Working from six cities - Herat, Mazar-i-Sharif, Taloqan, Faizabad, Kabul and Jalalabad - more than 50 international staff of Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF) are providing essential medical aid to the population inside Afghanistan. The teams work independently from all warring parties. They are joined in their efforts by over 400 Afghan staff, many of whom kept MSF projects going in the two months that passed since the foreign staff had to leave.

For the moment, the MSF teams focus on assessing the health facilities, assisting displaced populations and addressing malnutrition. In and around Herat, MSF works in two displaced camps where every day many new people arrive. They have supplementary and therapeutic feeding centers, in which they care for thousands of seriously malnourished children. In the same location, MSF also support the paediatric ward of the hospital.

In Mazar-i-Sharif and Sar-i-Pol, MSF has vaccinated over 7,000 displaced children over the past week. They also provide vitamin A and screen the children for malnutrition. Further east, in and around Taloqan, MSF has donated medicines to the hospital, resumed a mobile clinic in Bangi and assessed the clinics in Khanabad. From here, the teams have also traveled to Kunduz, which has been the scene of fierce fighting over the past weeks.

In Faizabad, MSF workers give vital support to the hospital. They also give support clinics in the towns of Baharak and Ishkashim. In Kabul, MSF supports another hospital and three clinics, as they do in Gulbuhar in the Panjsher Valley. A new team arrived recently in Jalalabad and plans to assist the displaced population at the onset of winter.

More international aid workers are on their way and MSF hopes to expand its already huge operation in Afghanistan into outlying regions soon.