UN Says Nearly 23 Million Afghans Face Acute Hunger

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Ayaz Gul
VOA News
October 25, 2021

ISLAMABAD — United Nations agencies warned Monday humanitarian needs in Afghanistan have grown to unprecedented levels and more than half of the conflict-torn country’s population, a record 22.8 million people, will “face acute food insecurity” from November.

The Food and Agriculture Organization and World Food Program said in joint study the combined impacts of drought, conflict, and economic decline have severely affected lives, livelihoods, and Afghans’ access to food.

“Among those at risk are 3.2 million children under-five who are expected to suffer from acute malnutrition by the end of the year,” the study said.

The latest U.N. findings come as the looming harsh winter threatens to cut off areas of Afghanistan where families desperately depend on humanitarian assistance to survive the freezing winter months.

“Afghanistan is now among the world’s worst humanitarian crises – if not the worst – and food security has all but collapsed,” lamented David Beasley, WFP executive director.

“This winter, millions of Afghans will be forced to choose between migration and starvation unless we can step up our life-saving assistance, and unless the economy can be resuscitated,” Beasley said. “We are on a countdown to catastrophe and if we don’t act now, we will have a total disaster on our hands.”

The Islamist Taliban took control of Afghanistan in August after overthrowing the Western-backed government, promising their interim government would restore stability.

But the hardline movement’s return to power has triggered financial sanctions on Kabul by the United States and other Western nations, blocking the Taliban’s access to around $10 billion dollars in Afghan assets parked largely with the U.S. Federal Reserve.

The sanctions have raised prospects of an economic meltdown that critics say will worsen the humanitarian crisis facing millions of people.

Washington and European countries have declined to directly engaged with the Taliban or give their interim government legitimacy, but they have vowed to make arrangements to sustain delivery of much-needed humanitarian aid to Afghans.

Neighboring countries, including China, Pakistan and Iran, have already dispatched relief assistance and promised to send more on a regular basis to help the Taliban government tackle the food crisis.

Thousands of poor families in western Afghanistan have reportedly already sold their flocks and fled in search of shelter and assistance in make-shift camps near major cities.

The U.N. says it will need to mobilize resources at unprecedented levels to meet the scale of needs, lamenting its humanitarian response plan remains only a third funded. Aid agencies warn this year’s drought conditions are likely to extend into 2022.

FAO and WFP say they have been alerting the world to huge funding shortfalls and the need for urgent action by the international community before it is too late.

“Hunger is rising and children are dying. We can’t feed people on promises – funding commitments must turn into hard cash, and the international community must come together to address this crisis, which is fast spinning out of control,” Beasley warned.

Save the Children, which champions the rights and interests of children worldwide, said Monday its analysis of the U.N data concludes almost 14 million children are expected to face crisis or emergency levels of food insecurity this winter “More than 5 million children are now just one step away from famine,” it added.

The relief agency pointed to this week’s media reports that said that eight children from the same family died of starvation in Kabul after losing both of their parents. The siblings, four boys and four girls, were aged between just 18 months and eight years old.

“It seems there is no end to the agony for Afghan children. After decades of war and suffering, they now face the worst hunger crisis in their country’s history,” said Chris Nyamandi, country director of Save the Children in Afghanistan.

“The situation is already desperate – we see young children in our clinics every day who are wasted from severe malnutrition because they have nothing but scraps of bread to eat,” Nyamandi said

Related

US Was Losing War So It Negotiated: Khalilzad

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Ashraf Ghani (left) and Zalmay Khalilzad (right)

Tolo News: Talking to CBS News, Khalilzad said the US military tried many times to strengthen its position on the battleground, but it failed. “The negotiation was a result of–based on the judgment that we weren’t winning the war and therefore time was not on our side and better to make a deal sooner than later.” Khalilzad blamed the then-president Ashraf Ghani for the disintegration of Afghanistan’s security sector, saying his escape triggered the chaos in the Afghan capital. Click here to read more (external link).

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‘Our Dream Came to an End’ – Afghan Female Athletes Speak Out About Taliban’s Return

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Jafar Haand
Roshan Noorzai
VOA News
October 24, 2021

WASHINGTON — Women athletes in Afghanistan say the Taliban’s return to power has put an end to their dreams of playing sports at the national and international levels.

“It is over,” said 21-year-old Homaira Barakzai, the captain of Afghanistan’s national handball team, adding that “Everything has changed with the political change (Taliban’s return). Our only hope right now is to survive. Our future, as athletes, is unknown.”

After seizing power in August, the Taliban rolled back the hard-won women’s rights gained in the past two decades in Afghanistan. They did so by imposing strict restrictions on women, including a ban on women’s sports.

