When Nilofar Hanafi started working for the World Food Programme hotline in Afghanistan in 2022, she thought she would simply be providing information to callers.
Now, as the organisation has run out of food for the starving nation, she and other call handlers are fielding hundreds of pleas every week from women so desperate that they threaten to kill themselves or say they will have to sell one of their children into marriage to be able to feed the rest.
“I feel like a counsellor,” said Hanafi, whose name has been changed to protect her identity. “Most of the areas they are calling from we no longer have any feeding programmes. We just have to say, ‘Sorry, there is no food because there’s no aid’. People get angry and emotional and start crying. It’s very hard.”
As the Taliban prepare to celebrate five years of rule on August 15, with parades expected of their suicide bomber squad on motorbikes and American equipment left by Nato forces when they abandoned Afghanistan in 2021, the country is on the brink of famine.
Six out of seven women and children suffering life-threatening acute malnutrition are being turned away from clinics because of cuts to international aid, combined with price rises and supply disruption caused by the war in Iran and the closure of the Strait of Hormuz, according to country director John Aylieff, from the World Food Programme (WFP) in Afghanistan.
“Mothers are walking three or four hours to our clinics only to be told, ‘Sorry, we don’t have food to help your child survive’,” he said. “We are on the brink of famine and seeing the highest surge of child malnutrition ever recorded, but international cuts mean we are so underfunded we’ve had to totally stop feeding 14 million acutely hungry people.”
On top of that, they can only provide special nutrition packs for a fraction of the 4.7 million Afghans facing life-threatening malnutrition. “We’re turning six out of seven women and children away empty handed, with absolutely nothing,” Aylieff said. “The situation is absolutely bleak.”
‘Gender-based lockdown’
The hunger, compounded by ever-more repressive Taliban restrictions on women and girls, is causing what many see as the world’s worst female mental health crisis.
Afghanistan is the only place on Earth where girls are banned from high school and university. Women are banned from parks, gyms and most jobs and not allowed outside without a male guardian in what Shukria Barakzai, a former Afghan MP, calls “gender-based lockdown”.
“We all remember the toll of lockdown in the pandemic,” said Barakzai, who like most female MPs, fled the country for her safety after the Taliban took back control in 2021. “Afghan women and girls have had almost five years of gender-based lockdown.
“Imagine living every day not knowing whether the door to freedom will ever reopen. The psychological trauma is immense.”
Initial outrage in the West seems to have faded and, in June, the European Union even hosted a Taliban delegation to discuss sending back migrants.The Taliban has imposed more and more restrictions on women, including banning all books by female authors and closing down beauty salons, which had become many women’s last refuge. Morality police patrol the streets, raiding workplaces and public spaces and arbitrarily arresting women for “violations” of dress codes.
The most recent penal code in January allows domestic abuse by recognising only “excessive beating” of wives as a crime and even then punishable by a maximum of 15 days in jail, and scrapped the minimum age for child marriage.
A recent study by the London School of Economics on the impact of the restrictions on women’s health, both mental and physical, described “a sense of loss, hopeless, fear for themselves and for their children, as well as sheer boredom … to alleviate a sense of despair for the future, and combat pain, [some] girls and women are getting addicted to tobacco and other drugs … In worse-case scenarios, young women are committing suicide.”
Professor Joanna Lewis, director of the Centre for Women, Peace and Security at the LSE, and one of the co-authors of the study, said: “The women call the situation ‘arrest at home’ and say [the Taliban] do not want us to live.”
Sara Nazim, 28, a mental health professional in Hounslow, west London, whose family are from Afghanistan, runs an online book club for about fifty women in the country. She says the stories they tell her are heartbreaking.
“One woman told me we are not even allowed to have a window in our kitchen,” she said. The Taliban have banned women being seen at windows. “Many talk of the loss of hope. They say even animals are treated with more respect than us.
“I can’t help comparing my own life,” she added. “I completed my bachelor’s degree in London in 2021 just as the Taliban took over, then did a master’s and now work in integrated neurological services. Had I been in Afghanistan, none of this would have been possible and I would be shut up at home.”
Nazim has written a book called Silent Scars of our Land, documenting her conversations with the women. “The scars may not be visible,” she said, “but the women in my book club all suffer chronic stress, anxiety and sleep problems — this is not just a human rights crisis but a profound mental health crisis.”
There is also a physical impact from keeping 2.6 million girls out of school. Increased child marriage and early childbearing combined with restrictions on women’s healthcare have seen maternal mortality rise to 600 per 100,000 live births, according to a report in June from the UN Office for the Co-ordination of Humanitarian Affairs. This compares with 16 per 100,000 in Iran and 12 in the UK.
While almost 19 million Afghans are in the grip of acute hunger or worse, the WFP received only 8 per cent of the $500 million funding it needs for the next six months, according to Aylieff. It has been particularly affected by cuts from the Trump administration. The US used to provide the majority of its funding.“It feels like starving children no longer strikes a chord because there are too many conflicts,” Aylieff said. Families are left feeding starving babies weak tea and bread.
Resources have been further stretched by the forced return of refugees from neighbouring Iran and Pakistan — almost 6 million over the last three years.
As hunger worsens, the 26 WFP hotline operators like Hanafi are at the sharp end, dealing with more than 11,000 calls a month. The majority of the call handlers are women working from home.
Hanafi, who used to work in a government ministry and is overqualified to be a call handler, says she is lucky to have a job and be able to feed her parents, whom she lives with.
But she says the combination of the women’s hopelessness over their own situation, as well as not being able to feed their children, often leaves her in tears.“I’ve had cases where women say, ‘If you can’t assist us, we will have to kill ourselves or burn our families’,” she said.
“One woman recently called me from Balkh and told me she has six children and her husband is a drug addict and only comes home when he is hungry, then takes their household items to sell to buy drugs. She said, ‘The last time he came we had nothing left so he started beating me. The Taliban don’t let me work so the only option I have is to sell my 11-year-old daughter’.
“Unfortunately, I had to tell her we didn’t have any [food available] in that area.” Hanafi does not know what happened to the woman.
One man who called her turned aggressive when she said there was no food and asked her. “Why are you called the World Food Programme?” He said he would have no alternative but to sell his eight-year-old daughter.
Afghanistan Peace Campaign
