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KABUL: The UN envoy for Afghanistan Deborah Lyons has warned that Afghanistan in on the brink of a humanitarian catastrophe and that the international community must help provide financial support to the Afghan people.
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, said Lyons.
“Now is not the time to turn away from the Afghan people,” Lyons said at a press conference on Wednesday at the UN.
“To abandon the Afghan people now would be a historic mistake – a mistake that has been made before with tragic consequences,” she had told the UN Security Council earlier in the day.
UN envoy said the humanitarian catastrophe “is preventable” as its main cause is financial sanctions on the Taliban, who took over the country in August, and she assured the international community the UN would make every effort to avoid the diversion of funds to the Taliban.
“Sanctions have paralysed the banking system, affecting every aspect of the economy”, according to the UN envoy. The country’s GDP is estimated to have contracted by 40 percent since the Taliban takeover.
The International Monetary Fund (IMF) blocked the release of about $450m to Afghanistan more than a week after the West-backed government collapsed and the Taliban took over. The Afghan central bank’s $9bn in reserves, most of which are held in the US, were also frozen.
