An Afghan child receives medical treatment at a local hospital in Kabul, capital of Afghanistan, Nov. 23, 2021. (Photo by Saifurahman Safi/Xinhua)
KABUL, Nov. 23 (Xinhua) -- An Afghan mother of eight, Nafisa, who lives in the national capital Kabul, was sad that she can't give her children enough food to eat.
"Destructive war, displacement and poverty have devoured my life and that is why today my 18-months-old daughter is suffering from malnutrition here in the hospital," she said.
"The war claimed the life of my husband one year ago and left me with eight children in poverty and my youngest daughter has been suffering from malnutrition in the past two months," said the mother in a hospital in Kabul.
Lying on the hospital bed, the 18-month-old Karima is in a ward shared with some 10 other children who were under medical treatment.
"I have no money to buy enough food, biscuits and powder milk for my children," said Zakia, a mother of six, who sat next to the bed of her ailing two-year-old daughter suffering too from malnutrition.
Doctors said more Afghan children have been suffering malnutrition this year.
"In this season in the past years we had five to seven children suffering from malnutrition but unfortunately this year nowadays we register seven such children on average every day," Noorul Haq Yousufzai, the head of the Indira Gandhi Institute of Child Health in Kabul, told Xinhua recently.
The aid agencies and non-government organizations backed by the World Bank, according to him, had provided assistance to the children health center in the past but such cooperation stopped after the Taliban takeover of Afghanistan in mid-August. Similar things have happened to some health clinics before their closure, he said.
After the withdrawal of the U.S.-led forces from Afghanistan in late August some leading financial institutions including the World Bank have suspended support to the Central Asian country.
The United States has also frozen more than 9 billion U.S. dollars in assets belonging to Afghanistan's central bank, delivering a heavy blow to the vulnerable economy of the war-torn country.
The Taliban-led administration has urged Washington not to link humanitarian issues to politics and unfreeze the Afghan assets.
More than half the population of Afghanistan, a record 22.8 million people, will face acute food insecurity from November, and 3.2 million children under five are expected to suffer from acute malnutrition by the end of the year, said a report of World Food Program released in October.
In Kabul, there are people seen selling their home appliances by the roadside to get money, and many children working on streets. Enditem
