Gusts of wind blew dust up off the ground as Ghulam Mohiddin and his wife Nazo walked towards the graveyard where all their children are buried. They showed us the graves of the three boys they lost in the past two years – one-year-old Rahmat, seven-month-old Koatan and most recently, three-month-old Faisal Ahmad. All three suffered from malnutrition, say Ghulam and Nazo.
Can you imagine how painful it's been for me to lose three children? One minute there's a baby in your arms, the next minute they are empty, says Nazo. I hope every day that angels would somehow put my babies back in our home. There are days the couple go without food. They break walnut shells for a living in the Sheidaee settlement just outside the city of Herat in western Afghanistan and receive no help from the Taliban government or from NGOs.
Watching helplessly as my children cried out of hunger, it felt like my body was erupting in flames. It felt like someone was cutting me into half with a saw from my head to my feet, said Ghulam. The deaths of their children are not recorded anywhere, but it's evidence of a silent wave of mortality engulfing Afghanistan's youngest, as the country is pushed into what the UN calls an unprecedented crisis of hunger.
We started the year with the highest increase in child malnutrition ever recorded in Afghanistan. But things have got worse from there, says John Aylieff, the World Food Programme's country director. Food assistance kept a lid in this country on hunger and malnutrition, particularly for the bottom five million who really can't cope without international support. That lid has now been lifted. The soaring of the malnutrition is placing the lives of more than three million children in peril.
Aid has sharply declined because the single largest donor, the US, stopped nearly all aid to Afghanistan earlier this year. But WFP says eight or nine other donors who funded them in the last two years have also stopped this year, and many others are giving much less than they were last year.
But the Taliban's intransigence on women's rights affects its bid for international recognition, and for the sanctions against it to be lifted. Other decisions, like the recent enforcement of a previously announced ban on Afghan women working for NGOs is putting the delivery of life-saving humanitarian assistance at serious risk, the UN says. The malnutrition emergency is compounded by other factors too – a severe drought that has affected agricultural incomes in more than half of Afghanistan's provinces, and the forced return of more than two million Afghans from Iran and Pakistan, reducing the remittances they send back.
At the Sheidaee graveyard we found startling evidence of child deaths. There were no records of the people buried there, so we counted the graves ourselves. Roughly two-thirds of the hundreds of graves were of children – it was easy to tell the small graves from the bigger ones. Villagers told us the graveyard is relatively new, between two to three years old. They also confirmed that it was not a specific graveyard for children.
As we walked through the settlement in Sheidaee, people came out carrying their children. Rahila was carrying Hibatullah who, at two, cannot stand up. Durkhanee brought out her son Mohammad Yusuf, who's also nearly two and unable to stand. Nearly half of all Afghan children under the age of five are stunted, the UN says. In one of the mud and clay homes, Hanifa Sayedi's one-year-old son Rafiullah could barely hold himself up, even while he's sitting.
Hanifa's is one of millions of pleas for help. It's incredibly heartbreaking to be in this country and watch this unfold. WFP has a hotline. We've had to retrain our call operators because we're getting a much higher proportion of calls from women threatening suicide because they're desperate and they just don't know how to feed their children any more, says WFP's John Aylieff.
As Zamira speaks, Sana's hands and feet turn blue. Her tiny heart is not pumping enough blood. A nurse puts her on oxygen. In another cot is five-month-old Musleha, who has malnutrition and measles. Her mother Karima says she's hardly opened her eyes in the past few days. In the cot next to Musleha, are twins Mutehara and Maziyan. The baby girls also have malnutrition and measles, and are half the weight they should be at 18 months. Within a span of a week, three babies from one ward became the latest casualties of Afghanistan's crisis of hunger. And it's about to get worse.
