Afghan villagers flee more than war

QALA-E NAU, Afghanistan — Between a sandy cliff and a cracked riverbed on the edge of this small provincial capital, 380 families are camped in a cluster of hand-sewn, sunbleached tents, waiting for rain and peace to let them return to their ancestral villages. But across droughtstricken, war-torn Badghis province in far western Afghanistan, the wait will not end soon.

One of the camp occupants is Reza Gul, a widow in her early 30s with four young children. Three months ago, with little food left and Taliban fighters harassing security posts near their village, she abandoned her only valuable possessions — a pair of donkeys —and fled in a rented truck. Now the family shares a tiny tent, where Gul shells pistachios all day with a small hammer, a chore for which local merchants pay about 50 cents a day.

Gul is among 120,000 people in Badghis who have sought refuge here in the past several months, according to a new report from the U.N. humanitarian agency for Afghanistan, nearly doubling the number of drought-displaced people in the far western part of the country to some 250,000.

Chronic drought, the result of a severe lack of rain and snowfall in many recent years, has now spread to 20 of the country’s 34 provinces, where nearly 15 million people depend on agriculture.

This year, aid officials said, nearly 45 percent of Afghans are facing food shortages due to drought and other factors, a sharp increase from 33 percent last year. Close to a half-million have been receiving emergency food aid since July, and officials plan to assist at least 1.4 million as winter approaches. The worst-hit areas are five northwestern provinces, where more than 300,000 people received extra food aid last month, and conditions in Badghis are especially desperate.

“This is the epicenter of food insecurity and drought,” Zlatan Milisic, country director for the World Food Program, said during a recent visit to the camps outside Qala-e Nau, where the agency is providing food. He noted that poor farmers in this desolate region depend almost exclusively on rain to irrigate their crops. Last winter, aid officials reported, precipitation was so low in Badghis that the wheat harvest this spring fell by 60 percent.

Aid officials hope to persuade some of the displaced families to return to their villages by offering to send extra aid there. They worry that the newcomers will overwhelm towns.

“Morally, we can’t stop aiding them” in the urban camps, Milisic said.

PAMELA CONSTABLE/THE WASHINGTON POST Makeshift tents put up by farmers fleeing the Taliban and drought cover a hillside outside Qala-e Nau, Afghanistan.