Nevertheless, Saturday’s attack by Islamic State on the Shi’ite minority adds a unsafe complication to the war the Western-backed government in Kabul has been fighting with Taliban insurgents.
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ISIS is battling the Taliban for territory in the country’s eastern provinces and the group has steadily grown in influence in the country that has been wracked by conflict since the US coalition invasion in 2001.
The premier informed the Afghan president how upset was the Pakistan Muslim League-Nawaz (PML-N) government and Pakistani people over the precious loss of lives in twin blasts that hit a demonstration in Kabul on Saturday. Most of those killed were civilians.
The Islamic State or Daesh had claimed responsibility for the Saturday’s attack in a procession of the Hazara community which killed over 80 people and injured almost 300.
A total of 1,601 civilians deaths were recorded among all ages between January and June, of which 388 were children. Nearly a third of.
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.
In the first half of this year the United Nations said at least 1,600 people had died, and more than 3,500 people were injured – a 4 per cent increase in overall civilian causalities compared to the same period last year.
Since the withdrawal of worldwide troops from Afghanistan began after 2011 and the official end of Nato’s combat mission in December 2014, the number of civilian casualties has risen year-on-year.
However, even though the casualties are record high in 2016, the number of deaths in Afghanistan owing to the protracted conflict peaked in 2014, with 1,686 deaths that year.
For the first time, the Afghan air force killed or wounded more civilians than did air strikes carried out by global forces, the United Nations said. While Afghan troops have suffered heavy casualties over the past two years, the country’s military is hoping to regain the initiative in the war as they put together a brand new offensive in their fight against loyalists of ISIS. However, it said this was a 47 per cent increase compared to the same period previous year, primarily as a result of stepped-up battles across the country.
Some of the casualties are linked to suicide attacks and explosive devices.
“Every single casualty documented in this report – people killed while praying, working, studying, fetching water, recovering in hospitals -. represents a failure of commitment and should be a call to action for parties to the conflict to take meaningful, concrete steps to reduce civilians’ suffering and increase protection”, Yamamoto said. The 15-year conflict has cost the USA nearly $700 billion and killed more than 2,200 American troops.
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UNAMA also says that during the first half of this year, it recorded 157,987 “newly displaced” people, a 10 per cent increase of the same period last year, bringing the total estimate of people displaced by conflict to 1.2 million.