“It was very painful” to see that Afghanistan did not play in the Asian Women’s Handball Championship, said Barakzai. The games were held September 15-25 in Amman, Jordan.

Barakzai added that the Taliban’s takeover of the Afghan capital and the chaos at the Kabul airport after the collapse of the Afghan government prevented them from traveling to Amman for the games.

“It would have been a major achievement not only for us (the team) but for Afghan women and Afghanistan if we participated and won,” said Barakzai, who led the Afghan handball squad for the past four years.

Barakzai said now that the Taliban again control Afghanistan, she will not be able to play for her country. “Our dream came to an end as the Taliban returned to power.”

The Taliban, who took control of Afghanistan in August, barred women from work, secondary education and playing sports.

‘Very disappointing’

A high-ranking Taliban official told the Australian broadcaster SBS last month that Afghan women will not be allowed to play sports if they cannot “get an Islamic dress code.”

“It is obvious that they will get exposed and will not follow the dress code, and Islam does not allow that,” said Ahmadullah Wasiq, the deputy head of the Taliban cultural commission.

Mashhed Barez, a member of Afghanistan’s national handball team, told VOA that the Taliban ban on women’s sports is “very disappointing.”

She said the Taliban have not changed from what she heard about the group’s rule in the late 1990s.

“If someone thinks that the Taliban have changed, they are mistaken. The Taliban want people to live in poverty and misery,” Barez said.

Under Taliban rule in the late 1990s, women were forced to cover themselves from head to foot. They were not allowed to leave their houses without a male companion. The Taliban forbade women from playing sports.

That, however, changed after 2001 when a new Afghan government, supported by U.S.-led forces, adopted new policies encouraging girls to attend school and women to participate in the workforce.

In the past 20 years, millions of girls enrolled in schools, and tens of thousands of women served in the public and private sectors. Afghan women athletes have participated at national and international tournaments, including the Olympic Games.

But with the Taliban returning to power in Afghanistan, circumstances have changed.

Safety concerns

New York-based rights group Human Rights Watch (HRW) has accused the Taliban of widespread human rights violations against Afghan women and girls.

In a statement last month, HRW’s associate director of the Women’s Rights Division, Heather Barr, said “women’s rights activists and high-profile women have been harassed and many are afraid and in hiding.”

“Because my parents were worried about my safety, I had to move to a relative’s house,” said Barakzai. “Now I cannot go out. I have to stay at home.”

She added that other members of the Afghan national handball team also live in fear.

Arzo Rahimi, chairperson of the Girls Football Federation in Afghanistan, told VOA that the international sports bodies should not forget about the country’s women athletes.

“They should not be left behind,” said Rahimi.

She added that athletes’ lives “are in danger under the Taliban,” and urged the international community to help with their evacuation to safety.

Evacuation

Last week, the world soccer body, FIFA, evacuated 100 football players and their families from Afghanistan with the help of the Qatari government.

The International Olympic Committee and a number of other sports bodies and countries have helped in the evacuation of dozens of other women athletes.

London-based rights group Amnesty International said in a statement this week that though the international evacuation of at-risk Afghans from Afghanistan ended two months ago, “those left behind face formidable obstacles to seeking safety outside the country.”

Freshta Ahmadzai, a member of the Afghan national basketball team, told VOA that women athletes, being at high risk, are “forced” to leave the country because the Taliban do not give women their rights.

“We live like prisoners at home. We will be forced to leave the country,” she said.

Ahmadzai called on the international community to put pressure on the Taliban to honor their pledges to respect women’s rights.

“If the Taliban allow women to work and play sports, I will not leave my country,” Ahmadzai said.

Journalists Beaten in the Torkham Passage

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8am: The Taliban border forces have beaten many journalists in the Torkham passage in Nangarhar province where most people are gathered to go to Pakistan, according to the reports. Sedaqat Ghorzang the Tolo News reporter in eastern provinces who had gone to the Torkham passage to make a report has been beaten by the Taliban border forces, Tolo News reported. Click here to read more (external link).

Pakistan, Afghanistan Mark Polio Day Amid Optimism for Eradication

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Child getting polio drops (file photo)

Ayaz Gul
VOA News
October 24, 2021

ISLAMABAD — Pakistan and Afghanistan, the only two countries where polio still paralyzes children, marked World Polio Day (October 24) Sunday amid excitement and hopes that global eradication of the crippling disease is within reach.

The neighboring countries constitute a bloc where the disease has been endemic; but each has detected just one case of wild polio so far this year compared to 53 in Afghanistan and 81 in Pakistan in October 2020. The number of cases so far in 2021 is the lowest in history, according to World Health Organization officials

A polio vaccination campaign in Pakistan has faced challenges in particular over the past two years — due to vaccine hesitancy and the COVID-19 pandemic, which led to a five-month pause in polio immunization campaigns starting in March of 2020.

