Barkat Khan was shot dead as he slept, curled up in the muck in one of the roughest parts of Karachi. He was a dirt-poor 13-year-old Afghan who never went to school and never dared to dream of a better life.
Friends say he was an innocent victim of an increasingly vicious cycle of ethnic violence in Pakistan’s largest city, a battleground between economic migrants from the northwest and Afghanistan, and original settlers from India.
Barkat was one of more than 20,000 children — the vast majority of them Afghans — who work for $ 2 a day, collecting rubbish dumped by the 18 million residents of Karachi.
They toil from dawn to night, braving the punishing summer climate and health dangers posed by toxic waste. Without passports and legal status, they have little protection.
And now they are caught up in one of Pakistan’s most under-reported wars: The violence that tears neighborhoods of the country’s richest city to shreds, trampling underfoot the unknown and the defenseless.
“Karachi has become too dangerous. People are being killed indiscriminately, among them, my friend,” said a mournful 12-year-old Jamali, picking up a soggy piece of cardboard.
He and Barkat came to Pakistan as babies when their parents fled the southern city of Kandahar when US-led troops invaded Afghanistan after the 9/11 attacks.
Like tens of thousands of Afghans, the family eventually moved to Karachi in search of work, abandoning their first port of call, the southwestern city of Quetta where Taleban and their families are said to have settled.
“Barkat started collecting garbage right after arriving in Karachi, along with his father. Our families lived together for some time,” said Jamali.
Five years later, Barkat was dead, shot in May at point blank range as he slept outside a food stall that offers free dinners to Karachi’s poorest. His parents are devastated by the loss of their only child.
“Barkat was a lovable boy, very hardworking, who wanted to earn a lot of money to see his parents happy, especially his mother who is shattered after his death,” said his cousin, Mohammad Mukhtar, 19, who also collects rubbish.
“Relatives told me that she hasn’t yet recovered from the shock.”
Police say Barkat was an unwitting victim of ethnic and political violence that has reached record levels in Karachi, Pakistan’s economic powerhouse, which accounts for 42 percent of GDP.
The Human Rights Commission of Pakistan says more than 1,100 people have been killed so far this year — the vast majority without any political affiliation whatsoever.
If the killings continue at the same pace, 2012 will top the 1,715 who perished last year, itself the worst death toll in 16 years.
The troubles are blamed on Mohajirs, Urdu speakers who migrated from India after partition and who dominate the city, and an influx of Pashtuns from Afghanistan and Pakistan’s northwest.
Migration and population growth have put enormous pressure on resources in the Arabian Sea port city, where the economy has been under serious pressure since 9/11.
The Mohajirs are represented by the Muttahida Quami Movement (MQM), led by Altaf Hussain, who exiled himself to Britain in 1992 over threats to his life.
It has 52 seats in the Sindh provincial assembly, while the secular Awami National Party (ANP), the leading Pashtun representation in Karachi, has two seats.
According to official figures, there are 500,000 Afghans in the city, 80 percent registered as refugees and the rest undocumented or illegal economic migrants.
The vast majority of them live in poverty, like Jamali who lives in Koochi, one of three ghettos reserved for Afghans in the city.
His family live near the neighborhood where a UN doctor from Ghana was shot while working on a polio vaccination program that had been condemned by the Taleban.
But the rag-pickers live at around 400 compounds dotted around the city, divided by bamboo into dozens of cubicles shaded from the sun by polythene sheets.
Each cubicle is shared by two to three, who pile up plastic bags stuffed with waste to snatch a few hours’ sleep, before rising at dawn to start again.
Karachi produces around 12,000 tons of waste a day and has no proper solid waste disposal system. Much of it goes into the drains or is dumped along roads or across the city.
Part of it ends up at government designated landfill sites, which seldom handle waste disposal on any scientific basis.
Contractors pay money to their parents every week, based on the weight of the rubbish they collect, and the children eat at restaurants and charities offering free meals, in order to save as much of their salaries as possible for their families.
The refuse is sold onto middlemen, who sell it to recycling factories — paper, cardboard, copper, iron, animal bones and other discarded articles are all in high demand.
Officials say rag-pickers do a valuable job, but that there are risks involved.
Rana Asif Habib, head of Initiator, a charity working for underprivileged children, says they handle hospital waste without the necessary protection kits, leading to contractions of diseases such as hepatitis and scabies.
“They also get infected by eating food from the garbage. They can’t afford to see a doctor. If they want to, no state-run hospitals treat them well.”
Afghans are particularly vulnerable, he added.
“They are often antagonized by police and their employers, but they can’t complain because they are not Pakistanis.”
Despite the dangers, Jamali still thinks Karachi is better than Afghanistan.
“Karachi is very dangerous. Nobody knows when a bullet will hit, yet we have a lot more opportunities here. We are not going anywhere now.”
