The reports from United Nations and its agencies claim that there have been "chilling reports" of human rights abuses in Afghanistan.
Rupert Colville, spokesperson of the Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights said that there have been "chilling reports of human rights abuses and restrictions on the rights of individuals, especially women and girls," over the last few weeks.
Speaking at a briefing in Geneva on Tuesday Colville said, “Such reports continue to be received. Unfortunately for the time being the flow of information has been considerably disrupted and we’ve not been in a position to verify the most recent allegations.”
UNICEF Chief of field operations and emergency in Afghanistan, Mustafa Ben Messauod said, he has seen a direct impact in Kandahar of the recent flare of fighting between the two parties.
He said, "I have seen the direct impacts of this recent flare in fighting and that impact is severely malnourished children I have seen injured in such a way, that it’s difficult to describe, young children, as young as 10 months.”
“The situation here in Kabul is improving but we’ve seen and gone to an IDP camp, started the work there - a mobile health team, but as mentioned by the colleague from WHO – it’s stopped over the last few days and there is great need there that we need to attend to,” Messauod said.
The spokesperson for United Nations High Commission for Refugees, Shabia Mantoo said that humanitarian emergencies are breaking across the different parts of Afghanistan as people seek to flee due to uncertainty and instability.
Many people have been displaced within the country and some have fled to neighbouring countries seeking refuge.
“Out of the hundreds of thousands of people that have been displaced, we have now 550,000 people displaced within the country, so they are still within Afghanistan. In recent weeks, the majority of those have fled and 80 per cent of those that are newly displaced are women and children,” Mantoo said at the UN Briefing.
“The stand of the Taliban is more or less the same but we’ve seen small differences, especially in terms of girls’ education. There are areas, part of the country, where they told us that they are waiting for guidance from their leadership, religious and political. In other places, they actually said that they want to see girls’ education and school up and running,” Messasoud said that the Taliban has changed but not enough.
