PUL-E ALAM, Afghanistan: Khurma had to borrow her neighbor’s shoes to walk to Pul-e Alam city to collect a cash handout being given to the growing number of vulnerable Afghans who are struggling to survive the winter.
The 45-year-old widow waited in her threadbare blue burqa to receive 3,200 Afghanis ($45) from the UN World Food Programme (WFP) in the eastern Afghan city, where temperatures can drop well below freezing.
“We are desperate,” the mother-of-six told AFP. “When we can’t find any bread, we go to bed on an empty stomach.”
She is one of millions facing months of hunger and cold, with natural disasters and displacement putting more Afghans at risk even as funding to one of the world’s poorest countries — wracked by decades of war — has plummeted.
“Things were already quite catastrophic” in Afghanistan, said Caroline Gluck, spokesperson for the UN refugee agency, UNHCR. “But as winter starts we have two massive emergencies.”
Thousands of people are still sleeping in tents in Herat province after successive earthquakes in October destroyed or rendered uninhabitable 31,000 homes.
And around half a million Afghans fleeing deportation from Pakistan have returned in recent months to a country where unemployment is rife, “at the worst possible time of the year,” Gluck said.
Rabbani, 32, is one of them.
As a refugee, he is entitled to WFP aid: 50 kilograms (110 pounds) of flour, six kilograms of red beans, five liters of oil and 450 grams of salt.
But, “there is no work here,” he said.
When freezing temperatures set in, his family of seven abandoned the tent they had occupied since crossing from Pakistan for a shack.
“When there is nothing left to eat, death is better than begging.”
Shakar Gul, 67, had just received the first of six monthly payments of 3,200 Afghanis from the WFP.
“If we adults don’t have enough to eat for several days, that’s okay... but we don’t let our children die of hunger,” she said.
With the money she will be able to buy household essentials — but only enough for 15 days.
This year, there is less assistance, due in part to a spike in humanitarian emergencies around the world and donor fatigue.
“Excluded people still come here and wait, especially women,” said Baryalai Hakimi, director of the WFP’s Pul-e Alam center. “They are upset. We explain to them that the people who get help are more vulnerable than they are.”
Such is the case for Bibi Raihana. Aged 40, she has eight children, a husband in prison, health problems and “not a single Afghani.”
Her eyes were wet with tears behind the mesh of her burqa.
“My name wasn’t on the lists. They didn’t give me anything,” she said.
This winter, 15.8 million Afghans need assistance, with 2.8 million at an emergency level of food insecurity, said Philippe Kropf, spokesperson for WFP, which provides 90 percent of food aid in Afghanistan.
Funding shortages have forced WFP to tighten the criteria for aid handouts, with just six million people eligible for emergency assistance in food, cash or vouchers, Kropf added.
“It leaves a gap of 10 million people.”
Once flush with humanitarian aid following the US-led invasion of the country, funding to Afghanistan has plummeted since the Taliban returned to power in mid-2021, in part over the many restrictions imposed on women.
Today, approximately 85 percent of Afghans live on less than $1 a day, according to the UN, with extreme poverty found in both rural and urban areas.
The poorest are left with distressing choices: fall into debt, take their kids out of school to work in the streets, or marry off young daughters to lessen household expenses.
In a desert an hour’s drive from Pul-e Alam, WFP distributed essentials in the Baraki Barak district.
Hunched in the back of a three-wheeled flatbed, 77-year-old Zulfiqar said his family sometimes goes hungry for days.
“When we have nothing left to eat, we just wrap ourselves in our shawls and sleep,” he said.
In the poverty-stricken Kabul suburbs, thousands of returnees from Pakistan have sought aid.
The Taliban authorities provided assistance at the border to the returnees, but government welfare programs are very limited.
Depending on eligibility, UNHCR distributes a maximum of $375 per person, sometimes much less.
Najiba arrived in Afghanistan two months ago with her husband and three children.
All five sleep on the floor in a room in her brother’s house.
“We fill cans with hot water to keep warm, we don’t have any wood,” she said, rocking her youngest child in the courtyard. Her other children were barefoot nearby, despite the cold.
Benazira’s fate is just as uncertain: at 34, she has eight daughters, a son and a sick husband.
Clutching the money she had just received from UNHCR, she asked for help counting the crisp, unfamiliar US dollars — $340, enough to survive three weeks.
“Only God is with us,” she said, before setting off on the hours-long journey to Nangarhar province, where her family sleeps in a brickyard.
