Afghanistan's Deadly Winter: A Family's Heartbreak Over A 3-Month-Old Baby's Death

The devastated Mohammad family poses for a photo in their home in Kabul on January 30. The mother, Shamila, doesn't have a photo of her baby Amrullah, who died in her arms, but she remembers his face perfectly. "He had a white and bright face, big eyes, a small nose, and black hair," she said.

Amrullah's father, Nek, lost his income a few months ago when health problems stopped him from working as a laborer. With no money for heating, little food besides bread and tea, and drafty windows in their mountainside home, several of his eight children quickly fell sick.

Shamila, with another of her sons, recalls the bitterly cold night she clutched her baby and covered herself in a quilt. Around midnight, she awoke to find his face cold.

Nek stands outside the home where his infant son died. A family member has since given them a basic charcoal-burning stove to help keep their home warm. 

One of Amrullah's sisters reads the Koran as light filters through the dirty windowpanes.

The only memento Shamila has of her infant son are the clothes she made for him.

Shamila is now worried about the survival of her other children, who also have heavy coughs.
 
"I am always thinking of my baby boy and my two other small children. They are also sick, I don't want to lose them as well," she said. 
 

The parents walk to the cemetery to visit Amrullah's grave. Without money to host funeral guests, they quietly buried their baby without informing their family.
 

"May God spare other mothers the pain of losing their children," Shamila said as she mourns by the rock marking Amrullah's grave. 

The United Nations has said 28 million Afghans, many of them children, are in urgent need of assistance during the coldest winter in 15 years, which has seen temperatures plunge as low as minus 34 degrees Celsius.