The mother who buried three children

The gusts of the wind blew dust from the ground when Gulam Mohyddin and his wife Nazo headed to the cemetery where all their children were buried.

We were shown by the graves of the three boys who have lost in the last two years-one-year-old Rahmat, the seven-month-old cat and a recently, three-month-old Faisal Ahmad.

All three suffer from malnutrition, say Gulam and Nazo.

“Can you imagine how painful it is for me to lose three children? One minute has a baby on your hands, in the next minute they are empty,” Nazo says.

“I hope every day angels somehow bring my babies back to our home.”

There are days the couple goes without food. They break the walnut shells for their livelihoods in the village of Sheada, just outside the city of Herat in West Afghanistan and do not receive help from the Taliban or NGO government.

“Looking helplessly as my children called out of hunger, it was felt that my body was erupting in flames. I felt that someone was cutting me half with a saw from my head to my feet,” Gulam said.

The death of their children is not recorded anywhere, but this is a proof of a silent wave of mortality that absorbs the most jerk in Afghanistan, since the country is inserted into what the UN calls an unprecedented hunger crisis.

“We have started the year with the biggest increase in the malnutrition of children ever registered in Afghanistan. But things are getting worse from there,” says John Eilif, director of the world program.

“Food care retains a lid in this country of hunger and malnutrition, especially for the smallest five million who really can’t cope without international support. This lid has already been canceled. The curve of malnutrition puts the lives of more than three million children in danger.”

The aid sharply decreases as the largest donor, USA, stopped almost all Aid to Afghanistan earlier this year. But WFP says that eight or nine other donors that have funded them over the last two years have also stopped this year, and many others give much less than last year.

One of the reasons is that the donors respond to a number of crises around the world. But the policies of the Taliban government also influence how much the world is ready to help.

What do they do to help their citizens?

“Those who face malnutrition, those who are hungry is because of the sanctions because of the reduction of the aid from international organizations. This is not because of the government,” said the head of the Taliban political service in Doha, Suhil Shahin, before the BBC.

“The government has expanded its assistance to people and does what is in its capacity, but our budget is based on internal revenue and we are facing sanctions.”

But the irreconcilability of the Taliban in terms of women’s rights influences his offer for international recognition and sanctions against him to be canceled. Other decisions, similar to the recent application of a pre -declared ban on Afghan women working for the NGO, place the provision of “life -saving humanitarian aid at serious risk,” the UN says.

The urgent malnutrition situation is also complicated by other factors – a heavy drought, which has influenced the income of agriculture in more than half of the provinces of Afghanistan, and the forced return of more than two million Afghans from Iran and Pakistan, reducing the money transfers they send back.

At Sheida’s cemetery, we found scary evidence of the death of children. There were no records of the buried people there, so we counted the graves ourselves. Approximately two-thirds of the hundreds of graves were from children-it was easy to say to the small graves of the older ones.

The villagers told us that the cemetery was relatively new, between the ages of two and three years. They also confirmed that this is not a specific cemetery for children.

As we passed through the settlement in Shada, people came out, carrying their children. Rahila wore a hibatula that she couldn’t stand up to. Durhani took out his son Mohammed Yusuf, who is also nearly two and cannot stand.

Almost half of all Afghan children under the age of five are stunned, UN says.

In one of the homes of the mud and the clays, Hanifa Sayey Rafoule’s one -year -old son could barely stay, even while sitting.

“I took him to a clinic, where they told me he was malnourished, but I have no money to continue to take him there,” she says. She and her husband have two other children, and the dry pieces of bread with Afghan green tea are the only dishes that the family can afford. They don’t eat a few days.

Rafiula still has no teeth, so Hanifa soaks the bread in tea and feeds it.

“But this is not enough and he is hungry all the time. To make him sleep, I give him these medicines,” she says, removing two strips of tablets.

One is a Lorazepam band, an anti -anxiety medicine, and the other is propanolol, a medicine that controls high blood pressure. One tape costs 10 Afghanistans ($ 0.15; £ 0.13) the same amount as one piece of bread. Hanifa says she bought them at a pharmacy, saying she wants to sleep for herself.

“I feel so guilty that my children will starve and I can’t do much. I feel suffocated and as if I have to kill my children and myself,” she says.

Doctors say that when given to young children, drugs like these can harm the heart of the child, kidneys and liver and can even be life -threatening if applied for a prolonged period of time.

Hanifa is one of the millions of requests for help.

“It is an incredible heartbreaking to be in this country and watching how it unfolds. WFP has a hot line. We had to retrain our call operators because we get a much larger share of calls from women threatening suicide because they are desperate and they just don’t know how to feed their children more.”

The closure of nutrition for communities such as those in Sheada and in other parts of Afghanistan means that more children are pushed into severely acute malnutrition.

We saw evidence of this at hospitals in Afghanistan.

There were 26 children in 12 beds in the Badahshan Regional Hospital in Badahshan in the northeast.

The three-month-old sanctuary, the youngest baby in the ward, has malnutrition, acute diarrhea and a cleft lip. She is her mother’s second baby. The first child, another girl, died when she was 20 days old.

“I’m afraid that this child may meet the same fate. I’m tired of this life. It’s not worth living,” says the stunned look at his face.

As he dies, he speaks, Sana’s hands and feet turn blue. Her tiny heart does not pump enough blood. A nurse puts her oxygen.

In another crib is the five -month -old musele, which has malnutrition and measles. Her mother, Karima, says she has hardly opened her eyes in the last few days.

“She is experiencing pain and I don’t know what to do. We are poor and we don’t have access to nutritious food. That’s why she’s in this state,” Karima says.

In the crib next to Musseha are twins Muthara and Mazan. Baby girls also have malnutrition and measles and are half the weight, which should be 18 months. Muthara releases a weak cry. Obviously, he is experiencing pain.

A week after we visited the hospital, we followed the baby families. We were told that Sana, Mullet and Muthara died.

This is not the first time we have documented the death of children from malnutrition in Afghanistan, but this is the worst we have ever seen.

Within a week, three babies from one ward have become the most victims of the hunger crisis in Afghanistan.

And it’s about to get worse.

“WFP’s humanitarian funding will expire in November. We are starting to reject malnourished women and children from health centers at the moment because we just can’t allow them to feed them. In November we will stop unless we receive additional financing injection,” says John Ailif.

As winter approaches, it is difficult to overcome the urgency of the disaster, which unfolds in Afghanistan.

Mahfouz Zubaide, Aakriti Tapar, Sanjay Ganguly