Vatican newspaper examines Afghanistan’s plight, 5 years after fall of Kabul
August 14, 2026
The Vatican newspaper marked the fifth anniversary of fall of Kabul to the Taliban with the publication of three articles in its August 13 edition.
In “Sognando un futuro,” the most prominent front-page article, L’Osservatore Romano lamented the denial of secondary and higher education to 2.5 million Afghan girls and young women.
“Access to schooling, which remains available only at the primary level, is crucial for granting Afghan girls the right to dream and build a better future for themselves,” the unsigned article stated. “This denial of education goes hand in hand with an increasingly critical humanitarian situation: a lack of international funding is exacerbating a structural economic crisis that has plunged 17 million Afghans into acute food insecurity and left half the population in need.”
“One in two people in Taliban-ruled Afghanistan is in need of humanitarian aid,” Valerio Palombaro reported in the second article. “Five years after the chaotic withdrawal of the United States and its allies from the country, a crossroads between Central, South, and West Asia—which culminated on August 15, 2021, with the Taliban’s return to Kabul—Afghanistan remains one of the world’s most severe yet forgotten humanitarian crises.”
In the third article, “Un Paese travolto da una crisi di sfollamento permanente“ (A country overwhelmed by a crisis of permanent displacement), Francesco Citterich wrote:
Today, Afghanistan represents one of the most emblematic and dramatic cases of the global internal displacement crisis; it also consistently ranks among the world’s ten most neglected displacement crises, according to the Norwegian Refugee Council (NRC).
In the most recent report on so-called “forgotten crises,” the country ranks fifth, a figure that not only measures the scale of the phenomenon but, above all, highlights the level of international inattention toward a humanitarian crisis affecting millions of people. This crisis continues to deteriorate year after year, with no concrete signs of the trend reversing.
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