A Bitter Winter of Crisis in Frozen Afghanistan
QADIS, Afghanistan — When the temperatures plunged far below freezing in Niaz Mohammad’s village in January, the father of three struggled to keep his family warm. One night, he piled every stick he had collected into their small wood stove. He scavenged for trash that might burn, covered the windows with plastic tarps and held his 2-month-old son close.
But the cold was merciless. The infant fell silent. His tears turned to ice. By daybreak, he was gone. “The cold took him,” said Mr. Mohammad, 30.
Afghanistan is gripped by a winter described as the harshest in over a decade, battering millions of people already reeling from hunger and disease. By the end of February, more than 200 people had died from hypothermia and 225,000 head of livestock had perished, the authorities said.
The harsh temperatures come at a particularly difficult moment. In December, the Taliban administration barred women from working in most aid organizations, prompting many to suspend operations.
The Afghan Ministry of Disaster Management has tried to fill the gap, officials say, working with local organizations to provide some food and cash assistance. But the response has been hampered by difficulty reaching far-flung communities, and by sanctions from foreign governments.
The cutback has already been felt across Afghanistan, which fell into a humanitarian crisis after Western troops withdrew in August 2021. About half of the country’s 40 million people face potentially life-threatening food insecurity, the United Nations said.
In Mr. Mohammad’s village, in the Qadis district of northwestern Afghanistan, the first wave of cold in January brought 500 patients a day to the town’s health clinic, according to Dr. Zamanulden Haziq, the director.
In a village nearby, Gul Qadisi, 62, spent nearly a month trying to get medical care for her year-old grandson, but the roads were too clogged with snow. Finally she managed to get him to a hospital in Herat, where the children’s intensive care unit had two or three sick children for every bed. Doctors told her she had barely made it in time; the child had been near death from pneumonia.
One recent afternoon, Bahaulden Rahimi, a 60-year-old shepherd, was trying to find land to graze his sheep when he got a call that the mountains would soon be blanketed in snow. He came straight home.
Now, he worries that he has merely delayed his flock’s fate. He was running out of feed, the price of which had more than doubled at the local market in recent months, he said. He had picked up a cough, and 13 of his 80 sheep had already died from the cold, a roughly $3,000 loss that threatened his family’s lives.
“Losing the sheep, it’s like losing a family member,” he said. “This is all we have.”