Law students and lawyers in Afghanistan are filing reports with JURIST on the situation there after the Taliban takeover. Here, a Staff Correspondent for JURIST in Kabul reports that malnutrition rates among Afghan children have almost doubled this year under Taliban rule. For privacy and security reasons, we are withholding our Correspondent’s name. The text has only been lightly edited to respect the author’s voice.
Since the US and NATO withdrawal and the Taliban takeover in August 2021, Afghanistan had been facing a humanitarian crisis. For more than a year now, it is reported that over 90% of the population do not have enough food to eat. Many families have been selling everything they have to put food on the table, which sometimes means selling one or two members of the family in an attempt to rescue the rest. Recently, the BBC also reported that some Afghan citizens sell their daughters and body parts due to extreme poverty, while others calm down their hungry children by giving them sleeping pills.
The International Committee of the Red Cross has lately reported that the lack of food and fuel has rapidly increased levels of malnutrition and pneumonia among Afghan children, and this situation could put thousands of children at risk of death. Their report shows that cases of malnutrition among children this year in Afghanistan have already increased by 90% compared to 2021.
People in Afghanistan are fighting against never-ending poverty and economic crisis due to political change after August 2021 last year. Poverty, insecurity, and unemployment have made a huge impact on the lives of children and especially women in the country.
The Taliban don’t care about how the people suffer. Since they retook control of Afghanistan, people have only experienced constraints in their everyday life. The international community’s financial support seems to be not enough as there are a lot of complaints that the Taliban use them for themselves instead of giving them to needy families in the country.
It also seems that international community’s efforts to remove restrictions and or at least make the Taliban rethink their decisions have failed so far.
