Zeenat Karzai

For a president who has been credited for helping the women of Afghanistan regain their civil rights, Karzai has been criticized for being overly conservative with his own spouse. Many have accused Karzai of keeping the first lady out of the media’s reach over fears of criticism from conservative mullahs and religious leaders.

She is a distant relative of Hamid Karzai and they have a son who was born in 2007, named Mirwais and a daughter named Malalai, born in 2012. Their third child, a daughter named Howsi, was born in a private hospital in Gurgaon, India in March 2014, when Zeenat Karzai was 44. Their fourth child, a daughter, was born on 3 September 2016 in Apollo Hospital, New Delhi. Dr. Zeenat belongs to the Quraish family line and her husband Karzai is from the Popalzai tribe.

Zeenat Quraishi Karzai (born 1970) is the wife of former President of Afghanistan Hamid Karzai and was the First Lady of Afghanistan from 2001 to 2014. Originally from the city of Kandahar, she moved to Kabul where she lived at the Presidential Palace with her husband and their four children.

Born in 1970 and raised in Kandahar, Afghanistan, the daughter of a civil servant, Zenat Quraishi moved to Kabul after high school to attend Kabul University. She is an ethnic Pashtun. In 1993, she and her family escaped from the civil war to neighboring Quetta in Balochistan, Pakistan. She was a gynaecologist by profession, and has worked in hospitals treating Afghan refugees in Pakistan before she married Hamid Karzai.