KABUL, Afghanistan -- Tightly wrapped against the cold that seeps through the damp walls of Kabul's children's hospital, 4-month-old Aminullah struggles to survive.
Doctors say the malnourished boy, who is barely the size of a newborn, has little chance of making it through the frigid Afghan winter, when temperatures sink well below freezing.The winter will be much harder this year after international aid groups pulled out of the capital city rather than follow rules imposed by the Taliban religious army.
"I don't know what to do. . . . He is so hungry," says Aminullah's mother, Huzra, as she rocks him gently back and forth at the Indira Gandhi Hospital, a multistory cement building where the wind whistles through the cold hallways.
The hospital has few supplies. The pharmacy is bare. The only ambulance has been locked away on the compound of one of the many aid groups that left the city earlier this year.
After two decades of war in Afghanistan, Kabul is a desperate city. Entire neighborhoods lie in ruin. Food stalls in the market are often full but too expensive for the poorest.
In front of the Ministry of Public Health, workers load about a dozen pieces of firewood onto a battered steel food trolley and push it a little over a mile to the children's hospital.
"Every day, the children are complaining that they are cold . . . but we have no fuel, no wood, nothing," says hospital administrator Maulvi Hajji Nasruddin. "We have no way to get anything. . . . We have only God."
In July, dozens of aid groups pulled out of Kabul to protest a Taliban order forcing them to relocate to abandoned school dormitories.
Negotiations are currently under way for some to return.
The international Red Cross and the United Nations estimate that more than 500,000 people in Kabul -- or two-thirds of the city -- depend on international aid to survive.
For some, bakeries run by the World Food Program, the Red Cross and CARE International supply their only food other than heavily sugared tea.
For women like Raeza, whose husband was killed when a rocket smashed into their home, the bread is all that is saving her and her seven children from ruin. For dinner most nights, she serves bread and hot water.
In the ruins of Kabul, Lailama Afghani clutches her feverish baby in her arms and slumps to the cold ground, frightened at the prospect of another winter.
"Feel my baby. He has a fever, but I have no medicine, no money. What can I do?" she asks, the burqa she is forced to wear slung over her head to expose her face.