Afghanistan Is Now The World’s Largest Humanitarian Crisis

A man distributes bread to Afghan women outside a bakery in Kabul. [Petros Giannakouris/AP Photo]

The New Yorker: Afghanistan Has Become the World’s Largest Humanitarian Crisis

Four months after the Biden Administration withdrew U.S. troops, more than twenty million Afghans are on the brink of famine.

On a recent afternoon in a Kabul hospital, seventeen babies lay beside one another on small beds, their bony elbows touching. Some of them, pink and a little plumper, cried and wriggled as nurses rushed by. Others, their pallid skin shades of blue and gray, were still—save for their skeletal rib cages silently rising and falling. The infants often weigh less than four pounds when they arrive in the neonatal intensive-care unit. Pregnant women across Afghanistan are increasingly malnourished, and their bodies, unable to carry their babies to full term, give birth prematurely. Meagre diets then leave new mothers unable to breast-feed. “A lot of babies are premature,” Abdul Jabad, a pediatrician in his late twenties, told me. “Some survive. Some not.”

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Update #1: As Afghanistan’s harsh winter sets in, many are forced to choose between food and warmth (Washington Post)

Update #2: Millions in Afghanistan are facing extreme hunger (The Week)

WNU Editor: The pictures that are coming out of Afghanistan are grim .... In Pictures: Hunger, poverty continue to stalk desperate Afghans (Al Jazeera).