Afghan scavengers in Karachi tread on dangerous ground
Afghan scavengers in Karachi tread on dangerous ground
Why this US cold snap feels bone-shattering when it’s not record-shattering
The brutally frigid weather that has gripped most of America for the past 11 days is not unprecedented. It just feels that way.
The first quarter of the 21st century was unusually warm by historical standards – mostly due to human-induced climate change – and so a prolonged cold spell this winter is unfamiliar to many people, especially younger Americans.
Because bone-shattering cold occurs less frequently, Americans are experiencing it more intensely now than they did in the past, several experts in weather and behavior said. But the longer the current icy blast lasts – sub-freezing temperatures are forecast to stick around in many places — the easier it should become to tolerate.
“We adapt, we get used to things. This is why your first bite of dessert is much more satisfying than your 20th bite,” Hannah Perfecto, who studies consumer behavior at Washington University in St. Louis, wrote in an email. “The same is true for unpleasant experiences: Day 1 of a cold snap is much more a shock to the system than Day 20 is.”
‘Out of practice’ because of recent mild winters
Charlie Steele, a 78-year-old retired federal worker in Saugerties, New York, considers himself a lover of cold weather. In the recent past, he has gone outside in winter wearing a T-shirt and shorts, and has even walked barefoot in the snow. But this January’s deep-freeze is “much, much colder than anything I can remember,” he said.
Steele’s sense of change is backed up data.
There have been four fewer days of subfreezing temperatures in the US per year, on average, between 2001 and 2025 than there were in the previous 25 years, according to data from Climate Central. The data from more than 240 weather stations also found that spells of subfreezing temperatures have become less widespread geographically and haven’t lasted as long — until this year.
In Albany, about 40 miles from Steele, the change has been more pronounced than the national average, with 11 fewer subfreezing days in the last 25 years than the previous quarter century.
“You’re out of practice,” Steele said. “You’re kind of lulled into complacency.”
Coldest week someone under 30 may have felt
Climate change has shifted what people are used to, said several climate scientists, including Daniel Swain of the University of California’s Water Resources Institute.
“It’s quite possible that for anybody under the age of 30, in some spots this may well be the coldest week of their life,” Swain said.
Jennifer Francis, a climate scientist at the Woodwell Climate Research Center in Falmouth, Massachusetts, said, “humans get used to all kinds of things — city noise, stifling heat, lies from politicians, and winter cold. So when a ‘normal’ cold spell does come along, we feel it more acutely.”
We forget how cold it used to be
People forget how extreme cold feels after just two to eight years of milder winters, according to a 2019 study in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. Americans have gone through a much longer stretch than that.
Over the past 30 years, the average daily low in the continental US has dropped below 10 degrees 40 times, according to meteorologist Ryan Maue, former chief scientist for the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. But in the preceding 30 years, that chilly threshold was reached 124 times.
“People have forgotten just how cold it was in the 20th century,” Texas A&M University climate scientist Andrew Dessler said.
Their wake-up call came late last month, when the country’s average daily low dipped below 10 degrees three times in one week.
Regardless of how it feels, extremely cold weather presents dangers. People and vehicles slip on ice, power can go down, leaving people freezing in homes, and storms limit visibility, making commuting to work or even doing basic errands, potentially perilous. More than 110 deaths have been connected to the winter storms and freezing temperatures since January.
Shaking off our cold ‘rustiness’
As this winter’s frigid days stretch on, people adapt. University of San Diego psychiatrist Thomas Rutledge said people shake off what he calls their “weather rustiness.”
Rutledge explained what he meant via email, recalling the period decades ago when he lived in Alaska. “I assumed that everyone was a good driver in winter conditions. How couldn’t they be with so much practice?” he wrote. “But what I annually observed was that there was always a large spike in car accidents in Alaska after first big snowfall hit. Rather than persistent skills, it seemed that the 4-6 months of spring and summer was enough for peoples’ winter driving skills to rust enough to cause accidents.”
That’s Alaska. This cold snap hit southern cities such as Dallas and Miami, where it’s not just the people unaccustomed to the cold. Utilities and other basic infrastructure are also ill-equipped to handle the extreme weather, said Francis of the Woodwell Climate Research Center.
While this ongoing cold snap may feel unusually long to many Americans, it isn’t, according to data from 400 weather stations across the continental US with at least a century of record-keeping, as tracked by the Southeast Regional Climate Center.
Only 33 of these weather stations have recorded enough subzero temperatures since the start of 2026 to be in the top 10 percent of the coldest first 32 days of any year over the past century.
When Steele moved to the Hudson Valley as a toddler in 1949, the average daily low temperature over the previous 10 winters was 14.6 degrees . In the past 10 years, the average daily low was 20.8 degrees .
As a younger man, Steele used to hunt in winter and sit for hours on cold rocks.
“I could never do that now,” he said. “I’m rusty. I’m out of practice.”
