Afghan dire humanitarian situation demands urgent support from int’l community: official

Afghanistan has faced a dire humanitarian situation over past few months, which urges the international community to take immediate actions to support the humanitarian response in the region, said an official of the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) on Thursday, Reuters reported.

Last August, the chaotic withdrawal of U.S. troops from Afghanistan added more woes to the country following two decades of war.

According to Reuters following the hasty pullout, the U.S. government quickly froze nearly 9.5 billion U.S. dollars in national foreign exchange assets from the Afghan central bank held in the United States, further aggravating the already dire humanitarian crisis in Afghanistan.

Last year, the United Nations World Food Programme (WFP) warned that Afghanistan is facing “an avalanche of hunger and destitution”, with 98 percent of the population lacking adequate food.

The ICRC Director-General Robert Mardini elaborated on his experience in Afghanistan after visiting there in February of last year, read the report.

“It is very severe. It’s very difficult to have exact figures. But we see more and more people in the streets, selling their few belongings to be able to put food on the table. We see more and more people seeking daily jobs. The situation is very dire. The economic system is on the brink of collapse. The vast majority of banks are not working. It’s very hard for people to get funds. The vast majority of civil servants today in Afghanistan are simply not getting their salaries. So, you can imagine the ripple effect when a family relies on, eight members of a family rely on a salary, how hard daily life is for Afghans today,” he said.

He believes that the current extreme situation in Afghanistan should be attributed to a combination of factors including warfares and climate change.

“This is the consequence of four decades of armed conflict that really brought the country in a very dire state. And then the effects of climate change are also at the same time and concurrently hitting Afghanistan, with the cycles of drought and floods that are more intense, more frequent. And of course, this is putting huge pressure on the food production in the country and the ability of Afghans to sustain their own needs. And the fact today that the international community and the vast majority of development agencies unplugged their support to Afghanistan since August last year, a country that relies heavily on international aid, of course, is bringing many of the critical services that 40 million Afghans rely on, at the brink of collapse,” he said.

The ICRC director-general also called on the international community to scale up support to humanitarian efforts in Afghanistan to avoid a humanitarian catastrophe in the region, Reuters reported.

“Afghans have experienced four decades of armed conflict, repeated cycles of drought, putting their food security at risk. And I think it’s fair to say that no family has been spared by the effect of war. And while the day-to-day security has improved over the past months, Afghans face acute needs in humanitarian, but also in socio-economic terms. And this is not the time for the international community to forget Afghanistan. The well-being of the Afghan people should really lie above politics. And the ICRC is really committed and will consistently call for proper international attention and funding to ensure that public services that are critical to the survival of the civilian population be preserved in the country and the economic collapse is avoided,” said Mardini.