'Crying all night in the cold': Afghan family buries 8th child

KABUL, Afghanistan — The war refugee Sayid Mohammad lost his last son on Wednesday, three-month-old Khan, who became the 24th child to die of exposure in camps here in the past month.

“After we had dinner he was crying all night of the cold,” Mr. Mohammad said. The family had no wood and was husbanding a small portion of paper and plastic that his daughter had scavenged that day. He said the boy had seemed healthy and was breast-feeding normally, though the family’s dinner consisted only of tea and bread. But he kept crying. “Finally we started a fire but it wasn’t enough,” Mr. Mohammad said. By 1 a.m. the boy was stiff and lifeless, he said.

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Even by the standards of destitution in these camps, Mr. Mohammad’s story is a hard-luck one; Khan was the eighth of his nine children to die. Back home in Gereshk District of Helmand Province, six died of disease, he said. Three years ago they fled the fighting in that area for the Nasaji Bagrami Camp here, where a three-year-old son froze to death last winter, he said. Like most of Kabul’s 35,000 internal refugees, he fled the country’s war zones only to find a life of squalor sometimes as deadly, even in the capital of a country that has received more than $60 billion in non-military aid over ten years.

Later Wednesday morning, Mr. Mohammad’s sole surviving child, his daughter, Feroza, 10, stared saucer-eyed at her brother’s tiny body as it lay in the middle of the family’s hybrid dwelling, part mud hut, part tent, with United Nations-branded canvas for a roof.

Leaders of this camp say that 16 children aged five or younger have died in theunseasonably cold weather and heavy snow that set in about a month ago, keeping nighttime temperatures in the mid-teens Fahrenheit. Eight other children have died similarly in another Kabul camp, Charahi Qambar, according to camp representatives, religious leaders and families.

Government officials have expressed skepticism that the children could all have died of cold, saying the deaths were unregistered and not reviewed by medical personnel, while at the same time blaming the international aid providers for not sending more supplies.

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