Hassan did not have enough money to afford a plot in the cemetery for his son. So on a chilling winter afternoon four weeks ago he scraped a hole in the ice and mud above a drainage ditch beside the busy Darulaman road and buried Muhamadulla there.

The boy was a month old and had died of hypothermia less than 100 yards from the warm glow of Kabul’s splendid new Aid Ministry. He lies beside the graves of two of his sisters, aged 4 and 5, who perished in similar circumstances within ten days of each other last winter.

His twin brother Rahmatullah is still alive, but only just. Marble-white and listless, the sick child lies in a crib covered by blankets in the squatters’ shack that is his family home. It seems more than likely that the cold will carry him away, too. Kabul’s nighttime temperatures have dropped as far as minus 25°C some nights over the past month and the leaden cold pervaded the unheated earthen room.

“If God is kind perhaps he will live,” said Hassan of the surviving twin. “I don’t know. He’s very sick. We try to keep him warm with blankets and quilts. I am not sure they are enough.”

As much as the cold, it is bureaucracy that has killed Hassan’s three children. If they had been classed as internally displaced people (IDPs) they would have fallen under the remit of the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) and been entitled to winter aid similar to that currently received by 300 IDP families in Kabul. To be an IDP you have to have fled your home through persecution, but Hassan’s family were made homeless by sheer poverty, so they are classified as “economic migrants”. They are the responsibilty of the Afghan Government. No one knows how many economic migrants there are in the city.

Hassan and his family are Kuchis, Afghanistan’s nomads, and they live in an ad hoc squatter camp among war ruins in the south of the Afghan capital. Owning neither land nor livestock, they eke out an existence scavenging on Kabul’s garbage dumps for plastic and scrap metal.

Despite the torrent of foreign aid over the past seven years and the smart, newly constructed Ministry for Rural Rehabilitation and Development, a stone’s throw from Hassan’s hovel of mud and corrugated iron, almost no aid has been forthcoming.

“In the past three years we’ve had no help at all apart from one 7kg bag of flour from the Ministry of Interior which arrived three days ago,” explained Hassan. “It was bad flour which they couldn’t use to feed the police. You can’t cook with it and it stinks. No foreign aid workers have ever visited us and when we asked for help at the nearby ministry building they told us they built roads and bridges and weren’t a relief agency.

“They gave us a bag of coal and two blankets last year. Nothing since.”

There are 15 children still alive in Hassan’s extended family. Dressed in little more than bundled rags, many of them barefoot, their faces prematurely wizened by the cold and malnutrition, most of the children were born in a refugee camp in Pakistan, where the family had fled during the Soviet invasion. They lost their livestock in the exodus, as well as the grazing land north of Kabul over which they had camped and migrated for generations.

When they returned to Afghanistan three years ago, they discovered the land was now privately owned by men who did not want the Kuchis on it. So Hassan brought his family to squat and scavenge in Kabul, where they have fallen through the holes in Afghanistan’s welfare net to the point where the cold kills their children.

Being landless also precludes them from getting aid from the UNHCR shelter programme, which gives families materials to build a new home.

“The UNHCR criterion is that to be helped the individuals concerned have first to prove that they own the land on which they will build,” said Mohammed Nader Farhad, the UNHCR spokesman in Kabul. “But the Kuchis don’t own land.”

A recent rise in winter food prices has worsened the squatters’ predicament. A bag of flour in the market that cost the equivalent of £6 a few months ago now sells for £15.

Fifteen other squatter families live among the ruins in Darulaman, but their shared poverty has not produced much community spirit. “If one of us gets hold of a bag of coal and the other families see us, they will run over and fight us for it,” said Salaam, Hassan’s son-in-law.

As he spoke his three-year-old son, Bilal, wandered out across the ice-packed ground. Shivering and barelegged, he was suffering from TB and one of his hands was swollen with an untreated infection. “We tried to get him treated last year but the medicine cost us $40 [£20] so we couldn’t buy any more,” Salaam added.

Behind them Kabul seemed picturesque under the cloudless sky of blazing blue, the distant snow-covered peaks glimmering in the sun. Looking across the road towards the ministry building illuminated in fresh white and yellow paint, Hassan was not impressed by the view.

“Its the worst life one could live,” he said. “A big family, no money, no land. Cold. Hunger. We are living in a grave here.”

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