UNITED NATIONS (Dispatches) – Afghanistan is “on the brink of a humanitarian catastrophe” and its collapsing economy is heightening the risk of extremism, the UN’s special representative for the country has warned.
Deborah Lyons said the United Nations predicts that 60% of Afghanistan’s 38 million people face crisis levels of hunger in a food emergency that will likely worsen over the winter. She said the country’s GDP is estimated to have contracted by 40%.
But she told the UN Security Council that a humanitarian catastrophe “is preventable,” saying the main cause is financial sanctions on the Taliban, who took over the country Aug. 15. Sanctions “have paralyzed the banking system, affecting every aspect of the economy,” Lyons said.
The Afghanistan central bank’s $9 billion in reserves, most of which is held in the United States, were frozen after the collapse of the former government.
She delivered a bleak assessment of the situation following the Taliban takeover, saying that an affiliate of the Daesh terrorist group has grown and now appears present in nearly all 34 provinces.
Lyons told the UN Security Council that the Taliban’s response to IS-Khorasan Province’s (ISKP) expansion “appears to rely heavily on extrajudicial detentions and killings” of suspected ISKP terrorists.
“This is an area deserving more attention from the international community,” she said.
Her comments came hours after the group -- an ideological foe of the Taliban -- claimed responsibility for two blasts that killed at least one person and wounded six others in a Shia Muslim neighborhood of Kabul.
The Taliban, she said, have been unable to stem ISKP’s growth.
“Once limited to a few provinces and the capital, ISKP now seems to be present in nearly all provinces, and increasingly active,” Lyons said, adding that the number of the group’s attacks have increased from 60 strikes in 2020 to 334 this year.
While the Taliban are making “genuine efforts to present themselves as a government” since seizing Kabul in August after a 20-year war with the United States, they continue excluding representatives of other sectors of society and curtailing the rights of women and girls.
The UN mission regularly receives credible reports of house searches and the “extrajudicial killings” of former security personnel and officials, she said.
Lyons warned anew of a humanitarian catastrophe as winter looms due to a failing economy and drought.
She implored the international community to find ways to fund the salaries of healthcare workers, teachers and humanitarian workers, saying humanitarian aid is insufficient.
The economic collapse will fuel illicit drug, arms and human trafficking and unregulated money exchanges that “can only help facilitate terrorism,” Lyons said.
“These pathologies will first affect Afghanistan,” she said. “Then they will infect the region.”