Kunduz, Afghanistan---Mauludeen lifts the shirt of his writhing, shrieking infant daughter to reveal a gunshot wound, highlighting the plight of tens of thousands of Afghans caught in the crossfire on the Taliban's expanding northern battlefront.
Civilians are bearing the brunt of a large-scale insurgent offensive in Kunduz province, the keystone of the Taliban's summer fighting season which is expected to be the bloodiest in a decade.
Kunduz is facing a humanitarian crisis, with thousands of families trapped in a vortex of violence as militancy spreads across the north, beyond traditional Taliban hotbeds in the south and east.
Civilians such as Mauludeen have flooded into the provincial capital Kunduz city to escape the conflict, taking shelter in fetid tent settlements, rife with signs of malnutrition and seething with desperation.
Mauludeen, who goes by one name, fled his home in the worst-affected Chardarah district with his wife and six children, including the year-old baby who was hit by a stray bullet during a battle between the Taliban and government-backed forces.
"We left our home, our cattle, our crops just before the harvest season," the 46-year-old vegetable farmer told AFP, pulling up the baby girl's sequined top to reveal a sutured wound across her abdomen.
"We are homeless, hungry, thirsty and waiting for help."
Some around Mauludeen displayed wounds infested with maggots, others clutched scraps of paper scrawled with messages in Dari pleading for official aid.
Abdul Qadir, a 45-year-old farmer from the same district, drew a line with a stick on the parched earth.
"The Taliban were on this side, government militia on the other -- and we were stuck in the middle," said Qadir, a baggy shalwar kameez flowing over his withered frame.
That typifies what many in Afghanistan feel, seemingly trapped in a hopeless quagmire after 13 years of war, with civilians increasingly caught between the government and a resilient Taliban insurgency.
"The consequences of the conflict go far beyond the horrific loss of life and injury to civilians," Georgette Gagnon of the United Nations Assistance Mission in Afghanistan said in a recent statement.
"Conflict-related violence also devastates Afghan families through displacement, loss of livelihood, destruction of homes and other losses."
AFP
