War, Disease, Hunger Taking Their Toll In Afghanistan

Shy, smiling Naqibullah seems like most youngsters until he raises his right pant leg, exposing a plastic prosthesis; a rocket blew off his own leg and mauled the other with shrapnel.

Asked how he feels about the people who wounded him, the 8-year-old boy says, finally, “I hope God will cut off their leg like me.”

Tousle-haired Naqibullah was wounded two years ago as he played in a road in the Afghan capital, Kabul, one more victim of the pitched warfare among Afghanistan’s feuding Muslim militias. The fighting has left much of the city and the country in a shambles.

Maimed bodies, hunger, homelessness, sickness, want and more than 20,000 dead. This is the legacy of the struggle for power in Afghanistan.

Home for Naqibullah and his mother, Zovinum, and for hundreds of other people in north Kabul who have lost their homes in the fighting, is an unheated, concrete school building. The refugees have only plastic sheeting to cover the windows against the piercing night cold.

Every Tuesday, a mobile clinic from the Afghan Red Crescent Society comes to the school. Dr. Abdul Ahat deals with the health problems of those who don’t have the money to buy food and who sleep on a piece of cardboard at night.

“They simply don’t have the facilities to keep warm,” said Ahat, 35, as women in shawls, anxious expressions upon their windburned faces, waited with their children for the doctor’s care.

Ahat estimates that 20 percent of the children he sees are malnourished; a 2-year-old he examined two weeks ago weighed just 11 pounds. People in Kabul suffer from amoebic dysentery and giardiasis, an intestinal infection, because of a lack of clean water for washing and other sanitation problems. Meanwhile, freezing winter temperatures have spread bronchitis and pneumonia.

“Warmer weather will bring relief from the cold,” Ahat explained, “but also a threat of new illness, including malaria.”

International aid agencies estimate the population of Kabul and its environs at 1.4 million; half of these people have been driven from their homes by the fighting in Kabul or elsewhere in the country, and forced to seek shelter and food where they can. Some have moved a dozen times or more to flee the battling.

The United States poured hundreds of millions of dollars into arming the now-feuding Muslim groups when they were combatting the Soviet-backed Communist regime in the 1980s. Washington also helped the victims of war, but last summer pulled the plug on grants to non-governmental aid agencies.

Kabul’s humanitarian needs have become so vast and pressing, however, that American aid began flowing to the people of Kabul again last week, albeit on a very modest scale.

To provide some relief against the winter cold, CARE, the U.S.-based international charity, began distributing blankets and plastic sheeting brought in from neighboring Pakistan to assist 12,000 needy families; the agency will provide food to 5,000 impoverished widows.

The State Department’s Office of Foreign Disaster Assistance has paid $800,000 for half the CARE programs’ costs, said Stephen Masty, the charity’s emergency relief coordinator.

There is no electricity in Kabul, save for a few government offices and international aid agencies that are equipped with diesel generators. Firewood has become so costly that one aid worker estimated that 60 percent of people’s earnings go toward purchasing it.

Poverty is a widespread consequence of the protracted warfare. Najiba, 30, a mother of seven children and now expecting her eighth, lost her home in the fighting. Her husband can only get sporadic employment as a watchman.

“Sometimes, when my husband finds work, we can buy food,” said the gaptoothed woman, who huddled under a rasberry-colored cloak to keep out a pervasive morning chill. “But we have to beg when he can’t. Otherwise the children cry.”