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"Anarchy" Leaves One Million Afghans Without Food
BERLIN, Dec. 9 (IslamOnline & News Agencies) - International aid agencies are warning that more than a million destitute Afghans are beyond reach and face death from starvation and disease. Conditions are worst not in regions still being fought over, but in areas firmly under Northern Alliance control, news agencies reported.
"Unless the security conditions in the north and west improve quickly, we must expect large-scale population movements, suffering and many deaths in the coming weeks," said Kenzo Oshima, the United Nations' chief co-coordinator of humanitarian help, the British daily newspaper,
The Independent, reported Sunday. Oshima's statement came at the conference of donors held in Berlin.
Aid organizations and their German hosts identified post-war anarchy as the single biggest killer in Afghanistan. "In many regions, chaos, fear and violence still reign," said German Foreign Minister Joschka Fischer.
More than seven million people out of an estimated population of 22 million are classified by aid organizations as being at "very high risk." Most barely eked out a living in areas captured by the Northern Alliance in the first days of its offensive.
By contrast, although Kandahar province has been cut off by intense fighting since the fall of Kabul, the region is in no immediate danger of famine, the British daily reported.
UNICEF's special envoy to Afghanistan, Nigel Fisher, returned from Afghanistan on Monday to report joyful scenes in Kabul but also worrying developments in the north. "Three weeks ago we had international staff in Mazar," he said. "But they are not there any more because of the security situation." Aid convoys enter the swath of land stretching from Mazar to Kunduz at their peril.
Mazar-e-Sharif is in the hands of Abdul Rashid Dostum, the Uzbek warlord who rejected the peace deal signed in Bonn, Germany, last week.
Fisher says only about 3.5 to four million, out of the five million or so people needing urgent help in the northern belt, "are accessible at the moment." Overall, he reckons that a third to half the country is out of reach at any one time.
The World Food Program (WFP), which uses six supply routes from neighboring countries, fears for the estimated 2.3 million people in mountainous areas that will soon be cut off by snow. The WFP is waiting for security clearance for three camps to feed the most remote settlements in the central highlands, the Panjshir Valley and parts of Badakshan.
The International Organization of Migrants (IOM) said Friday that hunger and cold have killed 177 people, the majority of them children, over the last four weeks in a refugee camp near Kunduz in northern Afghanistan, Agence France-Presse (AFP) reported.
Two months earlier, UNICEF warned that some 100,000 children risk dying from cold and hunger this winter, in addition to the 300,000 children who die each year in Afghanistan.
According to the IOM, some 2,800 families who had taken refuge at the Baghe Sherkat camp were given assistance until mid-October when the Taliban occupied IOM offices, banned local staff from providing aid and prevented the delivery of supplies. Deliveries were briefly reinstated between November 6 and 11, before being stopped again.
"As a result of this ban, thousands of blankets, winter clothes and boots could not be distributed," said the IOM spokesperson in Geneva, Jean-Philippe Chauzy.
Two decades of war have driven 450,000 Afghans to the Iranian city of Zahedan, the capital of Iran's vast Sistan-Balochistan province, swelling its population by a quarter. Since the U.S.-led "war on terrorism" brought renewed fighting to Afghanistan, they have been joined by more than 70,000 new arrivals, and tiny houses and courtyards are crammed to overflowing.
"Tuberculosis, diarrhea, malaria and malnutrition are common," said Dr. Mehdi Tabatabaei at the Valiasre health center in Shirabad, a district of Zahedan which is two-thirds Afghan. "The maternal mortality rate is high, and we are starting to see cases of Crimea-Congo hemorrhagic fever [CCHF]." This disease, often picked up by herdsmen from their animals, is related to the deadly Ebola virus.
The Amar refugee aid organization is working to bring clean water to the refugee settlements around Zahedan and Zabol, the only other town of any size in the region. Even Tabatabaei's center is reliant on deliveries from a water truck.
"Safe drinking water has the highest priority in maintaining public health," said Hassan Salman Manesh, head of Amar's office in Iran. "Once you have it, you can bring 70% of communicable diseases under control."
The organization plans to bring in snowploughs and bulldozers to keep the passes open to its convoys for as long as possible.
The U.N. agency also reports a "rising threat of ambushes from armed groups." To keep one step ahead of them, the agency has switched some of its supplies from road to river barges, and opened a tortuous new route through Turkmenistan.
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