Wardak, Roshanak Mrs. Dr.

2. Previous Functions:
Wolesi Jirga Member 2005 MP MNA Maidan Wardak Vardak

3.Biodata
Doctor Roshanak Wardak was born 1956 in Sayadabad district, Maidan Wardak Province. She was a practicing physician for thirty years, then traded her stethoscope for a role as a member of Afghanistan's parliament. She opened her clinic in Sheikhabad after the winter of 1996, when 40 area women died in childbirth. She spent five years defying Taliban authorities by providing medical care in one of Afghanistan's poorest provinces, while refusing to veil her face. A rival parliamentary candidate attacked Dr. Roshanak Wardak's home in Wardak province with automatic weapons and rockets. She is from political active family in Wardak and is associated with Pir Ishaq Gailani. She was a member of the Health Committe in Wolesi Jirga 2005. She was a practicing physician for thirty years, then traded her stethoscope for a role as a member of Afghanistan's parliament.
 

"I am a medical doctor and I am their representative and I am a woman so they look after me. As for the Taliban, they have respect for women and for my family because it is a famous family," she says, interviewed in an office in the echoing parliament offices on a sweltering afternoon in Kabul.

One of her drivers is "active Taliban", Wardak says. It is clear that he, as much as her good works, guarantees her safety when the insurgents stop the traffic, haul out those who have government identity cards or even government phone numbers on their mobiles and shoot them. Such are the myriad compromises that life in Afghanistan entails for tens of millions of people.

Wardak, a qualified gynaecologist who spent many years working with Afghan women refugees in Pakistan and who refused to wear the all-covering burqa when living in Taliban-ruled Afghanistan, is not averse to asking difficult questions herself. She says she questioned one Taliban commander about why he and his fellow militants "were destroying her country".

Wardak is unmarried – which itself takes a fair strength of character in a country where arranged marriages are the norm.