‘The Children Scream From the Hunger at Night’: Afghans Suffer After Biden Seizes Funds

New reporting from The Washington Post on Monday laid out the increasingly dire conditions across Afghanistan amid drought and in the wake of the Taliban takeover and disastrous U.S. withdrawal last year following nearly two decades of war.

“We were poor before the takeover. Now we have nothing,” Ahmed Shah Jamshidi told journalist Susannah George, who reports that the 42-year-old Afghan borrows money from shopkeepers to buy potatoes and cooking oil so his wife can make his family a watery stew.

When the family has no food, “the children scream from hunger at night,” Jamshidi explained. “Sometimes all we have is donated stale bread and tea. And when we run out of tea, I just gather grass to boil with the water.”

In a move that The Intercept‘s Austin Ahlman called “tantamount to mass murder,” Biden in February signed an executive order to evenly split the central bank assets held in the Federal Reserve between a trust “for the benefit of the people of Afghanistan” and American families of 9/11 victims who have taken legal action in the U.S. court system.

Various reports from United Nations and humanitarian organizations in recent months have found about 20 million people in Afghanistan, roughly half the population, face acute hunger.

“Unprecedented levels of humanitarian assistance focused on bolstering food security have made a difference. But the food security situation is dire,” Richard Trenchard, the U.N. Food and Agriculture Organization representative in Afghanistan, said last month.

The newspaper noted that the U.S. State Department’s “refusal to recognize the Taliban also made it impossible for the country’s new rulers to access billions of dollars in foreign assets. Parallel moves by the World Bank and the European Union brought Afghanistan’s economy crashing down.”

Although the U.S. government and others have recently begun to “funnel money through the United Nations and groups that bypass Taliban leadership,” the Post continued, “these hundreds of millions of dollars in international aid are a small fraction of the billions that once kept the country afloat.”

George’s coverage came a week after The Intercept‘s Murtaza Hussain detailed calls for the Biden administration “to take urgent steps to help the Afghan economy,” highlighting the impact of the $7 billion seizure and that lawyers are likely to be key beneficiaries of the February order.

Highlighting Hussain’s article last week, the Center for Economic and Policy Research (CEPR) noted the rising hunger as well as a reported increase in child marriages.

“It’s happening all over and in different social economic spheres,” said Cornelius Williams, head of child protection for the United Nations Children’s Fund (UNICEF), in April. “What we are seeing is a commodification of girls and child marriages becoming more of a transaction. Children in general are becoming an economic commodity in the household.”

Originally published at Commondreams.org, written by Jessica Corbett.