AFGHAN WOMEN LOOKED UP TO DOC.
Fierce `general' dedicated to serving country
When a Times of London reporter visited Kabul, Afghanistan, in 2001, asking female medical students to name the person they most admired, the answer was universal: “General Siddiq.”
Everyone seemed to have a story about Suhaila Siddiq, a surgeon who rose through the Afghan medical corps to become the director of a 400-bed military hospital in Kabul, the first female lieutenant-general in Afghanistan and one of two women appointed to the post-taliban transition government.
Siddiq kept her hospital going in the 1980s, when she and her colleagues treated as many as 50 casualties a day during the Soviet- Afghan war, and persisted a decade later when Kabul was rocked by civil war. After one deadly attack, she performed surgeries for 24 hours straight.
After the Taliban came to power in 1996 and ordered women home from schools and workplaces, it called Siddiq back to the hospital after eight months, deeming her expertise irreplaceable. She agreed to return only if she and her sister were permitted to be out without a burqa.
“I endured the difficulties of the Taliban to serve the women of Afghanistan,” she told Newsweek in 2001, after being appointed health minister under Hamid Karzai, after the Taliban regime fell.
Siddiq died Dec. 4 in hospital in Kabul. She was believed to be in her early 80s — her exact birth date is unknown — and had Alzheimer's disease, according to an Afghan news channel. One of her doctors told The New York Times she died of complications from COVID-19.
Roya Rahmani, Afghanistan's first female ambassador to the U.S., said Siddiq “was an icon of possibility for women and girls in Afghanistan.” President Ashraf Ghani attended her funeral, calling her someone who “dedicated herself to serving the country and its people.”
Siddiq graduated medical school in Moscow in 1961.
She became known as “General Suhaila” after being promoted in the mid1980s, and her fearlessness and fiery temper, as well as her skill in surgery, was well known. Colleagues told The Guardian she “once slapped a Kalashnikov-toting mujahedeen warrior for what she considered impudence.”
Afghan media said Siddiq had no survivors. She had never married, she said, because she “didn't want to take any orders from a man.”