Hello, hello, hello. Welcome to the show. Apologies for the slight delay. We're waiting on a brilliant guest.

You may have seen previously a brilliant lecturer from Afghanistan who after the fall of Kabul when the Taliban took over the capital, spoke to us firsthand about what was happening on the ground.

Hopefully we will be joined with him later in the show. We have a brilliant guest from about to bring in first of all.

But let me just give just a bit of an explanation about why we're doing this. Afghanistan now is the worst humanitarian crisis on earth. It was Yemen, which we've covered extensively.

I've been to a Yemeni refugee camp, Yemen, which is being bombed by the Saudi-led coalition armed back by the west. That was the worst humanitarian crisis.

It's still a horrific humanitarian crisis with millions of Yemenis on the brink of starvation. But now tragically Afghanistan has supplanted Yemen as the worst humanitarian crisis on earth, about millions of Afghans face being driven into starvation 97% are on the brink of extreme poverty.

Now to be clear, nobody serious is obviously an apologist for the Taliban. The Taliban now has taken over Afghanistan. This is an established fact.

The reason we're having this discussion is that $7 billion worth of frozen Afghan funds, which were frozen by the US for months, which are needed if the Afghan economy has any hope of any sound stable footing being established.

That's now being split with half of it to be given to victims of the 9-11 attacks. This is an obscenity. It's just a straightforward obscenity.

The greatest crime being committed right now with all too little discussion, the Afghan people are in a desperate state. They desperately need, obviously, just the basics of assistance and for an economy to be rebuilt after decades of war.

And for that money, which is Afghan money to be expropriated and given to victims of the 9-11 attacks, rather than starving Afghans at the moment is obviously obscene.

So we'll be talking about that later on. We'll be talking about that now, but we'll be talking about that first hand with Abdallah, who will be joining us at 25 past.

But first what I'm going to do is I'm going to bring in a brilliant writer, activist, Ead El Baghdaddi. It's great to see how you're doing.

Thank you so much for having me, Alan.

It's a great honor to have you. So let me just let's just as I said, we'll just bring in a bit of context. So there's actually been in quite some mainstream publications. This is foreign affairs stop starving Afghanistan, why the West should release its economic choke on that was back in December.

As I've said, it's become, as the New Yorker says, the world's largest humanitarian crisis, more than 20 million Afghans on the brink of famine, as it reported here, 97% of the population could be plunged into extreme poverty.

Now the reason what one of the many reasons I want to talk to you is a treat you did yesterday, America would elect 911 family, Saudi Arabia, it's happy to steal food from the mouths of Afghan children on awful disgusting immoral mood.

And then you want to know why America's hemorrhaging software around the world is shit like this. I like direct language. So that's very good. I could do this immoral and hypocritical has no place on the world stage as some of universe as some sort of universalist organising principle.

So just unpack that. Tell me about what that announcement from the US and what it signifies.

There's two parts to this. There's the part about the confiscation and there's the part of the justification for the confiscation.

I mean, I think you covered the reason why this is so egregious brilliantly yourself.

And I think your Afghan guest, of course, I'd rather if an Afghan speaks about this and I'm sure that your guest would speak about this.

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