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Over half a million people displaced by conflict in Afghanistan in 2016: UN

Xinhua, December 1, 2016 Adjust font size:

The UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA) in Afghanistan said that more than half a million people in the Asian country have been internally displaced by conflict so far in 2016, the highest number on record, a UN spokesman said here Wednesday.

"OCHA says the number represents a worrying trend of year-on-year increases of people internally displaced by conflict as well as a growing number of people living in prolonged displacement," the deputy UN spokesman, Farhan Haq, said at a daily news briefing here.

"This year, internal displacement is four times more than in 2013" in Afghanistan, he said.

Mark Bowden, the UN humanitarian coordinator in Afghanistan, has expressed concern that these record figures show not just an alarming number of new internally displaced persons (IDPs), but a longer term crisis where increasing numbers of families in Afghanistan are facing prolonged displacement.

Worsening security situation and the ongoing militancy have forced the Afghan people to leave their houses for safer places. More than 1.1 million Afghans have been displaced due to conflicts since 2001 and more than 323,000 were registered as displaced persons in the first 10 months of 2016, reports said.

Thousands of Afghans have been displaced in the wake of intensifying attacks by Taliban militants against government interests in northern Kunduz, southern Helmand and western Farah provinces over the past month, the reports said. Endit