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At a mountain pass overlooking the flattened capital of Pakistani Kashmir, ninth grader Sunous Bashir sits dangerously on the hanging edge of what used to be the roof of the family home.

Indian Kashmiri children stand in the doorway of their damaged home in Uri
© AFP Deshakalyan Chowdhury

MUZAFFARABAD, Pakistan (AFP) - The doe-eyed 13-year-old says she has found solace in the quiet corner since the October 8 quake crushed her house and killed her mother and several other relatives. Her father left her to look after two of her younger siblings while he went to check on their grandmother on the other side of the mountain.

He has not returned, and so Sunous tends the family tent on the Tariq Abad highway, protecting the family's last sack of flour, which she uses to make chapati bread every day.

Along the highway are makeshift tents teeming with children, many with bandages around their heads and fractured bones.

Farther up the road is Sunous' school, which is among the estimated 5,000 to 8,000 destroyed by the quake that killed more than 50,000 people, a disproportionate number of them children.

"I don't know where my parents are, but we cannot leave because they will return and worry. We have very little to eat and it's very cold at nights," Sunour says in near-perfect English, which she says she learned in school.

A Pakistani Kashmiri girl sits on relief aid at a makeshift relief camp
© AFP Arif Ali

"I miss my classmates and I don't know where they are," she says while watching the sun set and a blanket of thick fog descend on Muzaffarabad. "But we need food tonight and that is more important."

Sunous and her brothers are among the hundreds of thousands of children heavily traumatized by the quake and forced to live in squalor in roadside tents with little protection.

The United Nations Children's Fund (UNICEF) says that more than half of the 3.3 million people displaced by the quake are "severely affected."

Of them, "half are 18 years old and under, and a fifth are five years and under that make the most vulnerable group," UNICEF relief spokesman Michael Bociurkiw says.

"No matter what statistics you look at, this is really a children's catastrophe," he tells AFP.

Once winter arrives in the next two weeks, "It's going to be very difficult for them to survive," he says.

He says the number of orphans -- those who have lost both parents -- may not be that big, but many or most of the children have lost at least a father or a mother.

An Indian Kashmiri boy waits for medical assitance
© AFP Deshakalyan Chowdhury

There is no clear figure on how many children are displaced, and volunteers are making the rounds at camps for a proper census. In Muzaffarabad alone, there are about 2,000 children who are either orphaned or who arrived at tents with relatives other than their parents.

"The quake couldn't have struck at a worse time when the kids were in their classrooms. We have visited many schools (where) even to this day children are trying to claw through the rubble to get their classmates out," Bociurkiw says.

"It's absolute catastrophe and it's going to take a lot of time and resources to rebuild. We have thousands and thousands of kids in lowland tent communities that have just been set up.

"There is nowhere for them to play, there is no real counselling going on to help them through the trauma, and there is no education system left."

UNICEF has been deploying volunteers to account for all the children, and the agency will be giving immunizations for the common cold, polio and measles to a million children in the next few days.

Volunteers have also begun distributing educational materials, and tents will be set up to offer at least rudimentary schooling.

But what is more important at the moment is to bring the children in from the cold and ensure that they get proper care.

There is also a huge number of children who had body parts amputated and who would likely be marginalized in an impoverished society not trained to deal with people with disabilities.

"There has been a lot of heroism done on makeshift operation theaters in tents to save these kids' lives, but you are going to see a vast number of them with amputated legs, amputated arms," Bociurkiw says.

"And that in itself requires a huge rehabilitation effort."

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