RASC News Agency: The humanitarian crisis in Afghanistan has deepened to one of its darkest chapters, as malnutrition among children reaches catastrophic proportions under the Taliban’s repressive rule. In the northeastern province of Badakhshan, thousands of children are wasting away in silence victims of hunger, neglect, and the regime’s systemic dismantling of the country’s health infrastructure.
At the Faizabad Regional Hospital and other provincial health centers, emaciated children fill overcrowded wards where exhausted doctors fight to keep them alive with dwindling resources. Many are too weak to cry; some, according to medical staff, perish before treatment can even begin.
A report by Sky News on Monday, October 14, paints an even grimmer picture: over 4.7 million Afghanistani women and children are in urgent need of life-saving treatment for acute malnutrition. The report warns that nearly 90 percent of children under five years old are trapped in extreme food poverty statistics that reveal a silent famine unfolding in the heart of a country now abandoned to despair.
The findings identify Badakhshan as one of the most severely affected provinces. Over the past year, hundreds of children have died in its mountainous districts many buried in unmarked graves, their deaths unrecorded and unacknowledged by the Taliban authorities. Doctors in Faizabad confirm that child mortality has risen sharply, calling it “a crisis without end.” In several hospitals, two or even three malnourished children are forced to share a single bed, while medical workers face acute shortages of medicine, oxygen, and nutritional supplements.
This tragedy is compounded by the Taliban’s deliberate exclusion of women from public life. The regime’s ban on female healthcare workers and its suffocating restrictions on international aid agencies have crippled Afghanistan’s already fragile healthcare system. According to health officials in Faizabad, the absence of trained female doctors essential for treating women and children in conservative areas has turned malnutrition into a death sentence for thousands.
“This situation is deeply alarming,” said Daniel Timme, UNICEF’s Communications Chief in Afghanistan. “As budgets shrink and humanitarian access narrows, children are dying of causes that should never be fatal. These deaths are entirely preventable.”
Yet, the Taliban leadership remains fixated not on saving lives, but on enforcing moral codes and controlling women’s attire. While famine spreads through villages and children starve in hospital corridors, Taliban officials convene religious councils to dictate dress codes and suppress dissent. This grotesque prioritization of ideology over humanity has left millions at the mercy of hunger and disease.
Across other provinces including Kabul the same tragedy unfolds with alarming speed. Parents speak of watching their children grow thinner by the day, powerless to feed them amid rising food prices and collapsing aid programs. In remote areas of Badakhshan, mobile health teams supported by UNICEF travel treacherous mountain paths to reach malnourished children, yet the demand for care far exceeds their limited capacity.
In interviews with RASC News Agency, several families said they had “lost all strength to resist hunger.” One mother from Yaftal district pleaded, “We have nothing left no food, no medicine, no hope. If the world does not help us soon, our children will disappear like dust.”
The Taliban’s indifference has turned Afghanistan into a silent graveyard for its youngest citizens. By suffocating humanitarian access, banning female aid workers, and driving the nation’s economy to collapse, the regime has condemned millions of children to starvation.
Today, as Afghanistan faces what UNICEF calls a “critical threshold of survival,” the Taliban’s obsession with control and censorship stands as one of the primary causes of this preventable catastrophe. Every child who dies of hunger in Afghanistan is not just a victim of poverty it is a victim of Taliban neglect, cruelty, and moral bankruptcy.
