My three boys starved to death. I hope angels bring them home, says Afghan mother

Gusts of wind blew dust up off the ground as Ghulam Mohiddin and his wife Nazo walked towards the graveyard where all their children are buried.

They showed us the graves of the three boys they lost in the past two years – one-year-old Rahmat, seven-month-old Koatan and most recently, three-month-old Faisal Ahmad.

All three suffered from malnutrition, say Ghulam and Nazo.

"Can you imagine how painful it's been for me to lose three children? One minute there's a baby in your arms, the next minute they are empty," says Nazo.

"I hope every day that angels would somehow put my babies back in our home."

The graves of Ghulam and Nazo's boys Sheidaee

'Three million children in peril'

There are days the couple go without food. They break walnut shells for a living in the Sheidaee settlement just outside the city of Herat in western Afghanistan and receive no help from the Taliban government or from NGOs.

"Watching helplessly as my children cried out of hunger, it felt like my body was erupting in flames. It felt like someone was cutting me into half with a saw from my head to my feet," said Ghulam.

The deaths of their children are not recorded anywhere, but it's evidence of a silent wave of mortality engulfing Afghanistan's youngest, as the country is pushed into what the UN calls an unprecedented crisis of hunger.

"We started the year with the highest increase in child malnutrition ever recorded in Afghanistan. But things have got worse from there," says John Aylieff, the World Food Programme's country director.

"Food assistance kept a lid in this country on hunger and malnutrition, particularly for the bottom five million who really can't cope without international support. That lid has now been lifted. The soaring of the malnutrition is placing the lives of more than three million children in peril."

Aid has sharply declined because the single largest donor, the US, stopped nearly all aid to Afghanistan earlier this year. But WFP says eight or nine other donors who funded them in the last two years have also stopped this year, and many others are giving much less than they were last year.

One reason is donors are responding to a number of crises around the world. But the Taliban government's policies also affect how much the world is willing to help.

What are they doing to help their citizens?

"Those who are facing malnutrition, those who are facing hunger, it's because of sanctions, because of aid cuts by international organisations. It's not because of the government," the head of the Taliban's political office in Doha, Suhail Shaheen, told the BBC.

"The government has expanded its assistance to the people and is doing what is in its capacity, But our budget is based on internal revenues, and we are facing sanctions."

Two-thirds of the graves at Sheidaee are for children

But the Taliban's intransigence on women's rights affects its bid for international recognition, and for the sanctions against it to be lifted. Other decisions, like the recent enforcement of a previously announced ban on Afghan women working for NGOs is putting the delivery of "life-saving humanitarian assistance at serious risk", the UN says.

The malnutrition emergency is compounded by other factors too – a severe drought that has affected agricultural incomes in more than half of Afghanistan's provinces, and the forced return of more than two million Afghans from Iran and Pakistan, reducing the remittances they send back.

'Hungry all the time'

At the Sheidaee graveyard we found startling evidence of child deaths. There were no records of the people buried there, so we counted the graves ourselves. Roughly two-thirds of the hundreds of graves were of children – it was easy to tell the small graves from the bigger ones.

Villagers told us the graveyard is relatively new, between two to three years old. They also confirmed that it was not a specific graveyard for children.

As we walked through the settlement in Sheidaee, people came out carrying their children. Rahila was carrying Hibatullah who, at two, cannot stand up. Durkhanee brought out her son Mohammad Yusuf, who's also nearly two and unable to stand.

Nearly half of all Afghan children under the age of five are stunted, the UN says.

Hanifa gives Rafiullah bread soaked in tea, if she can - and drugs to make him sleep

In one of the mud and clay homes, Hanifa Sayedi's one-year-old son Rafiullah could barely hold himself up, even while he's sitting.

"I took him to a clinic where they told me he's malnourished, but I don't have the money to keep taking him there," she says. She and her husband have two other children, and dry pieces of bread with Afghan green tea are the only meals the family can afford. Some days they don't eat.

Rafiullah doesn't have teeth yet, so Hanifa soaks the bread in the tea and feeds him.

"But it's not enough and he's hungry all the time. To make him sleep, I give him these medicines," she says, pulling out two strips of tablets.

Drugs such as these can damage children's heart, kidneys and liver

One is a strip of Lorazepam, an anti-anxiety medicine, the other is Propanolol, a drug that controls high blood pressure. One strip costs 10 Afghani ($0.15; £0.13) the same amount as one piece of bread. Hanifa says she bought them at a pharmacy, saying she wanted sleeping pills for herself.

"I feel so guilty that my children are going hungry and I can't do much. I feel suffocated and like I should kill my children and myself," she says.

Doctors say that when given to young children, drugs such as these can damage the child's heart, kidneys and liver, and can even be life-threatening if given for a prolonged period of time.

Hanifa's is one of millions of pleas for help.

"It's incredibly heartbreaking to be in this country and watch this unfold. WFP has a hotline. We've had to retrain our call operators because we're getting a much higher proportion of calls from women threatening suicide because they're desperate and they just don't know how to feed their children any more," says WFP's John Aylieff.

The closure of food assistance to communities like those in Sheidaee and in other parts of Afghanistan has meant that more children are being pushed into severe acute malnutrition.

We've seen evidence of this in hospitals across Afghanistan.

In the malnutrition ward of the Badakhshan regional hospital in the north-east, there were 26 children in 12 beds.

Three-month-old Sana, the youngest baby on the ward, has malnutrition, acute diarrhoea and a cleft lip. She is her mother Zamira's second baby. The first child, another baby girl, died when she was 20 days old.

Zamira is scared Sana might die, like her first daughter did

"I'm scared this child might also meet the same fate. I'm tired of this life. It's not worth living," says Zamira, with a stricken look on her face.

As Zamira speaks, Sana's hands and feet turn blue. Her tiny heart is not pumping enough blood. A nurse puts her on oxygen.

In another cot is five-month-old Musleha, who has malnutrition and measles. Her mother Karima says she's hardly opened her eyes in the past few days.

"She's in pain and I don't know what to do. We are poor and don't have access to nutritious food. That's why she's in this state," says Karima.

In the cot next to Musleha, are twins Mutehara and Maziyan. The baby girls also have malnutrition and measles, and are half the weight they should be at 18 months. Mutehara lets out a feeble cry. It's evident she's in pain.

Five-month-old Musleha had malnutrition and measles

A week after we visited the hospital, we followed up with the families of the babies. We were told that Sana, Musleha and Mutehara had all died.

'We simply cannot afford to feed them'

This isn't the first time we've documented child deaths from malnutrition in Afghanistan, but this is the worst we've ever seen.

Within a span of a week, three babies from one ward became the latest casualties of Afghanistan's crisis of hunger.

And it's about to get worse.

"WFP's humanitarian funding will run out in November. At the moment, we are starting to turn away malnourished women and children from the health centres because we simply cannot afford to feed them. In November, we will stop unless we get a further injection of funding," says John Aylieff.

With winter approaching, it is hard to overstate the urgency of the disaster unfolding in Afghanistan.

Additional reporting Mahfouz Zubaide, Aakriti Thapar, Sanjay Ganguly