KABUL - In the Taliban's Afghanistan, desperate medical students moonlighted as graverobbers and stole skeletons to help them study the human body.

Anatomy books with pictures of women, human faces or genitals were banned by the radical Islamic purists. Students were not allowed to dissect cadavers to study internal organs and learn which one was located where.

With the Taliban defeated and foreign donors promising extensive aid, Kabul University medical school is slowly recovering from five years under Muslim extremists whose views one doctor described as "pre-Stone Age".

But its chilly lecture halls and empty labs remain haunted by the all-out assault on science that culminated in the Taliban and set back Afghan medicine by years.

"Five of us from my class went to a cemetery one night and dug up a grave," intern Mohammad Rafiq recalled as he stood in the chilly, unlit hall at the medical school.

"The bravest one among us pulled the skeleton out. We boiled it, used antiseptics and then varnished it. We chose a big grave because a big man's skeleton is good for study."

Another intern, Nur Rahman, said graverobbers near his medical school in the northern city of Mazar-i-Sharif did most of the ghoulish preparatory work for the students.

"The robbers dug up graves looking for gold," he said. "We went in after them and took the skeletons. That way, we could study bones in class when the professor talked about them. We had no skeleton in the class."

The lack of skeletons or proper textbooks to study anatomy, the first subject medical students take and the basis for all that follows, hardly surprises the professors and students struggling to keep medical education going.

Over the past decade, Kabul's medical school has seen its library and laboratories vandalised, its classrooms turned into battle grounds and its curriculum twisted to turn medicine into a sub-discipline of Islamic thought.

Dr Farid Barnayar, professor of embriology and histology, said the teaching staff knew students were digging up graves for skeletons but could hardly stop them when the school had no learning aids to help them.

"They did it to learn," he said in their defence.

The school's desolate state is all the more shocking since this is one of the world's poorest countries. Life expectancy is only about 44 years and a quarter of the 25 million population has no access to medical treatment whatsoever.

The school, built with U.S. funds in the 1970s, offers bleak testimony to the shattered state of Afghan education. Lecture theatres have been stripped of light fixtures, the bare walls are peeling, there is no heating.

The door to classroom number 65 is riddled with bullet holes, a reminder the school was headquarters for ethnic Hazara guerrillas during the 1992-1996 civil war between the Muslim rebels who had earlier defeated Soviet occupiers.

Enrolment for the seven-year course has fallen from 4,000 to about 2,500. Women, once half the student body but banned under the Taliban, are slowly returning.

The library, which was looted in the 1990s and saw many books burned for heating, is refilling its shelves with help from the World Health Organisation (WHO), the Iranian government and Loma Linda University in California.

The Taliban were no help, banning pictures of humans -- meaning most publications on anatomy, especially gynaecology textbooks -- and slashing library staff from 20 to two.

"They said we didn't need books," said librarian Abdul Aziz Najuman. "We had to hide the anatomy books in a part of the library," recalled Dr Mohammad Azim Ibrahimi.

"The religious police used to come and check now and then, but they usually didn't notice the books because they were more concerned with checking whether men's beards were long enough," said Ibrahimi, a pathology lecturer.

The Taliban forced all men to grow beards in their drive to create what they thought was the perfect Islamic state. Islamic modesty led to dilemmas for professors who had no way to illustrate even simple facts for their students.

"The professor would point to his shoulder and tell us a muscle called the biceps started there and ended at the elbow," said fourth year student Karim Rahimi. "And he kept his jacket on, because there was no heating in the room."

The Taliban also gave the school an Islamic twist, teaching theology once a week and admitting large numbers of fellow Pashtun tribesmen who were educated in rudimentary madrassas (Koran schools) where science was never taught.

"They had a hard time following lectures in Persian and pressured professors to speak Pashtu," said Rahimi, referring to Afghanistan's official languages. "They were happiest in theology class, which was taught in Pashtu."

Dr Bashir Noormal, a former embriology professor and now WHO national training coordinator for Afghanistan, said the Taliban did not consider science as real or necessary knowledge because only religion brought wisdom.

"Medical education in Afghanistan has been set back by more than 20 years," he said. "Now all the medical school has is four walls and a roof.

"Professors come and tell students about illnesses, but they have no microscopes, no laboratories, no patients to work on. They might just as well be teaching history." Nampa-Reuters