Millions of Afghans go hungry as winter cold bites
https://arab.news/bkzvv
Millions of Afghans go hungry as winter cold bites
- Thousands are still sleeping in tents in Herat province after earthquakes in October destroyed or rendered uninhabitable 31,000 homes
- Around half a million Afghans fleeing deportation from Pakistan have returned in recent months to a country where unemployment is rife
Salman Rushdie stage attacker sentenced to 25 years in prison
- Hadi Matar was found guilty of attempted murder and assault for the attack on stage during a lecture in New York state
- He faces a second trial on terrorism charges with prosecutors claiming he had supported Hezbollah
MAYVILLE, New York: The man convicted of stabbing Salman Rushdie on a New York lecture stage in 2022, leaving the prizewinning author blind in one eye, was sentenced Friday to serve 25 years in prison.
A jury found Hadi Matar, 27, guilty of attempted murder and assault in February.
Rushdie did not return to court to the western New York courtroom for his assailant’s sentencing but submitted a victim impact statement. During the trial, the 77-year-old author was the key witness, describing how he believed he was dying when a masked attacker plunged a knife into his head and body more than a dozen times as he was being introduced at the Chautauqua Institution to speak about writer safety.
Before being sentenced, Matar stood and made a statement about freedom of speech in which he called Rushdie a hypocrite.
“Salman Rushdie wants to disrespect other people,” said Matar, clad in white-striped jail clothing and wearing handcuffs. “He wants to be a bully, he wants to bully other people. I don’t agree with that.”
Matar received the maximum 25-year sentence for the attempted murder of Rushdie and seven years for wounding a man who was on stage with him. The sentences must run concurrently because both victims were injured in the same event, Chautauqua County District Attorney Jason Schmidt said.
In requesting the maximum sentence, Schmidt told the judge that Matar “chose this. He designed this attack so that he could inflict the most amount of damage, not just upon Mr. Rushdie, but upon this community, upon the 1,400 people who were there to watch it.”
Public defender Nathaniel Barone pointed out that Matar had a otherwise clean criminal record and disputed that the people in the audience should be considered victims, suggesting that a sentence of 12 years would be appropriate.
“Every day since then, for the last couple of years, this case has been an international publicity sponge,” Barone said. “There was no presumption, ever, of innocence for Mr. Matar from the very beginning.”
Rushdie spent 17 days at a Pennsylvania hospital and more than three weeks at a New York City rehabilitation center. The author of “Midnight’s Children,” “The Moor’s Last Sigh” and “Victory City” detailed his recovery in his 2024 memoir, “Knife.”
Matar next faces a federal trial on terrorism-related charges. While the first trial focused mostly on the details of the knife attack itself, the next one is expected to delve into the more complicated issue of motive.
Authorities said Matar, a US citizen, was attempting to carry out a decades-old fatwa, or edict, calling for Rushdie’s death when he traveled from his home in Fairview, New Jersey, to target Rushdie at the summer retreat about 70 miles (112.6 kilometers) southwest of Buffalo.
Matar believed the fatwa, first issued in 1989, was backed by the Lebanon-based militant group Hezbollah and endorsed in a 2006 speech by the group’s secretary-general, Hassan Nasrallah, according to federal prosecutors.
Iranian leader Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini issued the fatwa after publication of Rushdie’s novel, “The Satanic Verses,” which some Muslims consider blasphemous. Rushdie spent years in hiding, but after Iran announced it would not enforce the decree he traveled freely over the past quarter century.
Matar pleaded not guilty to a three-count indictment charging him with providing material to terrorists, attempting to provide material support to Hezbollah and engaging in terrorism transcending national boundaries.
Video of the assault, captured by the venue’s cameras and played at trial, show Matar approaching the seated Rushdie from behind and reaching around him to stab at his torso with a knife. As the audience gasps and screams, Rushdie is seen raising his arms and rising from his seat, walking and stumbling for a few steps with Matar hanging on, swinging and stabbing until they both fall and are surrounded by onlookers who rush in to separate them.
Jurors in Matar’s first trial delivered their verdict after less than two hours of deliberation.
Conflict and climate drive record global hunger in 2024, UN says
- “The 2025 Global Report on Food Crises paints a staggering picture,” said Rein Paulsen, FAO’s Director of Emergencies and Resilience
- “Conflict, weather extremes and economic shocks are the main drivers, and they often overlap“
ROME: Acute food insecurity and child malnutrition rose for a sixth consecutive year in 2024, affecting more than 295 million people across 53 countries and territories, according to a UN report released on Friday.
That marked a 5 percent increase on 2023 levels, with 22.6 percent of populations in worst-hit regions experiencing crisis-level hunger or worse.
