Female medical students win UK visas to beat Taliban’s study ban

Twenty Afghan women will arrive in Scotland this week to continue their studies in medicine after being caught for years in visa limbo.
The women, who were no longer able to attend university in Afghanistan after the Taliban took over in August 2021, will study in Edinburgh, St Andrews, Glasgow, Dundee and Aberdeen after being granted access to an unprecedented visa scheme.
All 20 were initially unable to come to the UK to begin their studies because of delays to the Home Office’s refugee pathway, which was supposed to support vulnerable Afghan women.
Now they are looking forward to discovering “the country of Harry Potter” after an unusual deal between the charity supporting them, the Home Office and the Scottish government.
Omulbanin Sultani, 21, a medical student who studied for two years at Kateb University in Kabul before she was banned, said the past three years had been “the most challenging years for me, my friends and all women in Afghanistan”.
She said: “When we heard about the visa approval, we were so excited I felt like I was flying. We are going from hell to paradise.
“I started researching Scotland and realised it’s the country of Harry Potter.” The author JK Rowling was living in Edinburgh when she devised the series.
Sultani, who will begin studying at St Andrews next month with three other Afghan women, is even enthusiastic about Scottish weather. “We have not been in such rainy conditions, so I think we will really like it,” she said.
Some of the students were only one exam away from qualifying as doctors when the Taliban banned women from studying at universities in December 2022. Others already had five years’ experience working in hospitals in Afghanistan.
After the Taliban took over, they were not allowed to go out without a male chaperone and they spent most of their time at home studying English to make sure that they could pass the Scottish medical entrance exams. Some had gone into hiding because they had spoken out about the state of women’s healthcare in Afghanistan.
The Linda Norgrove Foundation (LNF), a British charity that supports women’s education in the region, has for the past two years been petitioning the UK government to open up the final stage of its Afghan citizens resettlement scheme (ACRS) to enable the girls to apply for refugee visas.
The ACRS was launched in January 2022 with the aim of resettling up to 20,000 refugees in the UK over the following few years. Between this scheme and the Afghan relocation and assistance policy (ARAP), 27,000 people had arrived in the UK by the end of March this year.
The Conservative government had promised to open the third pathway of the ACRS last summer but there were several delays. The charity has now convinced the Scottish government to draft legislation to alter the student visa rules for these 20 women.
John Norgrove, chief executive of the LNF, said: “It’s all too easy for people to say, ‘There’s nothing we can do’. But in this case, persistence has paid off.”
The charity was founded in 2010 after John’s daughter Linda, an aid worker kidnapped by the Taliban, died during a failed rescue attempt.
The Afghan women will be treated as students with Scottish resident status, meaning they do not have to pay fees to study and will receive student loans to help cover their living costs. The Home Office has approved student visas for them.
Arifa Wahdat, 25, who hopes to qualify as a gynaecologist, has enrolled at the University of Dundee. She hopes to join the volleyball team there, having not been able to play in recent years. Top of her list of places to visit in Scotland is Edinburgh Castle for its architecture, having seen it on YouTube.
“As it’s my first experience to travel in a new country, I think it’s normal that I’m a little nervous,” she said. “But I know that it’s a beautiful country with beautiful people and finally I will feel free there.”