Shakur's clan of 20 Pashtun families fled Laghman province, where he says Taliban insurgents threatened to kill anyone who didn't give shelter and food to the fighters. The families had precious little food to spare, he says, and feared they would be killed. They retreated to Kabul nearly five years ago.

But Shakur also says the clan came to the capital in search of work; the Afghan refugee ministry contends that many among the internally displaced are economic, not war, refugees.

Shakur says the ministry's emergency aid was too little too late last winter. And so far this year, the ministry has provided no aid, he says.

That's true, says Dr. Abdul Samad Hami, deputy minister of refugees and repatriations. The ministry has submitted a budget for aid for internally displaced people, he says, "but, unfortunately, the Finance Ministry didn't approve the budget."

The relief burden must fall instead on the U.N. and international relief organizations, Hami says.

Shakur, chewing a slimy gob of green snuff, says he'll believe it when he sees it.

So, too, says Mohammed Anwar, 35, the bald, burly, self-appointed head of a section of the much bigger Qambar Square refugee camp a few miles away.

"We get no help; we're forgotten, even in the winter, when people are dying," Anwar says. He stands, arms folded, beside an ancient stove where his children are stuffing plastic and cardboard into a sputtering fire.

Aschiana, a nongovernmental Afghan relief group, provided the camp with a well and two tiny schools — one for boys and one for girls — housed in tents, in accordance with government policies banning permanent structures. The teachers are themselves refugees, like Joma Khan, 21, who says he learned to read and write during his five years in the camp.

There are occasional deliveries of cooking oil, rice, flour and blankets by relief groups, Anwar says, but not enough for the camp's 5,000 to 6,000 people.

Anwar says his extended family of 16 people fled Helmand province four years ago. They were trapped, he says, between NATO coalition airstrikes and night raids on the one hand, and Taliban demands for food and shelter on the other.

Now Anwar ekes out a living selling snacks, vegetables and cigarettes on the shoulder of a highway that skirts the camp. Sometimes he and his male relatives find day labor jobs in Kabul.

He pulls out a thin clump of worn bills, bound by a rubber band. He flaps it against his belly. "This is all I earn. My wife wants money for cooking gas — it's not enough."

Anwar looks down at his children. He has three sons and five daughters. Some attend the tent schools, he says. But on this day they are happily collecting trash to burn or begging from passing cars by tapping urgently on windshields and adopting pitiful poses.

Their hands and faces are stained black. "Look at them; they aren't really this black," Anwar says. "It's because they must live with dirt and trash."

Last winter, he says, more people would have died if several wealthy Afghan businessmen had not delivered food, fuel and blankets. This year, volunteers like Parween Omidi, a media worker in Kabul for the International Security Assistance Force — the North Atlantic Treaty Organization mission in Afghanistan — have taken it upon themselves to provide help.

Omidi, an Afghan American from Orange County, collected clothes, blankets, gloves, hats and school supplies for families at a displaced-persons camp called Chaman-e-Hozori. Escorted by a U.S. military security team, Omidi handed out bags of supplies to several dozen camp residents who had been driven to a school to accept the aid.

PHOTOS: Displaced Afghans dread approaching winter

At the Parwan-a-Duh camp, Abdel Shakur nods in approval when told of the donations. But then he says, "That's fine for them, but we still have nothing."

He does not hold out hope that any aid will come to his camp from the ISAF. In fact, he says, it makes no difference to displaced people who rules the country, or whether international troops go or stay.

"We never see these foreign troops; we are invisible to them," Shakur says.

He says he has heard American combat troops are leaving in 2014. He shrugs at the thought, and turns back to tending his cows and sheep, whose hooves are smeared with their own manure.

"What does it matter?" he says. "After they leave, we will still be poor, and we will still be right here."

david.zucchino@latimes.com