Afghanistan before hunger winter: “Children pay an unbelievable price”

Afghanistan’s economy is down. Many people do not know where to get food from, the health system has collapsed. The result: more and more children are malnourished.

They have the big eyes we know from famine: the babies in the Ataturk Children’s Hospital in Kabul. There is a special department for malnourished children. Osman is here, he is three months old and Lina’s son. She attributes its poor condition to the country’s economic problems – there is no work. And since the arrival of the Taliban, everyone’s situation has worsened: “Everyone is unemployed, many in Afghanistan are malnourished.”

Doctor Abdul Kudu confirms what the young woman from Kabul tells a reporter from the AP news agency. It’s getting worse and worse, he says, and the cases of malnutrition are increasing week by week, month by month. All beds in his clinic are occupied and no further patients can be admitted. And that is also true in the partner clinics, all beds are occupied: “The cases of malnutrition have increased to an unprecedented level.”

It’s horrible what you see in the children’s hospital, says Mary-Ellen McGroarty of the World Food Program – but there are only the children who make it to a hospital. The biggest catastrophe is not seen there, she emphasizes, and asks how many children there are whose parents are unable to take them to a hospital. The young children “are paying an unbelievable price here in Afghanistan at the moment”.

Cut off from funds

The foreign troops have been gone for 100 days, and Afghanistan is facing a terrible starvation winter. The country is economically ruined. The Taliban government has no access to the billions of dollars of its predecessors.

The banks have no money, and those who work don’t get any wages either. Alexander Matheou from the International Red Cross points out that the causes of the crisis go back a long way and lists: decades of conflicts, then natural disasters, the droughts that keep coming back, especially this year with one of the “worst droughts in living memory”.

Matheou names the large number of expulsions in the course of the civil war in the first half of the year. And since August there has been no more money for the health service in addition to the banking crisis, which is why many of the health services have stopped working. The combination of all these factors, says Matheou, “is now leading to a major humanitarian crisis that is only worsening”.

Up to 23 million are starving

Three women talk in confusion in a market in the northern Afghan city of Mazar-i-Sharif, where German soldiers were stationed until the summer. A woman in a dark blue burqa says she has run out of pennies. She has five or six children, says another woman, but not even a packet of flour.

The United Nations estimates that up to 23 million people could go hungry this winter. It is now time to put political considerations aside, says McGroarty of the World Food Program.

Even if the international community was very concerned about the situation in Afghanistan, at this stage of the crisis it was necessary to separate humanitarian needs from political discussions. The innocent people in Afghanistan, the children, whose lives have gotten upside down through no fault of their own, “must not be condemned to hunger and starvation just because they were born in this country”.

Thoughts revolve around food

On this day there is flour in Mazar-i-Sharif, the World Food Program distributes it by the sack. The 17-year-old high school student Mahmoud also came with his mother and brother. You need something to eat. He doesn’t know how it is in other countries, he says, but in Afghanistan people only work for their food – “they don’t think of anything else.”

And a country in which people have nothing more to eat is a country with no prospects. Mahmoud speaks of his dreams that he would like to come true. But unfortunately, he notes, that doesn’t work. “I don’t have a chance here.”