“The 2025 Global Report on Food Crises paints a staggering picture,” said Rein Paulsen, Director of Emergencies and Resilience at the UN Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO).
“Conflict, weather extremes and economic shocks are the main drivers, and they often overlap,” he added.
Looking ahead, the UN warned of worsening conditions this year, citing the steepest projected drop in humanitarian food funding since the report’s inception — put at anywhere between 10 percent to more than 45 percent.
US President Donald Trump has led the way, largely shutting down the US Agency for International Development, which provides aid to the world’s needy, canceling more than 80 percent of its humanitarian programs.
“Millions of hungry people have lost, or will soon lose, the critical lifeline we provide,” warned Cindy McCain, the head of the Rome-based World Food Programme.
Conflict was the leading cause of hunger, impacting nearly 140 million people across 20 countries in 2024, including areas facing “catastrophic” levels of food insecurity in Gaza, South Sudan, Haiti and Mali. Sudan has confirmed famine conditions.
Economic shocks, such as inflation and currency devaluation, helped push 59.4 million people into food crises in 15 countries — nearly double the levels seen prior to the COVID-19 pandemic — including Syria and Yemen.
Extreme weather, particularly El Nino-induced droughts and floods, shunted 18 countries into crisis, affecting more than 96 million people, especially in Southern Africa, Southern Asia, and the Horn of Africa.
The number of people facing famine-like conditions more than doubled to 1.9 million — the highest since monitoring for the global report began in 2016.
Malnutrition among children reached alarming levels, the report said. Nearly 38 million children under five were acutely malnourished across 26 nutrition crises, including in Sudan, Yemen, Mali and Gaza.
Forced displacement also exacerbated hunger. Nearly 95 million forcibly displaced people, including refugees and internally displaced persons, lived in countries facing food crises, such as Democratic Republic of Congo, Colombia.
Despite the grim overall trend, 2024 saw some progress. In 15 countries, including Ukraine, Kenya and Guatemala, food insecurity eased due to humanitarian aid, improved harvests, easing inflation and a decline in conflict.
To break the cycle of hunger, the report called for investment in local food systems. “Evidence shows that supporting local agriculture can help the most people, with dignity, at lower cost,” Paulsen said.
Russia jails Australian man for 13 years for fighting on Ukraine’s side
- The court had ruled that he had taken part in combat operations against Russian troops
MOSCOW: Russia has sentenced an Australian citizen to 13 years in a maximum security prison for fighting alongside Ukrainian forces, state prosecutors in a part of eastern Ukraine controlled by Russia said on Friday.
Oscar Jenkins, 33, was found guilty by a court of participating in an armed conflict as a mercenary, a statement from the prosecutors said.
The court had ruled that he had taken part in combat operations against Russian troops between March and December 2024.
Australian media reported last year that Jenkins, a teacher from Melbourne, was serving alongside Ukraine’s military when he was captured by Russian forces.
In January, Australia summoned the Russian ambassador over what turned out to be false reports that Jenkins had been killed after being captured by Russia.
Children die as USAID aid cuts snap a lifeline for the world’s most malnourished
- For years USAID had been the backbone of the humanitarian response in northeastern Nigeria
- Globally, 50 percent of the therapeutic foods for treating malnutrition in children were funded by USAID, and 40 percent of the supplies were produced in the US
DIKWA, Nigeria: Under the dappled light of a thatched shelter, Yagana Bulama cradles her surviving infant. The other twin is gone, a casualty of malnutrition and the international funding cuts that are snapping the lifeline for displaced communities in Nigeria’s insurgency-ravaged Borno state.
“Feeding is severely difficult,” said Bulama, 40, who was a farmer before Boko Haram militants swept through her village, forcing her to flee. She and about 400,000 other people at the humanitarian hub of Dikwa — virtually the entire population — rely on assistance. The military restricts their movements to a designated “safe zone,” which severely limits farming.
For years, the United States Agency for International Development had been the backbone of the humanitarian response in northeastern Nigeria, helping non-government organizations provide food, shelter and health care to millions of people. But this year, the Trump administration cut more than 90 percent of USAID’s foreign aid contracts and $60 billion in overall assistance around the world.
Programs serving children were hit hard.
Bulama previously lost young triplets to hunger before reaching therapeutic feeding centers in Dikwa. When she gave birth to twins last August, both were severely underweight. Workers from Mercy Corps enrolled them in a program to receive a calorie-dense paste used to treat severe acute malnutrition.
But in February, Mercy Corps abruptly ended the program that was entirely financed by USAID. Two weeks later, one of the twins died, Bulama said.
She has no more tears, only dread for what may come next.
