Highlights
- UN Secretary-General António Guterres met with displaced families in Kabul.
- Humanitarian organizations provide trauma care that is not funded by the public system.
- Darzab District Hospital damaged in an airstrike on the first day of fighting.
- Families returning from Pakistan after decades face a difficult future.
- The country faces an import requirement of 1.4 million tons of wheat but no substantial rise of the market price of flour.
- CHF-Afghanistan funded with one third of its target halfway through the year.
In this issue
- SG Guterres meets IDPs in Kabul: P.1
- Humanitarians fill trauma care void: P.2
- Difficult return after four decades: P.4
- Lower wheat harvest forecasted: P.5
Guterres: Solidarity with displaced people
During the month of Ramadan, on 14 June, UN Secretary-General António Guterres paid Afghanistan a one-day visit. In the morning, he visited displaced families in an informal settlement behind the Arzan Qeemat fruit market in an eastern outskirt of Kabul. In a mud house where one of the displaced families lives he met separately with elders and a group of women from a displaced community from Tagab district, Kapisa.
“The women and men I met spoke of their houses destroyed and members of their families being killed, but they also spoke about the will to rebuild their life, the will to have their children in school and the will to go back home as soon as peace and security are re-established,” Secretary-General Guterres told journalists the same day.
The lives of the 85 families living in the informal settlement are representative for the lives of approximately 70,000 displaced people currently living in similar settlements in Kabul.
Some of the families from Tagab arrived one year, others only three months ago. “The first families to flee were those whose houses were destroyed by the fighting,” Mr. Agha Shireen, one of the elders of the displaced community, explained. “Most of us were farmers. We grew corn, wheat and pomegranates on our fields.”