Haseeb like millions Afghan children paying heavy price of wars due to poverty

By Ilyas Khan

ISLAMABAD, Sep 11 (APP): The green eyed Haseeb Ahmed, 15,  an orphan  left his native place Mazr-i-Sharif due to war and is now doing cobbler job on a roadside in Kabul to feed two young brothers, two sisters and  and an elderly widowed mother.

 Heseeb said his father was a labour and supported his family with his meager income but was killed in the long war in Afghanistan  and he has to take over responsibility of feeding the family. Now being an elder member of his family, he has no other option but to polish shoes of the people.

 Talking to APP, he said he also wanted to study and go to school like other boys but could not continue his study owing to poverty and to support his family. He said  now he and his other brother, who was just 13 year old, were working as labourers. 

 Haseeb, who’s worries could be judged from his face and eyes, said he earned Rs. 100 to 150 daily which hardly fulfill their daily meal expenses.

 The continuous wars and interference of super powers in Afghanistan due to its strategic location  in the last 40 years had badly affected this impoverished country. 
  These foreign imposed wars had killed hundreds of thousands of Afghans and orphaned the same number of people.

 This was not only the one story of Haseeb Ahmed, but one could find hundreds of thousands of Haseebs’ who were compelled to leave schools and do a labour job in their tender age. 
 Most of the people in Afghanistan were attached with agriculture and labour jab as there was no industries in this war-ravaged country.

 According to a report of Save the Children Afghanistan, over 12,500 children were killed or maimed in the violence between 2015 and 2018, 274 children were recruited for combat or support roles. More than 3.7 million children were currently out of school, 60 percent of them girls.

 At least 700 schools were closed because of the violence in 2018. 3,8 million children need humanitarian assistance, 600,000 of whom were suffering with severe acute malnutrition. Between 2014 and 2018, over 8,000 civilians fell victim to explosives such as IED’s and mines. 84 percent of the victims of explosive remnants of war were children.

 Increased conflict and insecurity in Afghanistan had left children paying a heavy price. Afghanistan was already one of the most dangerous places in the world for a child. 

 Now, with a security crisis, skyrocketing food prices, a severe drought, the spread of COVID-19, and another harsh winter just around the corner, children were at greater risk than ever.
 Children should not pay for conflict with their childhoods. Afghanistan’s children need peace, said Muhammad Tahir Khan, a Pakistani journalist, who also visited Kabul along with other journalists soon after fall of Kabul to Taliban.

 The continuous war had badly affected economy of this country and forty percent of Afghanistan economy was run through foreign aid. According to latest Asian Development Bank (ADB) Report, 47.5 percent of Afghanistan’s total population was living below the poverty line and more than 3.5 million Afghans were still living in Pakistan and other countries as refugees.

 “One in three Afghans do not know where their next meal will come from. Nearly half of all children under the age of five are predicted to be acutely malnourished in the next 12 months,” the UN Secretary General spokesperson Dujarric has said.

 Afghanistan’s 2021 Humanitarian Response Plan required US $ 1.3 billion to help more than 18 million people, but the efforts are 40 percent funded, leaving a deficit of US $ 766 million. Dujarric said that the Geneva “conference will advocate for a swift scale-up in funding”.

 After taking over of Kabul on August 15 by the Taliban, people of Afghanistan were again confronted with a number of multiple challenges where the panic people were trying to leave their motherland and trying their luck for a better future abroad.

 So for, thousands of people had left their country, majority of them were those Afghans who had worked with the US and NATO forces. According to US, they had evacuated 1,23,000 Afghans from Afghanistan to the USA and some other countries.     

 Still a large number were desperate to leave their country but could not be evacuated due to expiry of  the August 31 deadline for foreign troops’ evacuation under the Doha  agreement.
 According to UNICEF’s latest report, against a backdrop of conflict and insecurity, children were living in communities that were running out of water because of drought. 

     They were missing out on life-saving vaccines. Many were so malnourished and lied in hospital beds, too weak to grasp an outstretched finger.

 Around 10 million children needed humanitarian assistance to survive. If current trends continued, UNICEF predicted that one million children under five years of age in Afghanistan would suffer from severe acute malnutrition. Around 300,000 children have been forced out of their homes. 

 The United Nations has convened an international aid conference in Geneva on September 13 to help avert what United Nations Secretary General Antonio Guterres called a "looming humanitarian catastrophe".
APP Services