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Affected families in Herat complain about lack of healthcare facilities
Families in the earthquake-affected areas in western Herat province have complained about the lack of facilities and medicine in the area.
Health teams are busy providing services in all the affected villages, but some of the earthquake victims say the assistance provided is not enough.
With winter fast approaching, children across the province are coming down with seasonal diseases, residents say. According to doctors, however, they say they have enough supplies and medicine to provide basic healthcare services.
One earthquake survivor, Ibrahim, says he was only discharged from hospital a week ago and is still in great pain. He lives in a tent after having lost his home and three brothers in the quake. While Ibrahim survived, he was seriously injured in the tremor.
“It’s been a week since I was discharged from the hospital, and they told me that you will be treated in your tent, and the doctor will provide you with anything you need,” said Ibrahim, a resident of Herat’s Zinda Jan district.
“We want our patient to be taken care of because our patient’s one arm and leg does not work,” said Maryam, a resident of Herat’s Zinda Jan district.
The string of earthquakes that rocked the area last month caused mass devastation and while government medical teams, volunteers and NGOs have been assisting the survivors, challenges have been enormous. Doctors say that all the wounded who were hospitalized in the seminary hospital are now being treated in their areas under tents.
“Since we came here, all the wounded were in the hospital, but now they have discharged the wounded from the hospital, and now the wounded are being treated and cared for in their tents,” said Ahmadjan Rahimi, the head of one of the medical teams in the earthquake-affected areas of Zinda Jan district of Herat.
But some affected families say that there are not enough facilities and medicine in these areas, and they have to transfer their patients to the hospitals in the city center.
“My son is sick here under the tent; no one gives medicine; they only give one packet of tablets, and that doesn’t really help, and I had to take my son to the city for treatment,” said Faqir Ahmad, a resident of Zinda Jan district of Herat.
Currently, health volunteer teams from the women’s and men’s departments are busy providing services in all areas affected by the earthquake. Psychologists are also working with patients with mental health problems.
“I am a vaccinator myself, I work in the vaccination department, and the vaccines that we apply here are generally the vaccines that are applied in the clinics of the city, including tetanus vaccines for women,” said Marziya Ebrahimi, a health volunteer.
“We go and check the people in every tent closely and invite and encourage people to come and participate in the meetings and use the principles of psychological counseling,” said psychologist Mohammad Elias Khairkhowa.
With the cold weather, seasonal illnesses have increased among the affected families, and doctors say that most of these patients are treated in these health centers.
The Embassy of Japan in Afghanistan announced on Friday that the country has allocated $19.5 million in humanitarian assistance to Afghanistan.
In a statement, the Japanese Embassy said it hopes the aid will help bring positive change to the lives of vulnerable Afghans.
According to the statement, the assistance will cover the basic humanitarian needs of vulnerable communities in Afghanistan.
The embassy added that the aid will be delivered through United Nations agencies, international organizations, and Japanese non-governmental organizations operating in Afghanistan.
Japan’s total assistance to Afghanistan since August 2021 has reached more than $549 million.
Security forces at the Islam Qala border in Herat province prevented hundreds of young Afghans from illegally entering Iran.
Officials from the 207 Al-Farooq Army Corps said that around 530 people attempted over the past two days to illegally enter Iranian territory through areas of Kohsan district in Herat, but border forces detained them and transferred them back to their original areas.
Meanwhile, officials in the local administration of Herat said that due to severe cold along the illegal migration route to Iran, three Afghan migrants have lost their lives in the Kohsan district of the province, and a shepherd has also died there for the same reason.
Mohammad Yousuf Saeedi, spokesperson for the Herat governor’s office, said that some statistics and images shared on social media regarding the incident are not reliable.
According to him, further investigations are underway to determine whether any individuals have died on the other side of the border.
President Donald Trump suspended the green card lottery program on Thursday that allowed the suspect in the Brown University and MIT shootings to come to the United States.
Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem said in a post on the social platform X that, at Trump’s direction, she is ordering the United States Citizenship and Immigration Services to pause the program, the Associated Press reported.
“This heinous individual should never have been allowed in our country,” she said of the suspect, Portuguese national Claudio Neves Valente.
Neves Valente, 48, is suspected in the shootings at Brown University that killed two students and wounded nine others, and the killing of an MIT professor. He was found dead Thursday evening from a self-inflicted gunshot wound, officials said.
Neves Valente had studied at Brown on a student visa beginning in 2000, according to an affidavit from a Providence police detective. In 2017, he was issued a diversity immigrant visa and months later obtained legal permanent residence status, according to the affidavit. It was not immediately clear where he was between taking a leave of absence from the school in 2001 and getting the visa in 2017.
The diversity visa program makes up to 50,000 green cards available each year by lottery to people from countries that are little represented in the U.S., many of them in Africa. The lottery was created by Congress, and the move is almost certain to invite legal challenges.
Nearly 20 million people applied for the 2025 visa lottery, with more than 131,000 selected when including spouses with the winners. After winning, they must undergo vetting to win admission to the United States. Portuguese citizens won only 38 slots.
Lottery winners are invited to apply for a green card. They are interviewed at consulates and subject to the same requirements and vetting as other green-card applicants.
Trump has long opposed the diversity visa lottery. Noem’s announcement is the latest example of using tragedy to advance immigration policy goals. After an Afghan man was identified as the gunman in a fatal attack on National Guard members in November, Trump’s administration imposed sweeping rules against immigration from Afghanistan and other counties.
While pursuing mass deportation, Trump has sought to limit or eliminate avenues to legal immigration. He has not been deterred if they are enshrined in law, like the diversity visa lottery, or the Constitution, as with a right to citizenship for anyone born on U.S. soil. The Supreme Court recently agreed to hear his challenge to birthright citizenship.
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