“We have reason to be optimistic,” said Aziz Memon of Rotary International, which coordinates a global polio eradication program.

Memon told VOA the declining trend of reported polio cases and negative environmental samples suggest “a positive outlook” for polio eradication in Pakistan and Afghanistan, stressing the need for capitalizing on what he described as an “unprecedented” opportunity to stop wild polio transmission.

“We are currently in the high season for polio transmission in Afghanistan and Pakistan, so it’s never been more important to ensure that polio immunization and surveillance remain a top priority, particularly as the pandemic continues to threaten immunization programs around the world,” he said.

Memon said restrictions on public movement to prevent COVID-19 from spreading was one of the key contributing factors leading to the recent decline in polio cases in Pakistan.

“Inter-city and intra-city public transportation remained suspended across the country during the pandemic lockdowns, which restricted many nomadic families from traveling to other cities in search of job opportunities,” he said.

Memon said the resumption of mass polio vaccination campaigns and the natural immunity induced by the wild polio outbreaks of previous years have also contributed to the current reduction in cases.

The Pakistani government reported earlier this month that its third vaccination campaign of the year in mid-September succeeded in the administering of polio drops to more than 40 million children across the country.

Afghan house-to-house drive

The United Nations last week announced that a house-to-house polio vaccination drive for all children under 5 in Afghanistan will restart on November 8 for the first time in more than three years, now that the conflict-torn country’s new Taliban government has granted approval.

“Given that Pakistan and Afghanistan are a single epidemiological bloc, this represents a great opportunity for both countries to reach even more children with lifesaving polio vaccines,” said Memon, while welcoming the Taliban’s decision to lift the ban on house-to-house polio vaccination.

Rotary’s Global Polio Eradication Initiative was founded in 1988. The program has since reduced infections by more than 99.9 percent worldwide and immunized nearly 3 billion children against polio, preventing more than 19.4 million cases of paralysis. But Rotary officials predict “hundreds of thousands of children could be paralyzed” if polio is not eradicated within 10 years.

International eradicators warn outbreaks of circulating vaccine-derived polioviruses (cVDPVs) also pose a major barrier to achieving a polio-free world, calling for increased vigilance in swiftly addressing it.

The outbreak occurs if not enough children in any given community are vaccinated and the weakened live poliovirus contained in the oral polio vaccine starts to circulate, mutating to a form that can cause paralysis.

“Multiple countries, including Pakistan and Afghanistan, are facing outbreaks of cVDPV type 2, and to address them, a new polio vaccine that carries less risk of changing to a harmful form that could cause paralysis in low-immunity settings has been developed,” Memon said.

US Immigration Agency Overwhelmed by 20,000 Afghan Humanitarian Requests

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Masood Farivar
VOA News
October 23, 2021

As recently as last week, the U.S. immigration service was using six officers to process about 14,000 humanitarian requests for Afghans seeking relocation to the United States following the Taliban takeover of the country in August.

That’s what the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Service recently told congressional staff, Congressman Jim Langevin, a Democrat from Rhode Island, said Thursday during a House Homeland Security Committee meeting.

“I want to say that again: 14,000 humanitarian parole applications with just six officers,” Langevin said. “That is completely and utterly unacceptable, and I call on USCIS to address the shortcoming immediately.”

A spokesman for Langevin told VOA that the information about the USCIS backlog came during an October 12 agency briefing for congressional staff.

Emergency permission

Humanitarian parole is a special permission given to foreigners to enter the United States under emergency circumstances. While it does not automatically lead to permanent residence, “parolees” can apply for legal status once they’re in the U.S.

In a typical year, USCIS gets fewer than 2,000 humanitarian parole requests from around the world, according to a USCIS official, who spoke on background.

But since August, the agency has received a total of nearly 20,000 such requests for Afghan nationals outside the United States, the official said in a statement to VOA on Friday. That is up from 14,000 in mid-October.

The vast majority of the applications have been filed by Afghan Americans on behalf of relatives back home who have no other options for relocating to the United States, according to community activists. A much larger number of Afghans with ties to the U.S. military, U.S. government and U.S. non-governmental organizations have applied for special immigrant visas or refugee status.

Asked about Langevin’s criticism of the humanitarian parole backlog, the official said the agency is actively assigning additional staff to address the workload.

“USCIS issued an agencywide request for volunteers to help process applications for humanitarian and significant public benefit parole and the agency will have significantly more staff assigned to this workload in the coming weeks,” the official said.

The deluge of applications has nonetheless overwhelmed the immigration service.

Afghan American lawyer Wogai Mohmand said the number of Afghan humanitarian parole requests could reach as high as 150,000 in a year.

