KABUL - Residents in a village blockaded by the Taliban insurgents in southern province of Kandahar were made to eat grass due to severe food shortages, a report said Tuesday.

International Crisis Group (ICG), the Taliban militants have blocked the roads to the Ghorak district of Kandahar province restricting the food supply to the local residents.

The villagers in restive Ghorak district were quoted in a ICG report as saying: “The people in the besieged pro-government enclave have resorted to boiling and eating grass.”

Graeme Smith, ICG’s Kabul-based analyst told AFP that they have been speaking to these residents for some years.

“They were already starting to have trouble keeping grocery stores stocked with food last year. Eating grass is one detail that illustrates the problems with supply lines and the isolation of outlying districts,” Smith said.

The International Crisis Group (ICG) in its report released on Monday concluded that “the overall trend is one of escalating violence and insurgent attacks” in Afghanistan, where NATO combat troops have pulled out of many areas where they had been fighting the Taliban for years.

The report further added that the “are blocking roads, capturing rural territory and trying to overwhelm district administration centres.”

“With less risk of attack from international forces, they are massing bigger groups of fighters and getting into an increasing number of face-to-face ground engagements with Afghan security personnel,” the report said.

ICG in its report also expressed concerns regarding the withdrawal of US-led troops from Afghanistan which coincides with the renewed ethnic and tribal feuds, government forces fighting each other and mistreatment of locals by Afghan soldiers and police.

The report by ICG also added that Pakistan had failed to crack down on safe havens from where Taliban leaders are able to direct the insurgency that erupted after the militants were ousted from power in 2001.  (WNA)