Afghanistan will face a new civil war, a top Russian security official has warned, if the Taliban and the world community fail to normalize the situation in the war-ravaged,  food-starved country soon. Calling the crisis unprecedented both in politico-military as well as socio-economic terms, Russian Security Council Secretary Nikolai Patrushev blamed the "flawed policies" of the US in the last two decades.

If Afghan people didn’t receive much-needed help,  "the situation could become catastrophic, involving a new civil war, the general impoverishment of the population, and famine", he said.

The remark came on Wednesday when Patrushev was addressing an annual meeting of the secretaries of the security councils of the member states of the Commonwealth of Independent States (CIS), reported Russian news agency TASS. 

On 15 August this year, the Taliban seized power militarily, toppling the US-backed Afghan government and plunging the country, which was already facing drought and food shortages, even into a deeper crisis. Since then, three months have passed and no country has recognized the Taliban.

A new UN report has warned that nearly 19 million Afghans--almost half of the country’s population-- are now facing acute food insecurity. Close to a million children could die of starvation and malnutrition, earlier reports said. 

Russian remains warry of the consequences the crisis would have on Central Asian countries, the region Moscow considers sensitive to its security interests. “They would be extremely grave," Patrushev said on Wednesday, adding that assessing the exact implications would be “difficult” at this stage. 

In conversion to NPR, Richard Trenchard, the representative of the United Nations Agency Food and Agriculture Organization, said that Afghan farmers across the country were abandoning their lands amid mounting debt and drought. 

As the Taliban remains unable to access the national reserves, the country has been facing a shortage of fuel, medicine, and other essentials. 

Meanwhile, the Taliban-appointed Foreign Minister Ameer Khan Muttaqi has written to US Congress to unfreeze Afghan national reserves. In the letter, he said, they (the Taliban) understood the international community's concerns.  “Currently, the fundamental challenge of our people is financial security and the roots of this concern lead back to the freezing of assets of our people by the American government,” Muttaqi wrote in the letter, reported TOLOnews. 

(SAM)