BANGKOK, Thailand (EPN) -- The skeletal remains of a huge spiral staircase lead to rooms caked with manure and reeking of urine, where gaps in the rubble form windows and doors.

Welcome to the miserable home of 60 destitute men, women and children who huddle in darkness, hoping to survive winter in the Afghan capital.

They are squatting in a big, wrecked, abandoned building which they share with horses, goats, chickens and a snarling, tied-up dog.

The animals' manure is heaped everywhere in the bombed building, especially upstairs where most of the Afghans dwell.

The residents dry the valuable manure in all the available rooms so they can burn it as fuel for cooking and warmth.

Barefoot children scamper over the animal waste.

"This place is bad for the children," says Begum Wazir, a 50-year-old woman with greasy hair at the top of the rotting spiral staircase.

"The children's health is very bad. They have no clothes for the winter," Mrs. Wazir says.

She grabs one screaming child, pulls off his cheap shoe and holds it up to show how the thin rubber is cracked and coming apart.

"Every day the children go to the bakeries and beg for bread," she says.

"They also must beg for money. We don't have anything here.

"There are 32 children among us. The eldest child is 14 years old and the youngest are infants," Mrs. Wazir adds.

A nearby child displays a cute smile and then covers his mouth with blackened hands.

Another child grins with slime-encrusted teeth.

Millions of people throughout Afghanistan are suffering in similarly appalling conditions -- cold, hungry and diseased -- according to aid officials.

The lucky ones find shelter in villages or abandoned buildings devoid of running water and electricity.

Like most structures in Afghanistan, this one is made of mud bricks.

Many of the walls, plus all the doors and windows, were destroyed by bombs and rockets during the past decade of warfare in Kabul.

The huge gaps allow cold weather to whip through the remaining rooms. Several rooms are too devastated to be used.

The military may have occupied this building before, but no one is really sure.

The metal-and-cement grand spiral staircase -- now ravaged, spindly and exposed to the elements because all its protective walls were blown away -- testifies to the building's lost glory.

An acrid stench of urine fills a large central room where the mud floor is streaked and wet. Residents relieve themselves in the barren room even though they must walk through it to meet each other.

On the far side of the open toilet, a filthy drape blocks off a smaller room which opens onto a pile of drying goat manure.

Inside the small room, choking smoke billows from a manure-burning stove.

Two women are laying on the floor under blankets, suffering from illness.

"They are sick," says a young man.

He then insists on revealing his bandaged stomach.

"I had a stomach operation but I am still in pain," the young man says. "Look, under these bandages I have 25 stitches."

Another room offers heaps of blankets and a stove, plus bits of personal items such as clothes and bowls.

Residents look down from their second-story rooms, through the rubble, to see a neighborhood of mostly deserted, bombed buildings.

A man passes by in the street, pushing a wheel barrel.

"Five years ago we left our village, near Karobagh, because the Taliban destroyed everything," says Mohammad Zahir, 38.

"Sixty people live here in this destroyed building. We are five families," Mr. Zahir adds.

Downstairs, a couple of horses graze on hay in a front yard.

"The animals do not belong to us," says Izmarie Belsaki.

"Other people keep the animals here and pay us a little money or give us things," Mr. Belsaki says.

The man with the bandaged stomach, meanwhile, suddenly shoves an infant with a bleeding forehead behind the rear tire of our car.

"If you don't write down my name, I will not move this child and you will run over it if you try to leave," he threatens.

Like other people in the building, Hakim Khan, 24, mistakenly thinks if his name is written down by a foreign correspondent then help will soon arrive.

"My father is in the hospital," Mr. Khan says. "I have no money to eat."

Right around the corner is a deserted parade ground where the Taliban and former regimes used to roll out their armaments and men.

Fighters, officials, workers and others would strut past a grandstand where government leaders sat, nodding in approval.

The plight of the people in the bombed building began five years ago.

The Taliban destroyed villages and orchards throughout the Shomali Valley 42 miles (70 kilometers) north of Kabul to crush local opposition to the Taliban's 1996 capture of Kabul.

Today, the Shomali Valley is a haunted, deadly wasteland.

In and around Karobagh it appears as if a tidal wave of war washed over a populated, fertile valley and turned the villages into miles and miles of huge crumbled sand castles.

All the houses, farms and markets have been reduced to hollow, abandoned stubble.

Heaved-over, damaged Russian tanks -- used by the Taliban and their U.S.-backed Northern Alliance opponents -- litter the tan dirt-and-rock landscape.

A few victorious Northern Alliance troops have erected their green, white and black striped flag on sticks above the disaster zone.

An occasional double-barreled anti-aircraft gun pokes through a non-existent roof above a maze of random walls.

The Shomali Valley's vineyards are darkened, twisted stumps due to neglect and drought.

The two-lane highway which links Kabul with Karobagh and the rest of northern Afghanistan is bordered with toaster-sized rocks painted red and white to indicate landmines.

Throughout Shomali Valley the red and white rocks -- placed by international monitors -- warn against walking off the asphalt road.

After the Taliban obliterated the valley, little remained of any value.

A couple of months ago, however, Taliban fighters took up positions throughout Shomali Valley to defend Kabul against a possible ground assault by U.S. and Northern Alliance troops.

The U.S. shredded the Taliban and the valley with massive aerial bombardments starting on Oct. 7 and ending on Nov. 13 when the Taliban finally fled.