GENEVA – The United Nations refugee agency called on Afghanistan’s neighbours to keep borders open as Taliban insurgent advances heightened the country’s crisis.
“An inability to seek safety may risk innumerable civilian lives. UNHCR stands ready to help national authorities scale up humanitarian responses as needed,” a spokesperson for the agency told a briefing in Geneva according to Reuters.
The World Food Programme sees food shortages in Afghanistan as “quite dire” and worsening, a spokesperson added, saying the situation had all the hallmarks of a humanitarian catastrophe.
Earlier on Friday, the Taliban captured another three provincial capitals in southern Afghanistan on Friday, including in Helmand, the scene of some of the heaviest fighting in the past two decades, as the insurgents press a lightning offensive that is gradually encircling the capital, Kabul.
The loss of Helmand´s provincial capital comes after years of toil and blood spilled by American, British and allied NATO forces.
Hundreds of foreign troops were killed there over the course of the nearly two-decade war.
The insurgents have taken more than a dozen provincial capitals in recent days and now control more than two-thirds of the country just weeks before the US plans to withdraw its last troops.
Attaullah Afghan, the head of the provincial council in Helmand, says that Taliban captured the provincial capital of Lashkar Gah following heavy fighting and raised their white flag over governmental installations.
He says that three national army bases outside of Lashkar Gah remain under control of the government.
