He fled Kabul with his wife and five children one of whom died on the way

He fled Kabul with his wife and five children, one of whom died on the way. “We did not want to come, but the bombing made us leave,” he said. “We spent all our money getting here, and there is no work for me to do.”One of Aziz’s sons, his face disfigured by impetigo, clung to his father. Five families share the three-room house, with another four in the courtyard. “The windows are broken and there is very little room, but we are luckier than the people who have to sleep outdoors,” said Aziz.He and the rest of the two million Afghan refugees in Iran are safe at least, but their life is extremely hard. Many Iranians are almost as poor, especially in the arid border region, which has lost population in recent years. The three-year drought which has devastated crops throughout Afghanistan is equally severe here: Hamoon lake, near Zahedan, had never dried up in thousands of years of recorded history, but now it is a dustbowl.

The city relies on brackish underground water which may dry up in a year or two if there is no rain.The Afghans have access to the efficient, though basic, Iranian public health system, but the clinics and health posts in the refugee settlements around Zahedan are struggling to cope with the diseases which have come in with the latest influx.”Tuberculosis, diarrhoea, malaria and malnutrition are common,” said Dr Mehdi Tabatabaei at the Valiasre health centre in Shirabad, a district of Zahedan which is two-thirds Afghan. “The maternal mortality rate is high, and we are starting to see cases of Crimea-Congo haemorrhagic fever” [CCHF]. This disease, often picked up by herdsmen from their animals, is related to the deadly Ebola virus.The Amar refugee aid organisation, which The Independent on Sunday is supporting for its Christmas appeal, is working to bring clean water to the refugee settlements around Zahedan and Zabol, the only other town of any size in the region. Even Dr Tabatabaei’s centre is reliant on deliveries from a water truck. “Safe drinking water has the highest priority in maintaining public health,” said Hassan Salman Manesh, head of Amar’s office in Iran. “Once you have it, you can bring 70 per cent of communicable diseases under control.”Amar, founded by Emma Nicholson MEP, has a decade of experience working in Iran with refugees from neighbouring Iraq. It is now bringing its expertise to bear among the victims of the conflict in Afghanistan, Iran’s eastern neighbour.Baroness Nicholson, who named the charity after Amar Kanim, an Iraqi boy who lost his family and suffered terrible injuries in Saddam Hussein’s attacks on the Marsh Arabs, calls the Afghans in Iran the “forgotten victims” of the war on terror.”The Iranians are doing all they can, but there is a gap which the international community is not filling, because of Iran’s international isolation,” she says “Amar exists to fill that gap.”.

International aid agencies are warning that more than a million destitute Afghans are beyond their reach and face death from starvation and disease. Conditions are worst not in regions still being fought over, but in areas firmly under Northern Alliance control. Aid organisations and their German hosts identified the post-war anarchy as the single biggest killer in Afghanistan. “In many regions chaos, fear and violence still reign,” said Joschka Fischer, the German Foreign Minister.More than seven million people out of an estimated population of 22 million are classified by aid organisations as being at “very high risk”. Most eke out a living in areas captured by the Northern Alliance in the first days of its offensive. By contrast, although Kandahar province has been cut off by intense fighting since the fall of Kabul, the region is in no immediate danger of famine.The areas that should be easiest to reach are often the ones out of bounds, such as Mazar-i-Sharif, the first Taliban domino to tumble as the West’s allies swept south.