Three times more children than women were killed or maimed, with UMAMA documenting 507 women casualties. “Pro-government forces”, or the country’s official security forces, accounted for another 23 percent of the deaths.
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This toll stops in June, and so doesn’t include the 80 civilians killed last week or the hundreds wounded in Kabul suicide bombings by ISIS.
Since January 2009, over 20,000 Afghan civilians have died and more than 40,000 were injured. Radmanesh said border tensions were also discussed, and a statement by the Afghan Defense Ministry said all sides were committed to solving the ongoing border disputes between the two countries.
The NATO-led coalition estimates there are between 1,000 and 3,000 IS militants in Afghanistan – mostly disaffected Pakistani and Afghan Taliban, as well as Uzbek militants and local residents of Nangarhar.
But the militants have had an apparent resurgence this summer, despite continued Afghan ground operations and airstrikes by US forces.
While the movement may have been limited to eastern Afghanistan, that need not stop it from seeking to spread violence and raise its profile with more attacks on civilian targets, officials said.
The U.N. Assistance Mission in Afghanistan (UNAMA) “recommends that current levels of support from global military forces to Afghan Air Force be increased in order to strengthen the capacity of Afghan security forces to mitigate civilian casualties in air operations”, the report says.
“Platitudes not backed by meaningful action ring hollow over time”. “History and the collective memory of the Afghan people will judge leaders of all parties to this conflict by their actual conduct”, he added.
The inexperienced Afghan forces have largely stalled in the fight against Islamic militants ever since most worldwide combat troops withdrew in 2014.
Ground engagements accounted for 38% of casualties, followed by complex and suicide attacks at 20%, United Nations investigators found.
While claiming responsibility for Saturday’s suicide attack in Kabul, the worst such incident in the city since 2001, IS warned it would carry out more attacks against ethnic Hazaras unless they stopped joining government forces in Syria fighting the terror group.
ISIS, which attacked both government and Taliban forces, was responsible for 122 civilian casualties – 25 deaths and 97 injuries – according to the report. No casualty figures for government troops were provided.
The Human Rights branch of the UN Assistance Mission in Afghanistan found that between January 1 and June 30, 2016, Afghanistan suffered 5,166 civilian casualties.
While global forces declared their combat mission over at the end of 2014, they continue to conduct air strikes and special operations missions.
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Significantly, the United Nations in its report also asked the worldwide military forces, that includes the U.S., to undertake an independent, impartial, transparent and effective investigation of the October 2015 airstrike on the Médecins Sans Frontières hospital in Kunduz and make the findings public.