“Their systems are not equipped to deal with that kind of volume,” Mohmand said during a recent webinar hosted by several advocacy organizations. “Frankly, they don’t have enough staff to look at all those applications.”

And assigning more officials to the humanitarian parole cases is not going to help anyone get out of Afghanistan, according to Sunil Varghese, policy director for International Refugee Assistance Project.

Varghese said that before parolees are admitted into the United States, they must have their fingerprints taken, identifies verified and travel documents issued by the U.S. embassy.

But the U.S. embassy in Kabul shut down at the end of August and moved to Doha, Qatar. As a result, once an Afghan applicant is deemed eligible for parole, he or she is instructed by USCIS to travel to a third country for vetting and biometrics.

With foreign visas hard to come by and regular commercial flights yet to resume, traveling to a third country for vetting is not an option for most Afghans, according to advocates.

If they do make it through the process “the Department of State issues a boarding letter for the applicant to take a commercial carrier, at their own expense, to the United States,” the official explained.

Even in the best of circumstances, the difficulty many Afghans face in reaching an overseas U.S. consulate has had undesirable consequences. Take the case of Fatima Khashee. As security deteriorated in July, the 61-year-old’s son, a U.S. permanent resident, filed a humanitarian parole request on her behalf.

In her case, USCIS acted fairly quickly, approving her application within 20 days on August 24, according to her son, who requested that he not be identified by name.

But by then the Taliban had overrun the country. The embassy, having relocated to the Kabul international airport, had transferred her case to Turkey. By the time she made it to Istanbul 30 days later, her parole authorization expired.

“It wasn’t my mother’s fault that her parole was expired,” the son said in a message to VOA. “She paid triple of regular price to get [the] first flights [that] became available out of Afghanistan. She tried every possible channel to get out sooner, but all land borders and airlines were closed.”

One month later, Khashee remains stuck at an Istanbul hotel, waiting for what her son describes as a long-overdue, updated parole reauthorization.

“That is unbelievable and very disappointing,” he said of the six officers adjudicating 14,000 applications.

It costs $575 to apply for humanitarian parole, a figure that adds up to several thousand dollars for a family of six and that some members of Congress want to see waived. Despite the cost and uncertainty over their approval, however, many Afghan Americans continue to file applications for their loved ones.

“First, they don’t have any other options available,” Khashee’s son said. “Secondly, they are all still hopeful that the USCIS approve their cases considering the situation in Afghanistan. Most of them are not aware how hard it is to be approved for humanitarian parole.”

The USCIS official did not respond to questions about whether the agency has approved any Afghan humanitarian parole requests and how long it would take the agency to clear the backlog.

Taliban Reacts to Newly-Formed ‘Resistance Council’

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Zabihullah Mujahid

Tolo News: Islamic Emirate spokesman Zabihullah Mujahid, reacting to the new movement, said no one can threaten the people of Afghanistan in the name of resistance or anything else. “No longer is there a need for making fronts. Anyone who establishes a front will not gain good results,” he said. Click here to read more (external link).

Afghan Pilots Who Fled To Tajikistan Say Taliban Is Threatening Relatives Back Home

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By Mumin Ahmadi
Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty
October 23, 2021

DUSHANBE — Afghan military pilots who fled to Tajikistan when the Taliban seized power in Kabul say the militant group is pressuring them to return to Afghanistan by threatening to kill their relatives.

Trained by the United States, the Afghan pilots say their documents have been completed for traveling and they hope they will soon be able to go to the United States.

But two Afghan pilots who are sheltering at sanatoriums on the outskirts of Dushanbe told RFE/RL’s Tajik Service on October 23 that the Taliban is now trying to force them to return to Afghanistan.

One Afghan pilot, speaking on condition of anonymity, told RFE/RL that his son back in Afghanistan was beaten by the Taliban and that the militants threatened to kill the boy if the pilot did not return.

Another pilot told RFE/RL that Taliban militants have gone to the homes of several of his family members to demand that the pilot return to Afghanistan.

He told RFE/RL that the Taliban has a list of the names of all 143 Afghan pilots now in Tajikistan. He said Taliban authorities are increasing pressure on all of the pilots by threatening their relatives in Afghanistan.

Taliban spokesman Zabiullah Mujahid denied that the Taliban is threatening the relatives of the pilots.

“Nobody cares about them,” Mujahid told RFE/RL on October 23. “They come up with high-profile stories to obtain refugee status. We have said many times that if they return, no one will touch them here.”

In August, shortly after the Taliban seized power in Afghanistan, the Taliban issued a call for all of the U.S.-trained Afghan pilots to join them in order to fly aircraft that the group had seized at military bases across Afghanistan.

Copyright (c) 2021. RFE/RL, Inc. Reprinted with the permission of Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty, 1201 Connecticut Ave NW, Ste 400, Washington DC 20036.