The rancid smell of an open sewer hangs heavy in the mid-afternoon heat and the bark of stray dogs makes the whisper barely audible.

Another woman outside a blue-tiled mosque eyes a foreigner. She quickly tucks her chin to her chest and stoops her shoulders trying it seems to bury herself deep inside her burqa. She steps forward, her hand outstretched.

``I'm not a beggar, but I have no choice. I need food for my family,'' says a voice from within. In the beleaguered capital, ruled by Afghanistan's hardline Taliban religious army, women have been on the receiving end of most of the militia's Islamic edicts.

Women cannot work, girls do not go to school. Women are not allowed to leave their homes unless accompanied by a male relative. Taxi drivers are routinely beaten if their fare is a womanalone.

Devastated by relentless fighting between rival Islamic factions, aid workers say an estimated 30,000 widows are among the hardest hit by the Taliban's rigid rules regarding women.

Forced off the job in 1996 when the Taliban took control of Kabul, some women have resorted to begging, others send their young children to the street to scavenge and beg.

According to a survey by one aid group, there are about 28,000 so-called street children in Kabul.

There are a a lot of widows in Afghanistan who have lost their husbands, their bread winners, in the war. ``These women have to do something for their survival,'' said Huma Saeed, a member of a small, but vocal Afghan women's group called the Revolutionary Afghan Women's Association. Their members, like Saeed, are mostly in neighbouring Pakistan.

``They have lost the male members of their family and they themselves cannot work,'' says Saeed. ``Begging is the only way.''

The Taliban defend their edicts in the name of Islam and remind its criticsthat the previous rulers of Kabul, led by ousted President Burhanuddin Rabbani, destroyed the city in four years of bitter factional fighting that killed 50,000 people, many of them women and children.

They say the streets were not safe from marauding bands of men who would steal and rape. But the Taliban's harsh edicts seems to be taking a toll on the women's mental health.

At Kabul's only mental health hospital, Dr Shaheen Shah Wasah, says since the Taliban takeover, the number of women patients is on the increase.

Theirs is a small shabby ward. Even behind closed doors several women bury themselves in their burqa, lying listlessly on the bed. Some moan and rock back and forth. Others squat in a corner.

Depression is their greatest enemy, says Wasah. ``Some of them were students or teachers or worked in the government,'' he said. ``Now she is in her home. She has no picnics. She can't go anywhere. It affects her brain.''

There have been reports, although not documented, that suicide amongwomen in Afghanistan has increased dramatically in Kabul since the Taliban takeover.

Wasah agreed, but said that suicide in Islamic Afghanistan is shameful and victims are buried quickly and quietly. ``Many more women are coming to my hospital . . . They are suffering from depression,'' he said. ``But many more are coming for medicine and going back home.''

But the medicine is running out, says Wasah. International aid workers, who have left Kabul to protest a Taliban order relocating them to abandoned school dormitories, were supplying Kabul's only mental health hospital with its medicines.

Another week and Wasah's stock of medicines will be gone. ``Then I don't know what I will do,'' he said. ``Maybe I will take them and leave them outside the presidential palace.''

On the street outside the mental health hospital, children scramble and jostle for a place in front of the World Food Programme (WFP) bakeries that supply subsidised bread to some of Kabul's poor.

Children, clutching their WFP slip,proof that they are in need, wrap the warm bread in their tattered scarves and trudge back home. Six-year-old Laila rubs her inflamed eye, squinting into the sun, as she explains that the bread and rice is the only food her family is likely to eat that day. ``I come every day . . . There are six of us in my family,'' she says.