Fierce Afghan winter kills 180 children

At least 180 children have died in Afghanistan’s coldest winter in years, the health minister said today, amid warnings that the final toll from the subzero temperatures and heavy snow could run into the thousands.

The government has yet to give an estimate of nationwide casualties from the freeze that has left many remote regions snowbound.

In Zabul, a south-eastern province haunted by Taliban militants, Governor Khan Mohammed Husseini said 135 people had died, mostly of cold, hunger and disease, but two of them had been attacked by wolves.

Health Minister Mohammed Amin Fatemi said in other parts of the country, the toll among children alone has risen to 180, almost half of them in the Hindu Kush province of Ghor where scores of villages have been cut off by snow.

Another 29 people have been killed in avalanches this year, Fatemi said.

But Fatemi has decried as alarmist forecasts by relief groups that the death toll could top 1,000.

Canada’s ambassador, Christopher Alexander, said several thousand could have died in the cold snap, highlighting the continued poverty of Afghans and the weakness of their government three years after the fall of the Taliban.