Women in Afghanistan have been banned from training to become midwives in the latest crackdown unveiled by the Taliban.
Trainee midwifery students, who have been ordered to no longer attend classes, urged Taliban leaders to allow them to continue studying.
A director at leading global charity Human Rights Watch said the measures would lead to women and girls dying due to struggling to receive healthcare during childbirth.
Sources close to the Taliban’s Ministry of Public Health told BBC Radio 4’s World at One they have received orders to shut medical institutions to female students until further notice. Several midwifery institutions in different provinces in Afghanistan confirmed the ban is in place to the news outlet.
Heather Barr, interim women’s rights deputy director at Human Rights Watch, told The Independent: “This is closing one of the very few loopholes that was still left in the Taliban’s ban on education for women and girls but it is also a particularly significant loophole because this will lead to women and girls dying.
“The Taliban have also banned women from being treated by male healthcare professionals and now what they are doing effectively is cutting off the pipeline of new female healthcare professionals.”
She warned the new measures are part of a wider pattern which sees the Taliban taking “more and more from women” and further restricting their lives.
Afghanistan has one of the highest rates of deaths in childbirth in the world – with one woman estimated to die every two hours.
