Access to food aid and other life-saving services in Afghanistan is close to running out, the
United Nations has warned, as concern mounts that the country is facing a “looming humanitarian catastrophe”.
The grim assessment from the UN’s Office for the coordination of humanitarian affairs [OCHA] came amid an appeal for an extra $200m (£145m) in emergency funding in
Afghanistan after the Taliban’s takeover sparked a host of new issues.
The UN says 18 million people are facing a humanitarian disaster, and a further 18 million could quickly join them.
The warning came as the UN’s children’s agency, Unicef, disclosed that it had registered hundreds of children who had been separated from their families in the chaos of the evacuation from Kabul’s Hamid Karzai international airport.
The children included unaccompanied minors who ended up on flights to countries including Germany and Qatar.
With several key donors including Germany, the World Bank and EU suspending their aid programmes follow the Taliban’s lightning military conquest of the country last month, spiralling food prices, the impact or recent devastating drought and uncertainty over how the hardline Islamist movement will provide services to an impoverished and largely rural population, the question of aid has become ever more urgent.