KANDAHAR: Magul collects cattle feed in a bag under her voluminous head-to-toe burqa and feeds it to her seven children. She does not remember when she last had a hot meal of rice and beans, let alone meat.

Thirty-eight years old, Magul lost her husband and one child to US air strikes on Kandahar last month, and the bombing took away any form of regular income.

She ekes out a hand-to-mouth existence, washing other people’s clothes when she gets a chance. Her 16-year-old son, the eldest, is looking for work, but so far hasn’t found any.

Every morning Magul joins an army of several thousand burqa-clad women besieging the interim government’s planning department in the southern city of Kandahar. All its officials can do is record their names. So the widows sit in the wintry sun and wait. And hope.

Azrato’s nine children, aged one to nine, are also fatherless.

The family’s breadwinner died in a raid by B-52 bombers as the US and its Afghan allies of the Northern Alliance closed in on this city, last bastion of the Taliban and their Al Qaeda allies led by Osama bin Laden.

Shakako, 45, says her husband was forcibly conscripted by Taliban and killed in fighting the Northern Alliance a few weeks later. “I don’t even know where his grave is,” she said.

She has eight children. The youngest, six months old, is a girl. “We haven’t eaten meat for a month. We live on bread and tea.”

Leslie Olquist, UN coordinator for six provinces of southwest Afghanistan, said the widows formed one of the most vulnerable groups. “They survive by begging, and they and their children are often badly malnourished,” he said.

Of the 4.5 million people in his region, 1.5 million are classified as internally displaced people, or IDPs — Afghans who were not where they were supposed to be, but had fled their homes, villages and farms for other areas.

Some families live in the open and have no breadwinner. The hungry widows of Kandahar continue to pick weeds, wash clothes and beg.—Reuters