Families flee war, face brutal winter

Thousands of Afghans are pouring into makeshift camps in the capital, where they face a harsh winter as the Taliban return to areas once cleared by foreign forces who this week are ending their combat mission.

On the grimy outskirts of Kabul, hundreds of families are huddled in flimsy tents or mud shelters at the Bagrami Camp. By day the children forage for fuel and food.

At night the families burn garbage to try to keep warm as the icy winds sweep down from the Hindu Kush mountains surrounding the city and temperatures plunge to below freezing.

"Violence has forced us out of our homes, but here misery and poverty have made our life even more difficult," said Abdul Qayyum, 52, who fled here with his wife and eight children. "Such a life is not worth living."

Like the others in the camp, they fled their home in Sangin in the volatile Helmand province, an opium-rich region where the British struggled for years to keep the Taliban at bay before withdrawing in 2010.

The insurgents are now once again on the move, and have extended the summer fighting season as foreign forces have handed over front-line combat responsibility to Afghan security forces.

This week the United States and NATO are formally ending their combat mission, 13 years after the invasion that toppled the Taliban in the wake of the Sept 11, 2001, attacks.

Bloodiest year

The insurgents have taken advantage of the vacuum and seized territory across the country, redrawing battle lines through urban areas and putting civilians at greater risk. The Sangin fighting began in June after Afghan forces replaced withdrawing US troops.

Emanuele Nannini, project coordinator of the Emergency aid organization, says its 90-bed hospital in Helmand's capital of Lashkar Gah has been full for months with wounded civilians and combatants from both sides of the Sangin fighting. Unlike previous years, he said, there had been no winter slowdown. The facility is "100 percent a war hospital", he added.

This has been the bloodiest year of the war for civilians, with the toll of dead and wounded expected to hit 10,000 for the first time since the UN began keeping records in 2008.

Sangin is not the only place in Helmand where the Taliban are attempting to reclaim territory, said Omar Zwak, spokesman for the provincial governor. But it is an important junction on the insurgents' supply routes and their access line to the capital. Zwak estimates that 3,000 families have been displaced from northern Helmand, mostly Sangin, since the summer.

(China Daily 12/30/2014 page11)