This comes as the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO) said that 53 world countries including Afghanistan face acute hunger.
Since the takeover of the Islamic Emirate in August 2021, “humanitarian conditions have deteriorated with over 24.4 million people in need of humanitarian assistance in Afghanistan—an increase from 18.4 million in 2021,” said a report of the US Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction (SIGAR).
The Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction in a report to the US congress said that 70 percent of the Afghans are unable to provide their basic needs.
This comes as the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO) said that 53 world countries including Afghanistan face acute hunger.
Many international organizations expressed concerns over the deteriorated economic condition in Afghanistan.
Osman, 7, is one of the victims of severe poverty in Afghanistan. Osman’s family said that he has had a stomach disease for more than one-year, but they are unable to feed him properly.
“The tube which is installed in his nose should be changed once each month. The doctors say fruit and good food should be included in the milk for him but we don’t have (money),” Osman’s mother said.
“The document reveals that around 193 million people in 53 countries or territories experienced acute food insecurity at crisis or worse levels (IPC/CH Phase 3-5) in 2021,” FAO said. “This represents an increase of nearly 40 million people compared with the already record numbers of 2020.
“The main reason of poverty is a lack of investment in infrastructure and lack of strategic programs in the last 20 years by the government and by the international community, as well as by insecurity,” said Basheer Shabiri, an economist.
“The recent tensions in Ukraine had a very small impact on the situation in Afghanistan and this shows the success of the Islamic Emirate,” said Abdul Latif Nazari, deputy Minister of Economy.
Afghans have been fighting since the 70s for the same reason Ukrainians are fighting but they have been neglected and betrayed
In January, some Taliban members in northern Mazār-e-Sharīf city allegedly gang-raped eight women in custody. These women were part of the group of people arrested while trying to flee the country following the Taliban takeover in the wake of the withdrawal of foreign troops.
The Taliban, obviously, denied this.
My friends in Kabul told me that the women who survived the gang rape were later killed by their families in the name of “honour” after they were handed over by the Taliban. The rest of the women, they said, were still “missing”.
The barriers between young women and higher education are at the highest, women are banned from most paid employment, women’s sports have been banned, and over 72% of women journalists have lost their jobs.
In their early days of power, the ministry of women’s affairs was swiftly replaced by the Taliban with the infamous ministry of virtue and vice, which later saw an array of restrictions imposed on women’s travels. Women have been beaten and abducted for peaceful protests for their right to work, education and health – more and more people now selling their daughters away for mere survival.
Yet there is a deafening silence in international media, which seems to have become bored with the plight of the Afghan people, especially women.
The life of a woman under Taliban rule is not a mystery to the outer world. Yet international media are becoming increasingly disinterested and distracted.
After the initial “winners and losers” coverage that kept newsrooms busy for a few weeks, as soon as the international troops and contractors left, international media made an exit too.
The US abandonment of Afghanistan set its people on a trajectory that prophesied a life of intimidation, terror and incarceration – human rights violations, poverty and statelessness that proved their worst nightmare true.
The absence of war is not peace.
Journalists may not be propagating war, but through inconsistent and infrequent coverage they are also not prioritising peace with the US-led coalition quitting and the Taliban ruling Afghanistan. It gives way to propaganda and misinformation to permeate through without public attention or inquiry.
On top of that, the Russian invasion of Ukraine, which led to fluctuations in the global stock markets, and the surging Covid-19 infections around the world have resulted in war-ravaged Afghanistan – disenfranchised and ignored by international media – continuing to suffer silently and helplessly.
The international media spotlight on Afghanistan is fading fast.
Yet the agony of the Afghan people, especially women and young girls, is far from over – the crisis is only escalating, with the crumbling healthcare and services system caught between international isolation and hardline Taliban rule.
Unfortunately, but unsurprisingly, local media does not have the freedom to raise questions, let alone investigate. Taliban control local media insofar as heavily armed Taliban fighters have been seen to accompany their leaders when they make live TV appearances.
For surviving journalists, the Taliban announced the vaguely worded “11 journalism rules” – basically their way of censoring and controlling media.
And now, with the western media broadly shelving the coverage of Afghanistan, there’s hardly anyone left to rely on with conflict de-escalatory coverage that is grounded in the frameworks of humanisation, justice and peace.
Yet, amid the threats of abduction and targeted persecution, a group of women took to the streets of Kabul on Sunday, demanding access to education and work. For these women to stand in the face of tyranny – that even the most powerful country in the world does not want to face – is an act of resilience in the most desperate of times.
It calls for robust international media coverage and solidarity.
Yes, some primary girls’ schools have reopened this month and some women have been allowed to return to work in the education and health industries, but human rights violations, hunger, poverty and sickness remain at a record high, and a predicted famine is around the corner due to economic crisis. And with people resorting to selling their daughters and kidneys in the black market for bare survival, one must recognise that there is hardly any strength left in them to stand for themselves.
These stories need to be told to shake minds and souls around the world for action.
With the era of media witnessing war and other distant crises came the age of the attention economy, where quite important issues struggle to survive in the public discourse for longer periods of time.
They need constant reminders. The continuity aspect of postwar follow-up reporting can give visibility to stories that may have been missed by the public in the first instance. The news media cycle is swift and urgency-centric. The continuity aspect keeps information alive and safe from obscurity.
We need to remember that what Afghan men and women have been fighting for since the 1970s and the Soviet–Afghan war is the same reason the Ukrainians are fighting now. The only difference is that the Afghans have been neglected and betrayed over and over again.
Peace reporting in a conflict is crucial and places a lot of responsibility on the journalists.
In the global fight between the pens and the AK-47s, the international media and journalists need to stay engaged in Afghanistan through peace journalism and not allow the latter an easy win.
The media spotlight on Afghanistan is fading fast – but the agony of its people is far from over
The United Nations says aid workers are still in a “race against time” to remove rubble and rebuild after the devastating earthquake struck eastern Afghanistan last month, killing at least 2,200 people and cutting off remote areas.
The 6.0-magnitude quake on Aug. 31 was shallow, destroying or causing extensive damage to low-rise buildings in the mountainous region. It hit late at night, and homes — mostly made of mud, wood, or rocks — collapsed instantly, becoming death traps.
Satellite data shows that about 40,500 truckloads of debris still needs to be cleared from affected areas in several provinces, the United Nations Development Program said Wednesday. Entire communities have been upended and families are sleeping in the open, it added.
The quake’s epicenter was in remote and rugged Kunar province, challenging rescue and relief efforts by the Taliban government and humanitarian groups. Authorities deployed helicopters or airdropped army commandos to evacuate survivors. Aid workers walked for hours on foot to reach isolated communities.
“This is a race against time,” said Devanand Ramiah, from the UNDP’s Crisis Bureau. “Debris removal and reconstruction operations must start safely and swiftly.”
People’s main demands were the reconstruction of houses and water supplies, according to a spokesman for a Taliban government committee tasked with helping survivors, Zia ur Rahman Speenghar.
People were getting assistance in cash, food, tents, beds, and other necessities, Speenghar said Thursday. Three new roads were under construction in the Dewagal Valley, and roads would be built to areas where there previously were none.
“Various countries and organizations have offered assistance in the construction of houses but that takes time. After the second round of assistance, work will begin on the third round, which is considering what kind of houses can be built here,” the spokesman said.
Afghanistan is facing a “perfect storm” of crises, including natural disasters like the recent earthquake, said Roza Otunbayeva, who leads the U.N. mission to the country.
Afghanistan Peace Campaign