“He had a clean and bright face, big eyes, a small nose and black hair,” said the baby’s mother
Shamila has no photo of her months-old son who died in her arms in the cold in their home in Kabul this month, but she remembers his face in every detail.
“She had a clean and bright face, big eyes, a small nose and black hair,” he said.
Three-month-old Amrullah was one of at least 171 people who have died due to freezing temperatures in Afghanistan in recent weeks, in a cold wave that has hit the country as it faces a severe humanitarian crisis.
The United Nations has said 28 million Afghans, many of them children, need urgent help to cope with the coldest winter in 15 years, with temperatures dropping to minus 34 degrees Celsius.
Many humanitarian organizations have suspended some of their operations in recent weeks following a decision by the Taliban government to ban women from working in NGOs, leaving aid agencies unable to carry out many of their programs in the conservative country.
Amrullah’s father, 40-year-old Nek Mohammed, lost his income a few months ago when his health problems forced him to stop working as a labourer. With no money for heating, little food beyond bread and tea, and windows without any insulation in their mountain home, several of their eight children quickly fell ill. The parents took Amrullah to the hospital about two weeks ago with a cough and fluid in his lungs.
Hospital wards in Afghanistan have been overflowing in recent months with children suffering from pneumonia and other respiratory illnesses as many families struggle to heat their homes or buy food. The night his parents took Amrullah back home, it was very cold.
35-year-old Samila took the baby in her arms and covered herself with a blanket. But around midnight he woke up and saw that his face was frozen.
“The night I lost my baby it was incredibly cold, I was trying to… warm my baby but I couldn’t,” she said.
Unable to afford a funeral with family and friends, the couple quietly buried the baby without informing the rest of the family. A family friend then gave them a rudimentary coal heating system to cope with the bitter cold, but as they cannot afford to buy food other than bread, Samila worries about her remaining children, some of whom are coughing heavily.
“I will always … think about my baby and my two other younger children, they are also sick, I don’t want to lose them too,” she said. She herself called for more international aid for Afghanistan.
Without a camera phone, the family was unable to take a picture of Amrullah. But his mother keeps the clothes she had prepared for him before he was born.
Today, the couple visited the snow-covered cemetery and prayed for their son.
“May God spare other mothers the pain of losing their children,” said Shamila. “It is too hard for a man to bear.”
RES-EMP
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