One million children in Afghanistan are suffering from life-threatening malnutrition in a rapidly worsening new crisis to hit the country, the United Nations warned on Tuesday.
Across Afghanistan, 3.7 million children suffer from “wasting”, meaning they are acutely malnourished, the UN children’s agency UNICEF said.
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This number includes at least one million children who have become subject to what UNICEF country representative for Afghanistan, Tajudeen Oyewale, described as hunger’s worst form: “life-threatening severe acute malnutrition”.
“If there is no treatment and we are not able to act fast, that one million number are at risk of dying,” he told a Geneva-held media briefing, from his base in Kabul.
Afghanistan has endured repeated hunger crises in recent decades as it has struggled through civil war and other grave hardships. An economic collapse followed the Taliban government’s return to power after US-led forces withdrew in 2021.
Oyewale confirmed that nearly 40 percent of the children admitted to hospitals with severe wasting and medical complications were babies under the age of six months old. Meanwhile, children under two years old make up more than 80 percent of severe acute malnutrition cases in the country.
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“Malnutrition plays a central role” in the growing numbers of deaths of very young children, Oyewale said.
He described a “worsening nutrition crisis” across the country, with more than half a million children requiring hospital admission so far this year for high risk, moderate and severe wasting.
In July 2025, around 6,000 cases were recorded; by July this year, the numbers had increased by a third, with the total number of cases surpassing 8,000.
“In parts of southern Afghanistan, some hospitals are now seeing three or four severe malnourished children for every available bed,” he shared.
(FRANCE 24 with AFP)
