Suhaila Siddiq, surgeon, health minister and trailblazer for Afghan women, dies

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, 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 country’s post-Taliban transition government.

Siddiq had helped keep her hospital going in the 1980s, when she and her col leagues treated as many as 50 casualties a day during the Soviet-Afghan war, and persisted a decade later when Kabul was rocked by guerrilla fighting and rocket attacks during a civil war.

After one especially deadly attack, she performed surgery for 24 hours straight.

When a patient desperately needed a pint of blood one day, she donated it herself.

After the Taliban came to power in 1996, it ordered women home from schools and workplaces, only to call Siddiq back to the hospital eight months later, deeming her surgical expertise irreplaceable.

She agreed to return only after the Taliban permitted her and her sister to walk the streets without wearing a burqa, the traditional head-to-toe women’s covering.

“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, who led an interim government after U. S.-led forces toppled the Taliban regime.

Siddiq died Dec. 4 at the Daoud Khan military hospital in Kabul, where she had worked for nearly four decades as a surgeon. She was believed to be in her early 80s - her exact birth date is unknown - and had Alzheimer’s disease, according to the Afghan news channel ToloNews. One of her doctors told The New York Times that she died of complications from the novel coronavirus.

“Growing up in Afghanistan, I remember that when people, both men and women, spoke Suhaila Siddiq’s name, they did so almost reverently, as if she held massive authority,” said Roya Rahmani, Afghanistan’s first female ambassador to the United States. In an email, she added that Siddiq “was an icon of possibility for women and girls in Afghanistan.”

President Ashraf Ghani attended her funeral, and he called her “one of the most experienced and popular doctors in the country,” someone who “dedicated herself to serving the country and its people.”

Siddiq was born in Kabul or Kandahar - accounts vary - into an ethnic Pashtun family that traced its lineage to the Mohammadzai clan, which ruled Afghanistan for generations before a 1978 coup. Her mother trained as a teacher, and her father was a regional governor in Kandahar who encouraged his six daughters to go to school and pursue careers.

After studying in Kabul, Siddiq graduated from medical school in Moscow in 1961.