CNN: At least 78 people have died in freezing conditions in Afghanistan in the last nine days, a Taliban official said Thursday, deepening a humanitarian crisis affecting millions of people now living under the control of the radical Islamist group. Shafiullah Rahimi, a spokesperson for the Taliban’s Ministry of Disaster Management, told CNN that along with the loss of human life, more than 77,000 livestock had also frozen to death in recent days.      Full news...

Washington Examiner: Desperation among Afghans from all walks of life is again on the rise. Prices continue to spike, donor fatigue has hit nongovernmental organizations hard, and Taliban rulings affect economic participation. Leslie Merriman has been distributing food packages to Afghan special immigrant visa applicants since September. At her latest food drop, delivery personnel were swarmed by hordes of hungry Afghans.      Full news...

Save the Children: KABUL, 9 May 2022 – 9.6 million children in Afghanistan are going hungry every day due to a dire combination of economic collapse, the impacts of the war in Ukraine and the ongoing drought, new figures released today show. Immediate food assistance is needed to save lives in the short-term, but aid alone is not enough to tackle the country’s worst hunger crisis on record, Save the Children said.      Full news...

VOA: For several months Pashtana kept rejecting marriage proposals made for her 14-year-old daughter, Zarghona, until she had to make a final decision. “I had to choose between the survival of my four little children and giving Zarghona to marriage,” Pashtana told VOA over the phone from the southern Afghan province of Kandahar, where last year her husband, an army soldier, was killed in clashes with then Taliban insurgents.The young widow made every effort to provide for her children, but there was no job for her under a Taliban regime that has banned work for women.      Full news...

GALLUP: WASHINGTON, D.C. -- The Taliban’s recent decision to renege on its promise to allow girls to attend school past sixth grade is a stark reminder of how much life has changed for Afghans since the group returned to power last year -- and Gallup's surveys in the country show it hasn’t been for the better. As the Taliban completed its takeover of Afghanistan last year, nearly all Afghans (94%) rated their lives poorly enough to be considered suffering. This was not only a record high for Afghanistan, but also the highest level of suffering that Gallup has measured for any country since 2005.      Full news...

RAWA News: The woman (name protected) shown in the photo is in her 40s and belongs to Chahrdara village of Kunduz province in the northern Afghanistan. Four years ago (2017) when heavy infighting was going on between Ghani government and Taliban rebels in Kunduz, the family escaped the area hoping to build a safer and better life for their children in the capital. Like thousands of other miserable Afghans who became victims of insecurity in Kabul, this family also faced a deep tragedy: she lost her husband in a suicide attack and due to nervous breakdown and a stroke, she became paralyzed in both legs.      Full news...

Etlat-e-Rooz: Sources at Zahirshahi High School, one of the oldest high schools in Kandahar province, confirm that Allah Nazar, the high school teacher, has died. According to these sources, Allah Nazar was ill in recent days and could not see a doctor due to poverty.One of the sources told the daily Ettela’at that Allah Nazar had served as a teacher at Zahirshahi High School for 40 years and had died of shortness of breath at home yesterday.      Full news...

Reuters: In the biting cold of a Kabul autumn, Hadia Ahmadi, a 43-year-old teacher who lost her job after the Taliban seized the Afghan capital in August, sits by the roadside trying to earn the equivalent of a few cents polishing shoes. The abrupt withdrawal of foreign aid following the Taliban victory has sent Afghanistan's fragile economy into freefall, leaving millions facing hunger and making once well-off middle class families destitute.      Full news...

A team of RAWA surveyed displaced people in Herat Terminal Street. Around 5000 people from Ghor and Badghis provinces have been displaced here due to poverty, unemployment, insecurity and drought. In the cold weather, the condition of children is disastrous. They beg in the streets and have no facilities for sanitation, let alone education and playing. Very little aid has been provided to them by some Afghan businessmen but Taliban gunmen get a portion of aid saying they also face food shortage.      Full news...

RAWA team surveyed a camp of displaced people in Nahre-Shahi district of Balkh province in Northern Afghanistan. Lack of security, poverty, unemployment and pressure of Taliban forced around one million people across Afghanistan to leave their villages and gather in suburbs of big cities under deplorable conditions. While most non-governmental and international aid organization have stopped their operations in Afghanistan, starvation threatens the life of millions in the coming winter. Children and women are in higher risk.      Full news...

UN News: The United Nations Children’s Fund (UNICEF) has received credible reports of families in Afghanistan offering daughters as young as 20 days old for future marriage in return for a dowry. In a statement released on Friday, the agency’s Executive Director, Henrietta Fore, said that she was “deeply concerned” over reports that child marriage is on the rise.      Full news...

AlJazeera: The UN envoy for Afghanistan says the country is “on the brink of a humanitarian catastrophe”, urging the international community to find ways to provide financial support to the Afghan people, who “feel abandoned”. Deborah Lyons said an estimated 60 percent of Afghanistan’s 38 million people are facing crisis levels of hunger in a food emergency that will likely worsen over the winter.      Full news...

Radio Liberty: Life has become a nightmare of despair for 22-year-old Maryam Rezaei since the Taliban seized power in Afghanistan less than three months ago.In early August, before the Taliban stormed into her neighborhood in the western city of Herat, Rezaei was among more than 10,000 women who were studying at Herat University.She also earned money as a journalist at a local radio station.But now, despite Taliban promises to let women receive an ed      Full news...

