PESHAWAR: After the United Nations warned that millions of children are at risk of malnutrition, local and international aid agencies informed that children in Afghanistan were starving, French new agency AFP has reported.
Mullah Mohammad Ahmadi, the Taliban’s head of public health in Ghor , told AFP that 71 children who were hospitalised for malnutrition had died in the past six weeks. Ahmadi said about 300 more children, suffering from hunger, have been hospitalised. Ahmadi said hundreds of other children in other parts of Afghanistan are facing food crisis.
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Salam al-Janabi, a spokesman for the United Nations Children’s Emergency Fund (UNICEF), said children’s deaths in Ghor due to starvation could not be confirmed at the movement but the cost of the ongoing crisis was borne by children. Janabi said that UNICEF was aware that Afghan children were facing starvation.
Afghanistan is facing a number of challenges, but the economic crisis worsened after the Taliban takeover on August 15, 2021. International humanitarian aid to Afghanistan has dwindled, drought and unemployment have increased, and food prices are on rise. The United Nations has warned that by the end of this year, nearly one million Afghan children will be suffering from serious malnutrition, compared to 3.3 million more already.
The World Food Program (WFP) said that $2001 million is needed to deliver food to Afghans to the end of 2021 while $300 more will be need to fulfill the food requirement in the first three months of next year. The United Nations has said that about 17 million Afghans are in dire need of humanitarian assistance.
Last month, the United Nations (UN) has called an international conference to raise funds for Afghanistan in Geneva and sought to $600 dollars to help the Afghans in this difficult situation. The US said that half of Afghanistan’s population is in need of assistance as droughts have left children under the age of five severely malnourished.