Afghan conflict displacing hundreds of thousands

KABUL: Afghanistan´s conflict has driven hundreds of thousands of people — most of them children — from their homes this year, prompting a huge need for humanitarian aid across the war-torn nation, the UN said Thursday.

According to the UN´s Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA), more than 217,000 people had to flee their homes because of fighting during the first seven months of 2019.

Of these people displaced by war, 58 percent were children under 18, OCHA said.

The issue of internal displacement is being compounded by natural disasters including a historic drought, which last year forced about 245,000 people to move — and about 100,000 of them have not yet returned.

OCHA “estimates that close to a million people on the move will need humanitarian assistance by the end of the year,” the agency said in a statement. Afghanistan´s war, which has raged in one form or another for four decades, has pushed millions of people out of the country over that time.

OCHA said that between January and July, 270,000 people had returned from Iran, which is in the grips of an economic crisis, and another 16,700 from Pakistan.

The US and the Taliban are expected to announce a deal that would see a withdrawal of international forces, potentially prompting more conflict and displacement.

When school’s not safe: Afghan war takes toll on kids: Sixteen-year-old Madina still has nightmares about the day two huge blasts tore through her school in Kabul, showering shards of broken window glass on her and other students.

She survived, with lacerations to her arms and legs.

The physical wounds are slowly healing, but she remains haunted by the stress of the attack. Madina, like many of her generation in Afghanistan, has never known peace and experts warn the psychological impact of living in a country where schools are often on the front line, and counselling is in short supply, can be overwhelming.

“It was a scary day. I still have nightmares, I cannot focus, it was very hard to prepare for exams,” Madina recalled.

She had to take her maths exam in the corridor at her shattered school as many classrooms have been left unusable. The US and Taliban claim progress in ongoing peace talks, but little has changed for Afghans, and recent attacks underscore how children remain as vulnerable as ever in the grinding conflict.