province. “I don’t remember much of what happened because I fainted. When I woke up, I was in the hospital. I couldn’t move my legs. My sister said I have lost both of my legs,” she tells Zan Times in an in-person interview. She remembers telling her sister, “Wasn’t it enough that I was a widow woman? How should I feed my children without legs?”
Unable to work cleaning homes, she fell behind on her rent. For the last two years, Qudsia and her children have lived in a tent. The Taliban refused to pay her a disability allowance. “I went to the Taliban’s office five times, asking them for help. But they said that I was injured during the previous government and they can’t pay me any benefits. The last time I went there was December [2023] because it was very cold and we didn’t have anything to warm our tent, but they didn’t help me,” she tells Zan Times.
“I don’t want to go to the Taliban anymore because they won’t help me. It is better to use the taxi fare to purchase two breads for my children than to go to the Taliban’s office of disability affairs” says Qudsia. “I am sending my children to beg on the street.”
*Names have been changed to protect the identity of the interviewees and writers. Sana Atef and Mahtab Safi are the pseudonyms of Zan Times journalists in Afghanistan.
Zohra Ghori* contributed reporting.