“I don’t want to bury another child,” she said.
‘Very traumatic’
Globally, 50 percent of the therapeutic foods for treating malnutrition in children were funded by USAID, and 40 percent of the supplies were produced in the US, according to Shawn Baker, chief program officer at Helen Keller Intl and former chief nutritionist at USAID.
He said the consequence could be 1 million children not receiving treatment for severe malnutrition, resulting in 163,500 additional deaths per year. For Helen Keller Intl, its programs in Bangladesh, Nepal and Nigeria have been terminated.
“It is very traumatic,” said Trond Jensen, the head of the United Nations humanitarian office in Maiduguri, Borno’s capital, of the funding cuts, noting that other donors, including the European Union, have taken similar steps this year. “One of the things is the threat to the lives of children.”
UNICEF still runs a therapeutic feeding center nearby, which now supports Bulama’s surviving baby, but its capacity is stretched. It is turning away many people previously served by other aid groups that have pulled out due to funding cuts.
Intersos, an Italian humanitarian organization, has the only remaining facility providing in-patient services for malnutrition in Dikwa, treating the most perilous cases. Its workers say they are overwhelmed, with at least 10 new admissions of seriously malnourished children daily.
“Before the USAID cut, we made a lot of progress,” said Ayuba Kauji, a health and nutrition supervisor. “Now my biggest worry is high mortality. We don’t have enough resources to keep up.”
Intersos was forced to reduce its staff from 30 to 11 in Dikwa after the USAID freeze. Its nutrition and health facilities now operate solely on support from the Nigerian Humanitarian Fund, a smaller pot of money contributed by a few European countries. That funding will be finished in June.
The crisis is equally acute in Maiduguri, where the economy is reeling from massive terminations of aid workers. At another Intersos-run facility, 10 of the 12 doctors have left and four nurses remain, with 50 new admissions of malnourished children per week.
“It used to be far less,” said Emmanuel Ali, one of the remaining doctors.
Beyond nutrition
The effects of the funding cuts extend far beyond nutrition. At the International Organization for Migration’s reception center in Dikwa, thousands of displaced families and those escaping Boko Haram captivity are stranded. There are no new shelters being built and no support for relocation.
“Before, organizations like Mercy Corps built mud-brick homes and rehabilitated damaged shelters to absorb people from the IOM reception center,” said one official at the center, speaking on condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to speak publicly on the situation. “Now, that has stopped.”
Jensen, the UN humanitarian head in Maiduguri, said, “sadly, we are not seeing additional funding to make up for the US cuts.” He warned that vulnerable people could turn to risky ways of coping, including joining violent groups.
A global problem
The crisis in Nigeria is part of a larger reckoning. According to Kate Phillips-Barrasso, Mercy Corps’ vice president for policy and advocacy, 40 of its 62 US-funded programs with the potential to reach 3.5 million people in Nigeria, Central African Republic, Ethiopia, Somalia, Iraq, Sudan, Afghanistan, Kenya, Lebanon and Gaza have been terminated.
In Mozambique, where jihadist violence in the north has displaced over a million people since 2017, humanitarian organizations face steep shortfalls with “devastating” effects on the needy, said Frederico João, chairman of the forum of NGOs in the region.
More widely, the USAID funding cut compromises Mozambique’s health sector, especially in HIV/AIDS care, said Inocêncio Impissa, cabinet spokesman. The government now seeks alternative funding to prevent total collapse of health systems.
Swedish diplomat spy suspect has died, his lawyer says
- Sweden’s SAPO security service had detained the man on Sunday
- “I heard the tragic news this morning and my thoughts go to his family,” his lawyer said
STOCKHOLM: A Swedish diplomat who was recently questioned by police on suspicion of espionage has died, the man’s lawyer said on Friday.
Sweden’s SAPO security service had detained the man on Sunday and kept him for questioning until Wednesday, when he was released, although he remained subject to investigation, the country’s prosecution service has said.
“I heard the tragic news this morning and my thoughts go to his family,” his lawyer, Anton Strand, told Reuters.
Strand declined to comment on the cause of the man’s death.
The man had denied any wrongdoing and had made a complaint against the police over the handling of the case, Strand said.
Public broadcaster SVT has reported that the diplomat had served at several Swedish embassies and that SAPO was investigating a potential connection to the resignation of the government’s national security adviser last week.
Sweden’s foreign ministry confirmed that one of its employees had died but declined to comment further.
“We can regrettably confirm that an employee of the foreign service has passed away,” the ministry said in a statement to Reuters. “Out of concern for the relatives we will refrain from giving further detail.”
