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Over 1,000 Die Of Famine In Northeastern Afghanistan
KABUL, March 13 (News Agencies) - Groups battling the ruling Taliban militia on Tuesday claimed that more than 1,000 people have starved to death in the past three months as famine struck northeastern Badakhshan province.
Mohammad Suhail Asem, a spokesman for opposition military chief Ahmad Shah Masood, said thousands more people would die if international relief did not arrive soon.
"It is a very serious situation. People are in an awful, terrible and tragic condition. At least 104 victims died last week while they braved impassable mountain tracks in search of assistance," Asem said.
"The famine has affected around 800,000 people in several districts of Badakhshan. Around 400,000 of them are threatened by death," he said, speaking on a satellite telephone from the area.
The opposition claims have not been independently confirmed, but the United Nations has warned that more than a million Afghans face famine this year due to a severe drought and the deprivations of civil war.
Asem said the worst affected districts were Shahr-e-Bozurg, Yaftal and Ragh in Badakhshan, the only province under Masood's total control.
The deeply Muslim population had resorted to eating non-halal (un-Islamic) meat and wild plants.
"We ask the international community to stop this widening catastrophe with the dispatch of emergency relief aid," he said.
The drought has hit most of the country for the past three years, affecting at least half Afghanistan's 22 million people and driving hundreds of thousands from their villages.
Elias Khorami, a spokesman for ousted president Burhanuddin Rabbani who is based in Badakhshan, said large numbers of people have concentrated in the provincial center of Faizabad in search of food.
Another opposition spokesman, Mohammad Habeel, confirmed reports that the Taliban had lifted a food blockade against opposition areas north of the capital Kabul.
Habeel said that food had arrived in the Panjshir valley, around 100 kilometers (62 miles) north of here, after the Taliban allowed it to cross the frontline two weeks ago.
"It is a good and benevolent move. We do appreciate it," Habeel said.
Locals were bringing every prime commodity except batteries and fuel through the Bagram and Nejrab frontlines, he said.
The Taliban banned the transport of food to Masood-controlled areas after they captured Kabul in 1996.
Traders in Kabul said truckloads of goods were heading for Nejrab district in northeastern Kapisa province, but then donkeys had to take the supplies along impassable roads across the front.
More that 500,000 people have been displaced inside the country and another 170,000 have sought refuge from war and drought in neighboring Pakistan in the past nine months.
Fierce battles have raged sporadically in the northern province of Takhar and north of Kabul since September, and the fighting is expected to pick up in the summer.
The U.N. food aid agency on Monday launched an appeal for a $76 million emergency operation to save millions of people in Afghanistan from starvation.
The new aid package is designed to help 3.8 million people for one year.
"There have been three consecutive years of severe drought in Afghanistan and we can see that millions of people are at a real risk of starving to death," said Girard Van Dijk, U.N. World Food Program (WFP) representative in Afghanistan.
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