Aziz Aryan worked in the Afghan National Army for 11 years in Ghazni and was the sole breadwinner for his family. After the Taliban’s unexpected takeover last August he was unemployed and forced to flee his village with his wife and four young children, as the Taliban was searching for him.
He left Ghazni before the Taliban reached the city and went to Spin Boldak, a district of the Kandahar province, to protect himself and his family from the Taliban’s revenge. He requested financial help from relatives, friends, and businessmen, but no one offered him any. Eventually, when he could no longer tolerate watching his children starve, he decided to end his life on 2nd February.
“My husband saw the cries of hungry children for months and tried several times to earn money and feed children, but failed and committed suicide as he lost hope,” says Samia, Aziz’s 35-year-old widow. “His suicide has further mounted our tragedy.”
The hardships that Samia and her four children faced did not end there. The family’s struggle with hunger only worsened after Aziz’s suicide. Before his death, Aziz sometimes begged in the city to buy naan, but now—as the Taliban has forbidden many women from working—Samia cannot go out to work or beg to feed her children.
“Sometimes I think that committing suicide is the best option for me as well to save myself from the current catastrophe, but then I think hunger will kill my children. I am living to protect them from the killing of famine,” she says. “The Taliban are responsible for my husband’s suicide because they deprived him of the job, displaced him from his native area, and brought tremendous miseries in our family, which compelled him to commit suicide.”
People are dying by suicide across Afghanistan because of starvation, as the US has frozen the Afghan Central Bank’s assets and the IMF suspended access to funds after the Taliban takeover. The World Bank had also halted funding for the country—though it has now approved a package of $1 billion to address the population’s urgent needs. More than half the population, around 23m Afghans, are suffering from hunger. Millions of dollars in lost income after the collapse of the government, soaring food prices, a liquidity crisis, and shortages of cash have deprived much of the population of access to food, water, shelter, and health care.
One day after Aryan’s death, when the children were crying out for food, Samia told her nine-year-old son, Baryal, to go to the city to tell their story to rich people and ask for help. She told him to bring home some bread. Baryal left home, and spent the whole day in the city, but was not able to persuade anyone to help. Disappointed, Baryal eventually had to snatch five breads from a bakery. “Everyone wants to eat, and my sibling did not eat for few days. I had to steal breads to silent the cries of hunger in the home,” he says.
Later, the Taliban heard about the theft, came to his home, arrested, and beat him in front of a crowd next to his home for stealing the bread. “It was not an issue for me that I was hungry every night, but I could not bear the hunger of my small brothers and sister,” says Baryal. “The Taliban beaten me because starvation made me a thief.”
Ghutai, a 32-year-old widow, killed herself and her four-year-old son in an act of desperation on 14th January in Paktia province. Her husband was killed by the Taliban last March, and she was the only earner of the family. After the Taliban takeover, she lost the right to to work. Amina, who is Ghutai’s younger sister, was with Ghutai during her last days. She says that “Ghutai’s son was crying day and night and she was unable to feed him.” Ghutai and her child had resorted to eating grass and boiling leaves, but when winter came and snow fell, there was no more grass or leaves to eat. “Finally, she was so disheartened and said that death is better than this starving life,”Amina says.
Many families across the country are selling their clothing, furniture, livestock, houses, and sometimes their children to earn food. “My daughter sold almost all household items to buy food, but she spent every moment of life in harsh sufferings after using all money and committed suicide,” says Sajida, Ghutai’s 56-year-old mother.
There is no exact figure for how many people have died because of hunger. The Taliban now has control over the Afghan media and many of the journalists who were covering these issues have been tortured. The international media is largely limited to Kabul, so tragedies in the provinces go unreported.
A senior doctor at Wazir Akbar Khan Hospital in central Kabul—who spoke on the condition of anonymity—says reports of suicide had tripled since last August. He estimates that three or four people have been dying daily of hunger suicides increasing from an average of 20 per month last year to between 100 and 120 per month.
“The situation of other provinces is more exacerbated than Kabul, where the suicide rate is vastly high,” he says. “A large number of hungry people are committing suicides in the Southern and Eastern provinces of Afghanistan.” Estimates from the end of last year suggest that at least a million children are at risk of dying from starvation, and some 200 children brought to the different hospitals of Kabul over the past three months have died.
Dr Akram Khpalwk, an Afghan historian, says: “Afghanistan faces the worst hunger in the world and starvation compels numerous people to commit suicides every day. The current suicides of famine in Afghanistan is unprecedented and we cannot get the example of such a large suicide [in Afghanistan] in history.
“Millions lost their lives in the four decades [of] constant war in Afghanistan, but hunger will massacre more Afghans than war in the near future.”
