UN agencies on Tuesday appealed to the Taliban to make good on promises to protect the vulnerable as Afghan civilians continue to bear the brunt of the crisis in the country where humanitarian needs remain critical.
Some 18 million people in the country need aid assistance and one in three children is expected to be severely malnourished in 2021, an official of UN Children’s Fund (UNICEF), Mustapha Messaoud, said.
Speaking via Zoom from the capital Kabul, the agency’s chief of field operations and emergencies, Messaoud, reported seeing hungry infants, some with terrible wounds after clashes between the country’s new rulers and Afghan Security Forces.
“In Kandahar, I have seen the direct impacts of this recent flare in fighting and that impact is severely malnourished children. I have seen injured in such a way that it’s difficult to describe, young children, as young as 10 months,” he said.
Isabelle Moussard Carlsen, Head of the UN Humanitarian Office (OCHA) in Afghanistan, told UN News that some 16 million people in the country were in need of aid.
Inside Kabul, Mr Ben Messaoud said that the situation was “improving”, although mobile health teams from the World Health Organisation (WHO) had been forced to halt operations in recent days, owing to insecurity.
“There is great need there that we need to attend to,” the UNICEF official added.
The recent fighting has also taken a heavy toll on an already fragile health system, which faces “a shortage of essential medical supplies and equipment in the middle of the COVID-19 pandemic,” said WHO spokesperson Tarik Jasarevic.
“Needs assessment and service delivery by mobile health teams is on hold for the past 24 hours and that’s due to security and the unpredictable situation in Kabul.”
From the UN human rights office, OHCHR, spokesperson Rupert Colville underlined “chilling reports of human rights abuses, and of restrictions on the rights of individuals, especially women and girls, in some parts of the country captured over the past few weeks.
Unfortunately, for the time being, the flow of information has been considerably disrupted, and we have not been in a position to verify the most recent allegations”.
Colville also described “desperate scenes” at Kabul airport on Monday, where videos screened on social media showed desperate men clinging to a U.S. airforce plane as it prepared to leave the capital.