Afghanistan is starving. The United Nations says the country is in the grip of the world’s worst humanitarian crisis. An estimated 90% of its households do not have enough food to eat, and as CBS News correspondent Imtiaz Tayeb reports, the country’s youngest suffer the most.
Malnourished babies from across Afghanistan are brought to the Indira Gandhi Children’s Hospital in Kabul for specialized treatment.
There a mother told Tyeb that her 4-month-old son Murtaza weighs only six and a half pounds.
Hunger has plagued Afghanistan for decades, but things have gone from bad to worse since the Taliban takeover a year ago.
Along with the extremist group running the country, the Biden administration has amassed billions of dollars in assets of the Afghan National Bank. International donors, who funded about 80% of the country’s economy, have pulled their financial aid.
All of those moves were intended to deprive the terrorist group of cash, and foreign governments and organizations continue to withhold funding, pointing to the Taliban’s dramatic crackdown on basic freedoms and its brutality.
But Afghan doctors tell CBS News that the Afghan people, not the Taliban, are paying the price.
One or two malnourished children die here every day, a doctor told Tayeb.
In Taliban-led Afghanistan, there is an orgy of hunger in almost every street. The number of people waiting outside the bakeries for bread is increasing day by day.
Each loaf of bread costs just 11 cents, but that’s too expensive for Najibullah, who told CBS News that he works as a daily wage worker. Recently, he said that getting work is difficult.
Asked whether the Taliban had offered him any help while in power, he told Tayeb that he “didn’t get a single penny from them.”
“It’s terrible,” he said. “It’s a slow death for us. Life isn’t worth living when there’s no food and no work.”
As sunset approached, a local resident offered to buy bread for the dozens of men and women who were waiting outside the bakery.
The total cost was no more than a few dollars, but for everyone out there, it meant they and their families wouldn’t go to bed on a completely empty stomach. At least not that one night.
Aid is still coming to Afghanistan, but the U.S. Nothing like this happened before the U.N.’s withdrawal, and in no way enough to end what the U.N. Says “pure catastrophe”.