TEHRAN, Apr 16 - The failure of the inter-Afghan talks in Doha to achieve any political solution to the conflict will only lead to an exponential increase in fighting as compared to last year, the special representative of Doctors Without Borders in Afghanistan told Sputnik.
TEHRAN, Young Journalists Club (YJC) - "We know that this fighting season there is a lot of expectation around the Doha talks, the different talks that are happening in Doha or in Moscow and if those talks don’t succeed, Afghans have told us that the fighting will be even worse this year," Christopher Stokes, the special representative of Medecins Sans Frontieres (MSF, or Doctors Without Borders) in Afghanistan said.
Stokes added that MSF would be forced to step up a plea for donations if there was a large increase in fighting.
"We won’t do a specific drive unless there is a big deterioration in the fighting this year," the representative noted.
he MSF special representative also revealed that Doctors Without Borders intended to dispatch additional staff members to the western Afghan province of Herat and open a centre to help internally displaced people (IDPs) in the region.
"We are expanding in Herat… We are adding staff and we are opening a project for the displaced.
There are several 100,000 displaced who have arrived in Herat over the last couple of months, they are fleeing both fighting and the drought because there has been a major problem with the rains in that area. So we have expanded," Stokes said.
In addition, Doctors Without Borders hopes to open a new trauma centre in the northern Afghan city of Kunduz at the end of this year, with the facility expected to have the same admittance capacity as its predecessor that was destroyed in the 2015 US airstrikes, according to Stokes.
He went on to note that in light of the 2015 bombings, MSF had been negotiating security guarantees for the new trauma centre both with the Afghan conflicting sides and the United States.
On top of that, Doctors Without Borders is looking to open additional centers to facilitate the treatment of multidrug-resistant tuberculosis (MDR-TB) in Afghanistan, Stokes added.
"We hope to increase the multidrug resistant TB program, which is not only a problem for Afghanistan but it is a problem for everybody because MDR-TB doesn't stay in borders, it crosses borders and other people get infected. We hope to increase the number of projects that we will be running in that area and to expand and bring in more patients. For the moment it is in Kandahar, which is the second largest Afghan city, and we are moving out of that city now. There are two neighboring areas next to Kandahar — Helmand and Zabul, the neighboring provinces," Stokes said.
Source: Sputnik
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