CNN: Parwana Malik, a 9-year-old girl with dark eyes and rosy cheeks, giggles with her friends as they play jump rope in a dusty clearing.But Parwana's laughter disappears as she returns home, a small hut with dirt walls, where she's reminded of her fate: she's being sold to a stranger as a child bride.      Full news...

Save the Children: More children in Afghanistan are going hungry than ever before, according to UN data analysed by Save the Children, with 22.8 million people – including almost 14m children – expected to face crisis or emergency levels of food insecurity this winter. Yesterday it was reported that eight children from the same family died of starvation in Kabul after losing both of their parents. The siblings - four boys and four girls - were aged between just 18 months and eight years old.      Full news...

ToloNews: An Afghan woman displaced from Baghlan province to Kabul due to fighting prior to the fall of Kabul, has sold her one and a half years old infant due to poverty. Living in a tent in Kabul, the mother, Lailuma, said she had no option but to sell her infant to treat her 13-year-old daughter who is sick.      Full news...

UNDP: New York – Afghanistan teeters on the brink of universal poverty. As much as 97 percent of the population is at risk of sinking below the poverty line unless a response to the country’s political and economic crises is urgently launched, according to a rapid appraisal released today by the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP).The study, which analysed four potential scenarios of escalating intensity and isolation, indicates that real GDP could contract by as much as 13.2 percent, leading to an increase in the poverty rate of up to 25 percentage points.      Full news...

Tolo News: Gul, 28, is a native of nearby Faryab province, but has sought refuge in Herat province amid the war and other violence. She said she did not have any other option except to sell her kidney and to pay the loans of her husband who was in Taliban custody. The Taliban has not commented.      Full news...

The Guardian: Millions of people are being pushed towards hunger by the coronavirus pandemic, which could end up killing more people through lack of food than from the illness itself, Oxfam has warned.Closed borders, curfews and travel restrictions have disrupted food supplies and incomes in already fragile countries, forcing an extra million people closer to famine in Afghanistan and heightening the humanitarian disaster in Yemen, where two-thirds already live in hunger.      Full news...

The Guardian: The main hospital in Zabul, southern Afghanistan, was abandoned after a Taliban attack last September destroyed most of the building and killed nearly 40 people. But when coronavirus slipped into the province this spring, desperate health authorities, casting around for ways to fight this new enemy, settled on its shattered remains.      Full news...

Gallup: The collapse in peace negotiations between the U.S. and Taliban has removed a potential barrier to holding Afghanistan’s presidential election as scheduled on Sept. 28. But the recent surge in Taliban attacks dispels any expectation that the election will lead to peace and stability for a people who rate their lives more poorly than any other worldwide.      Full news...

Gallup: Afghans not only are facing challenges in regard to their safety and security as the country’s presidential election nears, but they also are struggling more than ever to afford the basics such as food and shelter. Gallup surveys in Afghanistan over the past decade highlight the great need for action from incoming leadership.      Full news...

ReliefWeb: One year after the worst drought on record forced nearly half a million Afghans to leave their homes, many families remain in tents on the outskirts of Herat city. Unable to return home due to ongoing conflict, they struggle to survive as support is cut back.      Full news...

Daily Outlook: Afghanistan is one of the world’s most prolific producers of orphans and widows. The number of widows in Afghanistan is estimated to be from 600,000 to two million (2M), one of the highest in the world. Three decades of war in Afghanistan have created a large crowd of widows. Most of these widows in Afghanistan lost their husbands as a result of war and conflicts.      Full news...

The Washington Post: Khal Bibi is a 23-year-old widow. Her family has been destroyed by the 18-year war that afflicts Afghanistan. Bibi’s husband and one of her three children were killed in an airstrike during clashes between government forces and the Taliban. She, with her remaining two children, is among the 550,000 internally displaced people who have been forced to flee their villages.      Full news...

The New Humanitarian: Twice a week, Farid Rahimi gets up at dawn, wraps a blanket around his shoulders to keep warm, gathers his empty jerrycans, and waits beside the tap outside his house in a hillside neighbourhood above Kabul. At 7am sharp, water bursts from the pipes, filling Rahimi’s tank and buckets. He labours away, saving every drop until – just an hour later – the last drop falls.      Full news...

Associated Press: Wheat and opium farmer Murad Khan Ishaqzai, 80, has never seen a drought as bad as the one ravaging western Afghanistan where more than 250,000 people have been forced to abandon their homes. After his crops dried up in Gormach district of Badghis province earlier this year, Ishaqzai rented a truck and drove his family hundreds of kilometres through Taliban-infested areas to the neighbouring province of Herat.      Full news...

CNN: An unprecedented drought in Afghanistan has led to families selling their children just to be able to feed their households. CNN has spoken to multiple families around the western city of Herat who have been forced from their homes because of a record dry spell that, according to the United Nations, has forced more people from their homes in 2018 than the record violence afflicting the country.      Full news...

TOLOnews.com: The United Nations Children’s Fund (UNICEF) has said that over 600,000 children in Afghanistan are suffering from acute malnutrition. UNICEF warned that if these children are not provided with sufficient medical treatment, they could even die. The Afghan Minister of Public Health Ferozudin Feroz said Afghanistan still tops the list of countries with the highest maternal and child mortality rates.      Full news...

VOA: The United Nations says the ongoing drought has gripped two-thirds of conflict-hit Afghanistan’s 34 provinces and has put more than 2 million people at risk of becoming severely food insecure. Water points and fountains across the country have dried up, and the lack of rain and snow melt has caused rivers to run low or dry up completely, according to a weekly report by the U.N. Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs, OCHA.      Full news...