Men mourn over the coffin of a victim a day after a suicide attack in Kabul, Afghanistan July 24, 2016.
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And the urgency to uproot Daesh from Afghanistan has only accelerated in the wake of Saturday’s deadly suicide bombing at a protest march in Kabul that killed at least 80 people. Both radical Islamist groups are attempting to topple the Western-backed government of President Ashraf Ghani, in a bid to create an Islamic state in the country.
The U.N. mission in Afghanistan on Monday reported a worrying increase in the number of civilians killed and wounded in the country this year, making it likely that 2016 will be the worst year since 2009, when the organization began keeping track.
The carnage is the single deadliest assault in the country since 2001, the year the USA invasion unleashed the Taliban insurgency, according to the United Nations Assistance Mission of Afghanistan.
But the assault illustrates the report’s finding that suicide bombings and complex attacks are now hurting more civilians than roadside bombs.
Following a massive attack in Kabul, the Afghan military has launched a major offensive against the Islamic State group in the country’s far eastern region near the border with Pakistan, Afghan and US officials said on Tuesday.
More than 22,941 civilians were killed and over 40,993 others injured from January 1, 2009 to June 30, 2016 according to the report. Casualty numbers are not officially released, but according to figures provided by military officials, at least 5,000 troops were killed in 2014, rising to more than 6,000 past year.
But Afghan forces were responsible for more than 20 percent of casualties overall, and the global troops remaining in the country caused 2 percent, while 17 percent of deaths could not be attributed to any specific side.
Ahmad Shuja, Afghanistan researcher for New York-based Human Rights Watch, attributed the alarming rise in the number of deaths and injuries to children to a changing landscape of war. The UN has urged the government to cease the use of such aerial attacks in civilian-populated areas.
While the main fight is against the Taliban, a stronger group than IS, the campaign is a departure from the previous defensive strategy of Afghan forces, who have struggled to contain insurgents since US-led North Atlantic Treaty Organisation troops ended their combat mission in 2014.
Between January and June, 1,601 civilians were killed and 3,565 were wounded – a four percent increase in casualties compared to the same period a year ago, the United Nations Assistance Mission in Afghanistan (Unama) said. Until now they have been a largely defensive force, and have struggled to take the lead on the battlefield since the withdrawal in 2014 of most worldwide combat forces.
While 2015 saw the highest number of civilian casualties since 2009, when UNAMA started collating civilian casualties, numbers for this half-year were similar to a year ago.
Civilian casualties touched a record high in the first half of 2016, with 388 children killed and 1,121 wounded.
This is the highest number of casualties since the United Nations started keeping track in 2009, and puts 2016 on track to break the record level set in 2015, which itself broke a record set only in 2014.
Tadamichi Yamamoto, the Secretary-General’s Special Representative for Afghanistan and head of UNAMA, stressed that the report must serve as a call to action by parties to the conflict “to do all they can to spare civilians from the horrors of war”. Twenty-three percent of civilian casualties were a result of “Pro-Government Forces (PGE)”.
Nearly 40 percent of civilian casualties this year were caused by “ground engagement”.
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Nangarhar is one of Afghanistan’s most economically important provinces, a major producer of agricultural goods and a thoroughfare for much of the country’s exports to Pakistan and beyond.
