Afghanistan earthquake: men are saved while women left under rubble

A second earthquake brought more devastation to Afghanistanis in the Southern part of the country. Now the death toll has passed 1,400, and nearly 4,000 or more are injured. On September 3rd, I wrote a blog post about how "Afghan" women -I mean Pashtun women - are buried twice, once by natural earthquake, a second time by Pashtun men. The next day, on September 4th, an article in the New York Times by Fatima Faizi detailed the same concerns I had expressed the day before. 

The summary of the article is that women die under the rubble while men are saved. The reason why women are still under the rubble or remain under the rubble is that their male mahrams (lawful individuals or members of close family) are all lost and dead under the rubble, and there is no mahram left to save their women. On the other hand, the male rescuers who come from the village and the surrounding areas are not mahrams and by Pashtun tradition are not allowed to get close to women who are already dead or still alive, or those who are injured and remain under the rubble. Here is a quote:

In the village of Andarluckak, in Kunar Province, the emergency team hurriedly carried out wounded men and children, and treated their wounds, said Ms. Aysha, 19. But she and other women and adolescent girls, some of them bleeding, were pushed aside, she said. “They gathered us in one corner and forgot about us,” she said. No one offered the women help, asked what they needed or even approached them.

She cites a woman where an injured woman is waiting for help by the wall, but no one is willing to approach her.

In a war-torn, afflicted country like Afghanistan, while everyone is dying of hunger, an ignorant and brute group that descended from mountains and caves now controls the country, tries to enforce the Pashtun tradition on everybody else in the country. On the one hand, hunger, poverty, and misery wreak havoc; on the other hand, natural disasters such as earthquakes and floods, and now the Taliban has been added to it. Crisis upon crisis. The Taliban themselves are a serious catastrophe, and implementing the Pashtun tradition on other ethnic groups in Afghanistan is another disaster and crisis.