CNN
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As the sun rises over Kabul’s parched mountains, a family’s daily struggle to find water – and to make it last – is about to begin.
The sound of water tankers rumbling through Raheela’s neighborhood in the Afghan capital prompts the 42-year-old mother of four to rush out to the street to fill her family’s battered buckets and jerrycans. The family’s supply is always running low, she says, and every liter is expensive, stretching nerves and their budgets to breaking point.
“We don’t have access to (drinking) water at all,” Raheela, who goes by one name, told CNN. “Water shortage is a huge problem affecting our daily life.”
Kabul is inching toward catastrophe. It could soon become the first modern capital in the world to run completely dry according to a recent report by Mercy Corps, a non-government organization that warns the crisis could lead to economic collapse.
Population growth, the climate crisis, and relentless over-extraction have depleted groundwater levels, experts say, and nearly half the city’s boreholes have already gone dry.
Raheela’s family must pay for every drop of water, and watch how they use it carefully, sacrificing food and other essentials just to drink and bathe.
“We are deeply concerned,” she said. “We hope for more rain, but if things get worse, I don’t know how we’ll survive,” she told CNN.
It’s an emergency that “is not just a water issue,” warned Marianna Von Zahn, Mercy Corps’ Afghanistan director of programs. “It’s a health crisis, an economic crisis, and a humanitarian emergency all in one.”
A potent mix
Just three decades ago, Kabul’s population was less than 2 million, but the toppling of the Taliban in 2001 led to an influx of migrants, lured by the promise of increased security and economic possibility.
As its population grew, so did the demand for water.
Kabul relies almost entirely on groundwater, replenished by snow and glacier melt from the nearby Hindu Kush mountains. But years of mismanagement and over-extraction have caused those levels to drop by up to 30 meters over the last decade, according to Mercy Corps.
Kabul now extracts 44 million cubic meters more groundwater each year than nature can replenish, Mercy Corps said, a staggering imbalance that’s steadily draining the city’s reserves and its residents’ finances.
Some families, like Ahmad Yasin’s, have dug deeper wells, searching for more water to fill their buckets.
Yasin, 28, lives in a joint family of 10 in the city’s north. For months, he has queued along with his brother for hours every day at the nearby mosque, which has access to a big well, to bring full buckets home for his children, parents, nieces, and nephews.
“That was holding us back from our work and was affecting our income,” he said. So they saved for six months, sacrificing food, to come up with 40,000 Afghanis ($550) to dig a well in their backyard.
Yasin and his brother dug 120 meters before they could find any water – and while this water is free to use for all their basic needs, they can’t drink it. “It’s not safe,” he said.
“Since we spent all our money on the well, we cannot afford to buy a water filter or purified water. Hence, we boil the well water for extended periods of time, let it cool and then drink it.”
Up to 80% of Kabul’s groundwater is contaminated, according to Mercy Corps, a consequence of widespread pit latrine use and industrial waste pollution.
Diarrhea and vomiting are “problems people experience all the time in the city,” said Sayed Hamed, 36, who lives with his wife, three children and two elderly parents in the northwestern Taimani district.
“We often get sick due to contaminated water either by drinking in someone else’s house, in a restaurant, or even by brushing our teeth with the well water,” the government worker said.
The crisis is further compounded by Kabul’s vulnerability to climate change.
“We are getting more and more rain, but less and less snow,” said Najibullah Sadid, a water resource management researcher and member of the Afghan Water and Environment Professionals Network. “That’s impacting a city which has less infrastructure to regulate the flash floods… Snow was helping us, but now we have less, and that’s harming us in terms of groundwater recharge.”
If current trends continue, UNICEF predicts Kabul could run out of groundwater by 2030.
When water runs dry, many turn to tankers
Those without the means to dig hundreds of meters for water are at the mercy of private companies or must rely on donations.
Rustam Khan Taraki spends as much as 30% of his income on water, mostly buying from licensed tanker sellers.
But for families who can’t afford to spend this much, the only option is to walk often long distances to mosques, which can provide water.
Dawn sees Hamed, the government worker, lining up for hours at a nearby well to fill two buckets for his family. During the day, two of his children – 13 and nine years old – line up for a refill, sometimes skipping school to carry heavy buckets up their steep hill in the scorching sun.
The crisis is taking a toll on the children’s future, said Von Zahn from Mercy Corps. “The hours that children should be spending in school, they are now basically spending on fetching water for their families.” she said.
“These harmful coping strategies further deepen the cycle of poverty and vulnerability for women and children.”
Women shoulder much of this crisis — forced to walk for hours across Kabul just to fetch what little water they can, risking their safety under the Taliban’s oppressive rule which prohibits them from going outside without a mahram, or male guardian.
“It is not easy for a woman to go out, especially under the current circumstances where women need to have male company from her family to be able to go out,” a 22-year-old Kabul resident, who did not want to disclose her name for safety reasons, told CNN.
“There are numerous difficulties for every woman or girl to go out alone to get water. They could be harassed or bothered on the way,” she said.
CNN has contacted the Taliban for a response.
A dire future
Beyond the climate crisis, population growth and mismanagement, Kabul’s water crisis is compounded by deep political turmoil.
The Taliban seized control of the country in August 2021 following the chaotic withdrawal of US-led forces after nearly two decades of war, tipping the country to the brink of economic collapse as development and security assistance to the country froze.
Since then, humanitarian aid – aimed at funding urgent needs through non-profit organizations and bypassing government control – filled some of the gap. But US President Donald Trump’s decision earlier this year to halt foreign aid has further set back the country with crippling consequences.
The freeze in US Agency for International Development (USAID) funds is “one of the biggest impacts,” said Von Zahn from Mercy Corps. By early 2025, only about $8 million of the $264 million required for water and sanitation had been delivered.
“So what we’re seeing is a dangerous mix: collapsing local systems, frozen funding, and growing regional friction — all while ordinary Afghans face a worsening crisis every day,” she said.
That leaves the future of many living in Kabul in limbo.
Years ago, when Raheela and her family moved to their current neighborhood, the rent was cheaper, the mosque had water and life was manageable, she said.
Now, she doesn’t know how much longer they can survive in the city.
“We won’t have any other choice but to be displaced again,” she said, “Where will we go from here? I don’t know.”