Worsening Afghan security hurting children: UNICEF

Worsening Afghan security hurting children: UNICEF

KABUL (AFP) — Deteriorating security is harming children in Afghanistan, where an explosion of deadly attacks have targeted schools and impeded access to vital health care, the UN children's agency said Wednesday.

In the first four months of this year, UNICEF recorded 73 incidents involving schools, including burnings, explosions, threats and attacks, which left 27 people dead.

This compared to 53 incidents for the same period in 2008 that resulted in three deaths, and 65 cases the previous year with 10 dead.

These attacks and incidents like mysterious gas poisonings that sickened scores of girls near Kabul recently, create fear and stop parents sending their children to school, UNICEF South Asia director Dan Toole said.

"We can't lose the progress we have made on education, such a huge improvement, such a difference for the future of Afghanistan," he told AFP.

"We have had attacks on villages, on schools by both anti-government elements as well as by coalition forces and international troops that have hit civilians," Toole said.

Hundreds of schools have closed in the south -- the main battlefield between the Taliban and Western-backed Afghan troops -- and most of the country's polio cases are in the same region where lack of security hampers vaccination drives.

Fighting linked to the growing Taliban-led insurgency has put much of the area out of bounds to international aid agencies, with UNICEF having offices in only two provinces in the dangerous south.

There have nonetheless been "huge improvements" in the conditions facing Afghan children since the fall of the Islamist Taliban regime in late 2001 following the US-led invasion, Toole said during a visit to Kabul.

"Many fewer children die now than they did in 2001, millions of children are in school now who weren't in 2001," he said.

"Gigantic efforts" are still required to cut Afghanistan's low rate of child survival and the high rate of women dying in child birth -- both among the most extreme in the world, he said.

Afghanistan has the world's third-highest mortality rate for children, with 257 of 1,000 dying before they turn five, according to UNICEF figures.

It also has the world's second-highest maternal mortality rate with around one in eight women dying because of childbirth with most cases preventable, according to UN figures.