Bitter winter kills Afghan children fleeing war
Baku, February 18 (AZERTAC). Fleeing Nato bombardment and Taliban intimidation, thousands of Afghans in refugee camps in the capital Kabul face a new enemy: an unusually bitter winter that is killing their children.
Del Agha, a farmer from the southern province of Kandahar, the heartland of the Taliban insurgency, left his home and orchards four years ago after a Nato air strike that he says killed several villagers.
Last week he lost one of his two children, a three year-old girl, to the freezing temperatures.
"It was very cold that night. When I woke up my baby daughter was dead," he said.
His second child, also a girl and only a few months old, is coughing and he says he fears for her life at the Charahi Qambar refugee camp, one of several settlements for displaced people in and around Kabul.
"Life is very hard and I`m worried for my other child," he told AFP at his camp home -- a hole in the ground with mud walls about a metre high covered with filthy cloth and torn pieces of old tents.
Despite the billions of dollars in aid that have flowed into Afghanistan since the fall of the Taliban, it remains one of the poorest countries in the world.
Khair Mohammad, 12, and his family are also from the south and came to the camp, on the southwestern outskirts of Kabul, from Helmand province.
They fled after the Taliban killed his uncle by hanging him from a tree and running a sharp knife from side to side across his chest and belly, accusing him of spying for foreign forces.
Now heavy snowstorms blow through the family`s huts.
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