As Hunger Spreads in Afghanistan, Hospitals Fill With Premature, Dying Babies

Palwasha didn’t get enough time to pick the names for her twins.

Her son died immediately after birth. Her daughter, born premature and weighing 700 grams, equivalent to 1½ pounds, was put into an incubator at the provincial hospital in Maidan Shahr. Breathing seemed to take all her strength, jerking her little body with each gasp. Two days later, she was gone, too.

Palwasha’s husband, Wali Muhammad, was burying their son when he got the call. The hospital wrapped the girl’s body in a checked cloth, a miniature bundle, for the parents to take away.

She was the latest victim of Afghanistan’s economic collapse caused by the Taliban takeover in August and the punishing Western sanctions that followed. Half of the population faces acute hunger, according to the United Nations, with one million children in danger of dying from malnutrition. The economy is set to contract by another 20% this year, following last year’s plunge, the U.N. says.

The Wardak provincial hospital’s director in Maidan Shahr, Muhammad Nadir Rahmani, said the hospital is seeing the birth weight of babies reduce alarmingly, as the bodies of malnourished mothers are unable to carry their children to full term. Babies born weighing under 1 kilogram, or about 2.2 pounds, have no better than a 30% chance of survival, he said.

“We have lost our twins all because of our poverty,” said Mr. Muhammad.  “We continue to have hope in God. We have no one else to depend on.”

The couple was struggling before the Taliban’s Aug. 15 takeover, but a new level of deprivation has swallowed them in the past few months. The little work Mr. Muhammad could previously find as a casual laborer, mostly moving goods for people in a wheelbarrow in Maidan Shahr, Wardak’s provincial capital, dried up as seemingly everyone has run out of cash. Afghan casual laborers like Mr. Muhammad are now able to find work for an average of just one day a week, according to U.N. estimates.

Meanwhile, food prices have soared. Since June, the price of wheat flour jumped 53%, cooking oil is up by 39% and sugar by 36%, according to the U.N.’s World Food Program. With winter, heavy snow has blanketed the country, so there is a daily quest to find something to burn in the stove, for cooking and warmth. Unable to afford to buy wood, Mr. Muhammad forages for bushes in the nearby hills.

“We have always been poor, but things have gotten so bad I don’t have words to describe it,” said Palwasha, 35 years old. “My girl was born in such a pitiable condition, my husband’s heart would not allow him to even look at her. He just cried.”

Mr. Muhammad said that before the Taliban takeover, he could make $8 to $10 a week but now that has shrunk to $3 or $4 a week. The couple has five living daughters. If his son had survived, he would have become a second income earner for the household when he got older, Mr. Muhammad said, so they could eventually pull themselves out of destitution.

Two small stones, placed side by side in the snow, mark the graves of the twins in Mr. Muhammad’s home village, just outside the Wardak provincial capital.

The U.S. froze Afghanistan’s central-bank assets and imposed financial sanctions, paralyzing the country’s banking system, after the Taliban takeover. The salaries of civil servants, soldiers, health workers, teachers and other public employees, all met through foreign aid in the past, were no longer paid. Banks stopped people withdrawing their savings. Afghans working abroad could no longer send money home. Neighbors Iran and Pakistan, where Afghans have traditionally gone to seek work in hard times, closed their borders.

The consequences of this crisis can be seen in the Maidan Shahr hospital’s malnutrition ward for toddlers. The mothers bringing children there all had the same grim story. Their husbands couldn’t find work, so the family’s diet shriveled. Mothers said they aren’t eating enough to produce breast milk for babies, while slightly older children often get just bits of bread and tea.

“The war is over, but our biggest problem now is the economic situation,” said Dr. Rahmani, the hospital director.

Developing immune systems need nourishment to fight off infection. There is a surge of emaciated children under five ending up in hospitals across the country, with complications such as acute watery diarrhea and pneumonia, doctors say.

Adila’s 2½-year-old girl, Amina, admitted to the ward in Maidan Shahr, is too weak to stand. Adila, who goes by one name, said that at most, they eat beans at home. “Each day is worse than the last,” said Adila.

A whole nation of over 40 million people seems to be surviving on scraps of food, charity and borrowing from relatives and neighbors. But even the better-off Afghans who were able to help others are running out of resources.

Most of the Taliban’s forces have been deployed to consolidate their military hold on the country, not to provide humanitarian assistance.

Last month, the Taliban regime’s Prime Minister Mullah Hassan Akhund said in a speech that the Taliban had promised to expel the U.S.-led international coalition, establish an Islamic Emirate and bring security. He blamed hunger on the drought, which he said had come from God.

“Remember, the Emirate had not promised you the provision of food. The Emirate has kept its promises. It is God who has promised his creatures the provision of food,” Mr. Akhund said.

Zabiullah Mujahid, the Taliban’s chief spokesman, said the new government was doing its best to address poverty. He added, however, that U.N. statistics that 95% of the population are struggling to feed themselves were an exaggeration. “The poverty in Afghanistan is due to 40 years of destructive wars. It has not come just now,” said Mr. Mujahid.

International aid has restarted, with over $1 billion raised, mostly by Western nations, for Afghanistan late last year. But, as the Taliban administration isn’t recognized by any country—and many ministers are under U.N. sanctions because of alleged involvement in terrorism—the assistance is being distributed directly by humanitarian groups. The Taliban want the aid to flow through their government, but say they have no option but to accept the current arrangement.

Aid has kept running around two-thirds of the public hospitals and clinics previously funded through foreign funds before the Taliban came to power. The hospital in Maidan Shahr is run by the Swedish Committee for Afghanistan, a long-established nongovernment organization.

The World Food Program distributed food to eight million people in December, more than five times as many as it reached in August. WFP says that 23 million people have sunk to crisis or emergency levels of food shortage.

“Winter means decisions for people on how to spend meager incomes, a choice of food versus fuel versus medicine,” said Hsiao-Wei Lee, deputy director for Afghanistan at WFP. “We are having to choose between helping the hungry or the hungrier. We don’t have anywhere close to the resources we need.”

In western Kabul, some 1,400 families inhabit a shanty settlement called Charahi Qambar, a warren of scrappy alleys and mud-wall compounds. The only thing they have to burn in their stoves is plastic, which children scavenge for in the neighborhood. Acrid fumes from the plastic fill mud-floored rooms, where the women and babies spend all day.

Children from the camp are dispatched around Kabul to offer to shine shoes on the roadside. Construction industry work for the men isn’t available much in winters. There is no electricity. Water has to be fetched in plastic containers from a half-hour walk away. Some of the children wander around barefoot in the snow.

Many residents—aware that publicly criticizing the Taliban is dangerous—blamed the international community for their plight. They said that, if the world recognized the Taliban government, aid would flow to them.

“The world should understand that it is not only the Taliban living in Afghanistan. There are hundreds of thousands of innocent people,” said Sahib Khan.

Days earlier, Mr. Khan said he took his daughter, Laila, 3, to a square in central Kabul to sell her to a passerby. He hoped to get $200 to $300 for her, saying that anyone with that sort of money would be able to look after her better than he could. He didn’t find anyone able to pay.

“Who would want to sell their child? Poverty forces me. I need money to get through winter,” said Mr. Khan, who has four other children. “We can’t see any future. Everything is dark.”