Doctors, hospitals among Taleban casualties of war

After the Taleban closed his local health clinic, Afghan farmer Haji Fazel Ahmad was forced to rent a car to take his sick wife to the nearest hospital six hours away. To his dismay the insurgents had shut that too. It is a scenario being played out across Afghanistan as medical facilities and workers come under attack from all sides of the bloody conflict, denying ordinary people access to even the most basic healthcare.

Since January more than 200 medical centers have been forced to close-most temporarily-while 13 aid workers have been killed and over 150 injured, figures show, underscoring the growing violence as Afghan forces struggle to beat back a resurgent Taleban and other Islamist groups.

In recent days Taleban fighters have closed scores of medical facilities in the impoverished southern province of Uruzgan in what authorities say is an attempt to force the local government to set up more clinics in areas under control of the insurgents, apparently to treat their own fighters.

“We were in the clinic when a number of armed men came in and asked us to give them the keys and told us we could no longer stay there,” Ehsanullah, a doctor based on the outskirts of the provincial capital Tarinkot, said. Other facilities shuttered by the Taleban were located in Charchino district where Ahmad and his wife live. “There were no health services available so I spent 2,500 Afs on a car fare to Tarinkot but unfortunately the situation is no better,” Ahmad said. The poor farmer then had to borrow more money to rent another car to drive to Kandahar city in the neighboring province of the same name in the hope of finding treatment for his ailing wife.

The 2014 withdrawal of US-led NATO combat forces has fuelled the insurgency, driving up casualties and increasing pressure on healthcare providers. Medical facilities and workers have been targeted by all sides of the conflict including the Taleban, Islamic State, Afghan military and international forces, experts say. The motives include denying wounded enemy combatants medical treatment, killing those already inside a facility or using the centre as a shelter during battle.

They are also sometimes used as a bargaining chip, like in Uruzgan, to improve medical access for fighters while on other occasions they appear to be the unintended target such as the deadly US airstrike on a Doctors Without Borders trauma centre in northern Kunduz province in 2015. —AFP