Bibi Sharifa’s grandmother died of tuberculosis when there was no medicine available in her village in central Afghanistan and visiting shrines of the dead holy men was the only healing they could get.

That was two decades ago when the country’s entire healthcare system was in shambles under the first term of a brutal Taliban regime in the late 1990s. Then, when the west-backed democracy was set up following the US invasion in 2001, Afghanistan saw the establishment of clinics and community healthcare centers in villages and towns that revived the miserable population’s hopes and trust in modern medicine to some extent.

Now, Sharifa herself is infected by that consuming disease which killed her grandmother. With the drastic cuts by the Trump administration to the healthcare system worldwide, she told Health Policy Watch she has no hope of healing except by visiting the dead holy men’s graves.

“I cough all night and head to the Mazar (shrine) of Hakeem Senai in Ghazni in the day. Whenever I visit and ask for help, the preachers there advise me to either just touch and kiss the shrine, or they give me a paper with something written on it to put in a leather cover and wear it. I don’t even know what is written on it and it hasn’t helped me stop coughing,” Sharifa explained.

She was referring to a ‘taweez’, or amulet worn on the body in some beliefs to give the wearer protection. 

Dr Siraj Uddin, a physician in Ghazni province, Bibi’s home town, told the Health Policy Watch that many deadly diseases, such as TB  are prevalent. Until the latest aid cut, medicines and treatments were available to keep them under control.

“These days, all the government hospitals and the few charity-run clinics throughout Afghanistan are running out of medicine and other resources and with the cut in aid announced by (President Donald) Trump, it is going to get worse”, he said.   

Patients like Sharifa are facing the effects of this aid cut already. 

“There is no healthcare or medicine available even when we go to the hospitals,” she lamented, her voice heavy with despair. “And if it is in the private pharmacies, it’s too expensive. We pay for both healthcare and visiting the Mazar. If I could, I would rather pay the money for medicine to get some relief because the Mazar could not heal my grandmother,” she said.

The situation is similarly bleak in the capital, Kabul.

“First, we lost access to female doctors due to the Taliban’s policies, and now the lack of access to medicines via aid agencies is only making our difficulties worse,” said Sumaya Ahmadi, speaking on the telephone from  western Kabul while visiting a shrine in Karte Sakhi to seek help for her daughter’s chronic kidney condition.

“My husband and I brought our daughter to Mazar. We also visited a holy man in our area who wrote something on a piece of paper and performed a blessing over our daughter. If she drinks the water with that paper in it, hoping it will help. We try to manage, but it’s never enough.”

Vicious cycle of poverty and suffering

The United Nations (UN) has urged the global donor community to continue critical support to Afghanistan, where almost 23 million people will need humanitarian assistance this year.

“If we want to help the Afghan people escape the vicious cycle of poverty and suffering, we must maintain support to meet urgent needs while laying the foundation for long-term stability,” said Indrika Ratwatte, UN Resident and Humanitarian Coordinator in Afghanistan.

The UN has warned that the global funding crisis “could jeopardize the fragile improvements achieved in stabilizing Afghanistan over the last four years, such as improved food security levels and moderate economic growth”.

The World Health Organization (WHO) has also sounded the alarm, warning that 80% of the health services it supports could cease by June due to funding shortages.

By early March, 167 healthcare facilities had closed, depriving 1.6 million Afghans of access to healthcare. Another 220 are at risk of closing, affecting 1.8 million people.

“Afghanistan is already battling multiple health emergencies, including outbreaks of measles, malaria, dengue, polio and Crimean-Congo haemorrhagic fever,” according to the WHO.

“Without functioning health facilities, efforts to control these diseases are severely hindered. Over 16 000 suspected measles cases, including 111 deaths, were reported in the first 2 months of 2025. With immunization rates at critically low levels (only 51% for the first dose of the measles vaccine and 37% for the second), children are at heightened risk of preventable illness and death.”

The Trump administration’s decision to slash United States aid to Afghanistan is particularly devastating given that the US is the country’s largest donor, contributing over 43% of the $1.72 billion in aid raised last year. While the US has pledged waivers for life-saving aid, the scope and reliability of these waivers remain unclear.

The UN-coordinated $2.4 billion Afghanistan Humanitarian Needs and Response Plan for 2025 is only about 13% funded.

Meanwhile, a woman dies every two hours from preventable complications in Afghanistan and 3.5 million children and 1.2 million pregnant or breastfeeding women are acutely malnourished or at risk of becoming so.

Women like Sharifa and Ahmadi know little about the geopolitical decisions that are stripping away their access to healthcare. 

In desperation, they turn to shrines and holy men, seeking the only kind of healing still available to them. But their stories raise a critical question for the international community: where does the moral responsibility of the global healthcare system begin – and end?

Image Credits: WHO EMRO.