Maryam is hooked up to an IV drip hanging from a stick that has been shoved into the ground. She is sitting cross-legged on a dirty rug in her threadbare red tent in the middle of a camp for internally displaced people (IDPs) in Khair Khana on the outskirts of northwest Kabul, Afghanistan.
The gaunt-faced young woman is in her early twenties and her downcast eyes and thin, pale visage betray the early signs of malnutrition. She barely has the strength to cradle her infant son in her arms. “You are punishing people like her and us for the actions of the Taliban,” Mohammad, the representative of the camp, told openDemocracy.
Maryam and Mohammad are two among thousands of Afghanistan’s IDPs, who fled the years of fighting between US/NATO-supported Afghan National Army troops and the Taliban forces. Now many of them languish in camps in Kabul and other major cities, while others have turned to begging on the streets.
