KABUL: There are not many women in Afghanistan who can claim to have fought the Taliban head on. Suhaila Siddiqi did - and the Taliban lost. When the religious zealots took Kabul in the autumn of 1996, Siddiqi, like all working women, was banished to her home. Her professional standing as one of the most respected physicians in Afghanistan and her rank - she was a lieutenant general in the Afghan medical corps - could not spare her.

Eight months later, the Taliban came crawling, begging for her surgical skills to treat their daughters and wives. “They needed me and they asked me to come back.” Siddiqi consented, but only on the condition that she and her late sister, Shafiqa, be granted absolution from wearing the burqa. The Taliban agreed. “It was not exactly a victory for me, but they certainly needed me to be there. Even when I went to Kandahar I never wore a burqa,” she says.

That personal triumph transformed Siddiqi from a symbol of female accomplishment for the Afghan elite into a folk heroine. Now the country’s new health minister - one of only two women in the cabinet of Afghanistan’s interim government - she is perhaps the most popular and recognisable figure in Kabul in a month-old administration made up of militia commanders and unfamiliar exiles. “Suhaila is our only hope,” says a housewife here.

Though spectrally thin and well into her 60s, Siddiqi is exceedingly glamorous and conducts herself with the confidence of a woman used to giving orders. Pencilled-on eyebrows arc across a high, domed forehead, and her greying bouffant hair is covered with a gauzy veil. Her long slim fingers seem unsuited to the messy business of abdominal surgery - her speciality - and she is always impeccably dressed in a well-cut shalwar kameez.

As the chief of the Four Hundred Bed military hospital - built by the Russians and the most prestigious in Kabul - and a lieutenant-general in the medical corps of the Afghan army, Siddiqi was renowned well before the Taliban stormed out of Kandahar.

The daughter of a royal Pakhtoon family - she is a relative of the octogenarian exiled king, Zahir Shah - Siddiqi is respected as much for her patriotism as for her pedigree.

Unlike other wealthy and well-connected Afghans, she rejected a comfortable exile to stay in the country, enduring more than 20 years of war and devastation. “It is a matter of pride for me. I stayed in my country, and I served my people. I never fled abroad,” she says.

Siddiqi’s loyalty and her personal courage are the stuff of legend now here, and on the wards of the hospitals here, doctors swap stories of her defiance of the Taliban at a time when others were cowed.

A reluctant addition to the interim government, Siddiqi prides herself on remaining politically neutral. She says she took on the post of health minister as a patriot, and harbours no further political ambition. In her vast pink office decorated with plastic flower arrangements, she frequently turns to two senior bureaucrats, and giggles coquettishly to ask them for advice on facts and figures.

Already a month into her six-month term in the interim authority, she is unwilling to reveal her prescription for Afghanistan’s ravaged health services beyond claiming that she does indeed have a plan. So far, she says, her main accomplishment is to rehire nearly 3,000 female doctors, nurses, and workers who lost their jobs, and to encourage the reopening of privately run women’s clinics. She has also sacked 100 or so Taliban who were imposed on the ministry as administrators. —Dawn/The Guardian News Service.