Dr Sima Samar was born in Jaghoori, Ghazni, Afghanistan, on 3 February 1957. She obtained her degree in medicine in February 1982 from Kabul University, one of the few Hazara women to do so. She practised medicine at a government hospital in Kabul, but after a few months was forced to flee for her safety to her native Jaghoori, where she provided medical treatment to patients throughout the remote areas of central Afghanistan.

One year after the communist revolution in 1978, her husband was arrested and was never heard from again. Some years later, Dr Samar and her young son fled to the safety of nearby Pakistan. She then worked as a doctor at the refugee branch of the Mission Hospital in Quetta. In 1989, distressed by the total lack of healthcare facilities for Afghan refugee women, she established the Shuhada Organization and Shuhada Clinic in Quetta. The Shuhada Organization was dedicated to the provision of health care to Afghan women and girls, the training of medical staff, and education. In the following years, further branches of the clinic/hospital were opened in central Afghanistan.

After living in Quetta as a refugee for over a decade, Dr Samar returned to Afghanistan in December 2001 to assume a cabinet post in the Afghan Interim Administration led by Hamid Karzai. In the interim government she served as Deputy Chairperson and first ever Minister for Women's Affairs. She was forced to resign from her post after receiving death threats and being harassed for questioning conservative Islamic laws, especially sharia law, during an interview in Canada with a Persian-language newspaper. During the 2002 Loya Jirga, several religious conservatives published an advertisement in a local newspaper calling Dr Samar the Salman Rushdie of Afghanistan.

She currently heads the Afghanistan Independent Human Rights Commission (AIHRC).1 She was a nominee for the Nobel Peace Price in 2009.