PESHAWAR, Dec 19: Over 55,000 Afghan families rendered internally displaced due to US airstrikes and three years of drought have taken shelter in six eastern provinces, overburdening the already rundown local infrastructure.

The provinces are Nangarhar, Laghman, Paktia, Paktika, Kunar and Khost.

Nangarhar has the largest concentration of such families housing over 17,000 displaced families belonging to different parts of Afghanistan, particularly northern areas.

According to a survey, Paktia has a total of 13,376 displaced families, Laghman 10,584, Kunar 7,994, Khost 3,943 and Paktika is housing 2,709 such families.

“The number of such families in the six provinces comes to between 350,000 and 400,000,” said a Peshawar-based representative of Afghan Mobile Reconstruction Association (Amran) that conducted the survey in Paktia.

The survey, aimed at designing and executing a shelter project for the internally displaced families in the six provinces, was jointly carried out by six Afghan non-governmental organizations with financial support coming from the UNHCR.

However, the project came to a halt after the funding agency shelved it due to bad security situation inside Afghanistan.

Survey showed that displaced families were leading a miserable life with a shortage of food, proper bedding and warm clothing.