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.
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.
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.
At the Sheidaee graveyard, there were starkly visible signs of child mortality with two-thirds of the graves being for children. Villagers confirmed it was not a specific graveyard for children.
As the crisis deepens, a growing number of families like Ghulam and Nazo's are losing children to malnutrition every day.
Experts warn that with the current trajectory of aid decline and multiple socio-economic challenges, conditions for Afghan children will likely deteriorate even further.
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, warns John Aylieff.
The situation in Afghanistan is urgent and dire as winter approaches, threatening the already vulnerable population with increasing hardship.
