The Afghan Taliban have ordered doctors to stop performing corneal transplants in the country, citing their interpretation of Islamic teachings, leaving patients who have lost their eyesight waiting for treatment, according to doctors.
The order has halted a programme that began in Afghanistan earlier this year, through which more than 150 patients received corneal transplants after a medical charity expanded its work across the border from Pakistan.
Dr Noor Zaman Hashim of Noor Eye Hospital in Kabul said that his staff had performed 90 corneal transplants in recent months before the Taliban instructed them to stop. The hospital has since seen its waiting list grow, with most patients being young people who lost their eyesight because of trauma, injuries, explosions and welding-related accidents.
“The Taliban have verbally instructed us to stop the transplants. Nobody has the courage to defy their orders because of the risk of severe punishment,” Hashim said.
He pointed out that Afghanistan faced a shortage of ophthalmologists and locally available corneas, making it difficult to meet the demand for transplants.
“Decades of violence have devastated Afghanistan’s healthcare infrastructure. We neither have sufficient ophthalmologists nor locally available corneas to meet the demand for transplants.”
Corneal transplants can restore sight in patients whose corneas have been damaged. The procedure relies on donated corneas, which are supplied through organ donation.
The Association of Physicians of Pakistani Descent of North America (APPNA), a charitable organisation based in Illinois in the United States (US), has supplied free corneas for transplant procedures in Pakistan since 2017.
The organisation expanded the programme to Afghanistan earlier this year, allowing more than 150 operations to take place.
As part of the expansion, three Afghan ophthalmologists received training in Peshawar, Pakistan, to perform the procedures.
Dr Fawad Zaffar, who leads APPNA’s cornea programme and heads the US-based Zaffar Meer Foundation, said that the initiative had helped patients in Pakistan before the organisation extended its work to Afghanistan.
“Since 2017, we have been sending free corneas to Pakistan, where 10,000 people have benefited,” Zaffar said.
He said that the organisation expanded the programme to Afghanistan about four months ago because hundreds of people needed corneal transplants. “However, the Taliban’s directives have severely disrupted the programme,” he stated.
The ban takes place months after the charity helped train Afghan doctors to carry out the procedures in Kabul and Jalalabad.
