At least 166 people have died in a wave of bitterly cold weather sweeping through Afghanistan, an official said on Saturday, as extreme conditions piled misery on the poverty-stricken nation.
Afghanistan has been frozen by temperatures as low as -33 degrees Celsius (-27 degrees Fahrenheit) since Jan. 10, combined with widespread snowfall, freezing gales and regular power outages.
Aid agencies had warned before the cold snap that more than half of Afghanistan’s 38 million people faced starvation, while nearly four million children suffered from malnutrition.
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The Disaster Management Ministry said on Saturday that the death toll rose by 88 over the past week and now stands at 166, according to data from 24 of the country’s 34 provinces.
The deaths were caused by flooding, fire and leaks from gas heaters that Afghan families use to heat their homes, ministry official Abdul Rahman Zahid said in a video statement.
Some 100 houses were destroyed or damaged and nearly 80,000 cattle, a vital commodity for Afghanistan’s poor, also died from the cold.
The World Health Organization (WHO) said this week that 17 people had died in a single village in the northeastern province of Badakhshan due to an outbreak of “acute respiratory infection”.
“Severe weather prevents aid from reaching the area,” the WHO said.
Afghanistan is enduring its second winter since US-backed forces withdrew and Taliban Islamists returned to Kabul to retake government.
Foreign aid has fallen sharply since then and the central bank’s key assets were seized by the United States, worsening a humanitarian crisis considered one of the worst in the world.
The Taliban government banned Afghan women from working with humanitarian groups last month, prompting many to suspend operations.
An exemption was then granted to female NGO workers in the health sector and some organizations restarted their programmes.
