Famished Afghan Children Fade Away

His name, Shirin, means “sweetie.” He is about 3 years old and weighs less than 6 1/2 pounds. He lies, with flies crawling around his eyes, in a room with mud floors and walls in mountainous Afghanistan, and the local doctor says he will die soon of hunger.

But there is no money here. In fact, his family is in debt for what to its members seems a large sum: 50 cents.

He lolls on a rough wool blanket like a small baby, his tiny fists clenched, his legs curled up, and he starts to cry. But even that effort seems to exhaust him, and he simply stares at strange visitors with his big dark eyes.

Twenty-two years of war and four years of drought have devastated Afghanistan, leaving millions facing hunger and the threat of starvation.

With the U.S. targeting Afghanistan in its campaign against international terrorism, and tens of thousands fleeing cities for fear of bomb strikes, international aid agencies are warning of a humanitarian catastrophe here.

Last week, the U.N. emergency relief coordinator, Kenzo Oshima, called Afghanistan the site of the world’s worst humanitarian crisis.

Shirin’s mother has already lost three children, all of whom died in infancy from the combined effects of hunger and illness. One of Shirin’s grandmothers lost five of her nine children from the same causes.

The child’s father is away on the front line fighting the Taliban, Afghanistan’s radical Islamic regime.

“Many children in this village have died,” Shirin’s 15-year-old uncle, Asef, said Sunday. “We don’t count them.”

But ask other families in Ejan, 70 miles northwest of the capital, Kabul, and they count their own dead. At the other end of the village, Mohammed Agram, 65, buried his granddaughter, Soleha, age 1, six weeks ago. She died from starvation and dysentery. He had 12 sons and daughters, but six of them died in infancy.

Majestic peaks loom imperiously above the Salang Gorge, where Ejan sits. A river races over white boulders, and golden trees glitter in the sun. This gorge was the scene of some of the fiercest battles between Soviet soldiers and Muslim resistance fighters, or moujahedeen, in the 1979-89 Afghanistan war.

Now, when children such as Soleha and Shirin get sick, their parents go to a local clinic run by Emergency, an aid agency based in Milan, Italy, that assists civilian victims of war. But the doctor there, Mohammed Najib, said Sunday that he cannot do anything to save starving children.

“That is not our duty. Our role is to help only those wounded by mines or bullet wounds or shrapnel,” he said blandly. The clinic takes in about one case involving wounds every month, while about 150 to 200 children have died of hunger and related illness in the region this year, he said.

Najib said 6,000 people live in the region, 2,000 of whom do not have enough food. Many families have nothing to live on but dried mulberries.

“We don’t have the means to help them. So far, no one helps the hungry children,” he said.

The life expectancy in Afghanistan, according to the U.N., is 46 years. The nation also has one of the highest infant mortality rates in the world.

The United Nations has just launched an appeal for $584 million to feed 7.5 million Afghans suffering from hunger and displacement due to war and drought.

Life in this valley has always been harsh, but according to Agram, this year has been the worst. Ahead lies the toughest time of year, winter. In some parts of the country, the U.N. reports, people are eating grass and locusts to survive.

Hardship and hunger have gnawed down Ejan’s population. It has shrunk from about 500 families to 50 or 60.

“Life is difficult. There are no doctors, no medicines, no food,” Agram said. When his family approached Najib for help, the doctor visited their home, but it was too late to save Soleha.

At the top of a steep, slippery, rocky track lies the crude mud hut where Shirin’s family lives. On Sunday, a child’s plastic shoe lay abandoned at the door.

His relatives feed the dying boy the only food they have--one daily meal of flat bread. He fell ill with dysentery and began vomiting six months ago.

The family sold its stocks of winter food--dried mulberries--and borrowed 50 cents to scrape together $4.60 for treatment.

“We spent our money trying to save him, but it did no good,” said his mother, Zergul, 32, covering her mouth with a delicate shawl as she spoke. The mud floor of the home’s second room was bare. In one corner was a pile of shabby bedding.

Shirin’s tiny frame is so frail that he cannot wipe the flies from his eyes, let alone sit up. He is so small that it is difficult to believe that he is 3, but both Najib, the doctor, and members of the family said he is.

Najib said Shirin has always been a tiny, wasted figure because of poor nourishment.

“It’s a problem with food. The child has no energy. He needs good food and good treatment. He’s going to die within six months,” Najib said, holding Shirin out awkwardly, so that the boy looked uncomfortable and vulnerable, his arms waving feebly.

Zergul, Shirin’s mother, has 30 pounds of flour left, which will last up to 10 days. The family has a handful of chickens, but it needs them to sell eggs for money.

When the flour runs out, said Zergul, “we’ll find a way out somehow.” The family has 10 goats, which give milk only in summer. Selling a goat would feed the family for two weeks. If they trade their animals to survive, they will have sold their last assets by sometime this winter.

“Then we’ll just hope for spring and put our faith in Allah,” said Zergul. “It’s our worst year yet.”

Much of the focus of the humanitarian aid for Afghanistan has been on refugees and internally displaced people. But Ejan is an example of the severe hardship of villages in areas without irrigation.

In the past, residents could cultivate small plots of vacant land on high slopes, but the drought has eliminated that possibility.

What’s more, the war between the ruling Taliban and opposition forces, known as the Northern Alliance, has blocked the supply route from Kabul to villages such as Ejan. The road out of town is now a dead end. It leads only to the front line.

There has been no help for Ejan from the Northern Alliance. And in the southern parts of Afghanistan, held by the Taliban, the U.N. complains that it has had frequent conflicts with the regime over the terms under which it can distribute aid.

On Saturday, the first international aid for Afghanistan since the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks on New York and the Pentagon left from Pakistan. Two hundred tons of aid were sent and will travel into northern Afghanistan on 4,000 donkeys.

If it gets as far as Ejan, it will be the first international aid the villagers have seen.

In the Aureng Zamankur displaced persons camp in the nearby Panjshir Valley, the refugees received 220 pounds of flour per family early this year, but that ran out long ago.

Sheba, 30, a mother of five there, opens the lid of her flour tin, which is empty. She said Sunday that her flour ran out that day. All that remained were several loaves of bread.

Her husband begs on the road to bring in enough money to buy bread.

In the Kodoman camp in Anaba, Dr. Mohammed Tarek, 30, said the people in the camp, many of whom have been there for years, are the poorest in the country. Tarek has opened a school there.

“But their fathers come to me and say: ‘How can they learn anything when their stomachs are empty? They can’t think of anything but food.’

“But illiteracy and poverty are the main causes of terrorism,” he said.

In Ejan, the question of how to save Shirin is too big for his mother to deal with. It is God’s domain.

She has no means to find the money that will save him.

“We don’t even know what we could do,” she said.

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Special correspondent Sergei L. Loiko contributed to this report.