WASHINGTON (Pakistan Point News / Sputnik - 21st September, 2018) Severe drought in Afghanistan, particularly in the northwest part of the country, has forced hundreds of thousands of people to abandon villages where they are no longer able to survive, UN Humanitarian Coordinator Toby Lanzer said in a briefing on Friday.
"Within the past weeks, we've seen a quarter of a million people move inside Afghanistan looking for any way to get by," Lanzer told reporters.
Lanzer cited the village of Qala-e-Naw in the northwestern Afghanistan near the Iranian border of about 60,000 people, where drought-induced refugees doubled the population in a few days.
A severe drought in 20 of 34 provinces affects about 2 million Afghans, of which 1.4 million people are in need of humanitarian assistance, according to a recent UN estimate.
