HIGHLIGHTS
• Casualties of war treated by EMERGENCY at Lashkargah surgical centre continue to climb
• 89,000 displaced by conflict during first quarter of 2016 prompting the question: Is it time for a fundamental reassessment?
• Conflict displacement is a countrywide phenomenon
• FEWS NET March update
FUNDING OF HUMANITARIAN RESPONSE PLAN
393 million requested (US$)
50 million received (US$)
(reflects funding on Financial Tracking Service as of 7 April 2016)
Source: http://fts.unocha.org
EMERGENCY’s Lashkargah surgical centre: bringing humanity to the Helmand front line
Kafia was in her kitchen cooking when a rocket struck her home in Helmand Province’s Marja District. With no clinic in her village, her father had to whisk his 20-year-old daughter to EMERGENCY’s surgical centre in Lashkargah. “I received good treatment. I feel better now,” says the young woman.
Bibi, 25, also was injured in her home following a rocket attack in Sangin, one of Helmand Province’s most contested districts. “I was lucky because there is a first aid post (FAP) in Sangin and they rescued me. After I received first aid treatment, I was transferred to EMERGENCY’s surgical centre in Lashkargah,” recalls Bibi.
Casualties continue to increase from ‘brutal’ Helmand Province conflict
The international non-governmental organization EMERGENCY opened the Lashkargah surgical centre in 2004 to provide specialized surgical services free of charge to victims of war in the embattled Province of Helmand, where Taliban and Afghan and foreign forces have waged some of Afghanistan’s fiercest and most deadly battles.
As the violence in Helmand Province escalates and intensifies becoming “more and more brutal,” the number of patients treated for war-related injuries from mines, shrapnel and bullets increases, says EMERGENCY Programme Coordinator Luca Radaelli, who has worked with the NGO in Afghanistan since 2008.
“Helmand Province is very dangerous. We only observe a lull in fighting during poppy harvesting season, which takes place two or three times a year,” he notes.
Roughly the same number of patients are treated in the Lashkargah facility as EMERGENCY’s surgical centre in the Afghan capital of Kabul, Radaelli points out to stress the scale of the ongoing armed conflict in Helmand and its impact on the local population.
Frontline FAPs reinforce neutrality policy
EMERGENCY’s presence in Afghanistan dates back to December 1999. Establishing its
operations in the country has not always been easy, even though the public hospitals that
exist in the country are inadequate to meet the medical needs of those in remote
locations, and particularly so in areas where security is tenuous.
The NGO adheres to a policy of strict neutrality in the provision of its medical services. “We realized, after opening our first hospital in Panjsher in 2000, that to be neutral and to treat everybody without discrimination, our presence was needed in a valley under Northern Alliance control. The first step was to open a FAP close to the front line in order to bring victims over the front line to our facility in Panjsher. A clinic was not enough and so we opened a hospital in Kabul city, which at that time was under the control of the Taliban. In 2001, we had two fully functional hospitals located in areas controlled by both sides of the conflict,” explains Radaelli.