Women, children casualties on the rise in Afghanistan, warns the United Nations
The UN warns "unprecedented numbers of Afghan civilians will perish" if violence is not stemmed.
(AFP: Sajjad Hussain)
More women and children were killed and wounded in Afghanistan in the first half of 2021 than in the first six months of any year since the United Nations began systematically keeping count in 2009.
"I implore the Taliban and Afghan leaders to take heed of the conflict's grim and chilling trajectory and its devastating impact on civilians," said Deborah Lyons, the UN secretary-general's special representative for Afghanistan. The war-torn country saw a 47 per cent increase in the number of all civilians killed and wounded in violence across Afghanistan in the first six months of the year, compared to the same period last year, according to a new UN report.
"The report provides a clear warning that unprecedented numbers of Afghan civilians will perish and be maimed this year if the increasing violence is not stemmed," Ms Lyons added in a statement accompanying the report.
More women and children were killed and wounded in Afghanistan in the first half of 2021 than in the first six months of any year since the United Nations began systematically keeping count in 2009.
"I implore the Taliban and Afghan leaders to take heed of the conflict's grim and chilling trajectory and its devastating impact on civilians," said Deborah Lyons, the UN secretary-general's special representative for Afghanistan. The war-torn country saw a 47 per cent increase in the number of all civilians killed and wounded in violence across Afghanistan in the first six months of the year, compared to the same period last year, according to a new UN report.
"The report provides a clear warning that unprecedented numbers of Afghan civilians will perish and be maimed this year if the increasing violence is not stemmed," Ms Lyons added in a statement accompanying the report.
Afghans go through belongings left behind after deadly bombings near a Kabul school.
(AP: Mariam Zuhaib)
The Taliban have swiftly captured significant territory in recent weeks, seized strategic border crossings with several neighbouring countries and are threatening a number of provincial capitals.
The report found a particularly sharp increase in killings and injuries since May, when international military forces began their withdrawal and the fighting intensified following the Taliban's offensive. The advances come as the last US and NATO soldiers leave Afghanistan.
The UN mission in Afghanistan reported in its Afghanistan Protection of Civilians in Armed Conflict midyear update 2021 that there were 1,659 civilians killed and 3,254 wounded.
It said that's a 47 per cent increase compared with the same period last year.
Women and children made up close to half of all civilian casualties in the first half of 2021, at 46 per cent, according to the report.
The Taliban have swiftly captured significant territory in recent weeks, seized strategic border crossings with several neighbouring countries and are threatening a number of provincial capitals.
The report found a particularly sharp increase in killings and injuries since May, when international military forces began their withdrawal and the fighting intensified following the Taliban's offensive. The advances come as the last US and NATO soldiers leave Afghanistan.
The UN mission in Afghanistan reported in its Afghanistan Protection of Civilians in Armed Conflict midyear update 2021 that there were 1,659 civilians killed and 3,254 wounded.
It said that's a 47 per cent increase compared with the same period last year.
Women and children made up close to half of all civilian casualties in the first half of 2021, at 46 per cent, according to the report.
The UN blames the Taliban for 39 per cent of civilian casualties.
(AP: Tariq Achkzai)
Thirty-two percent were children, with 468 killed and 1,214 wounded. Fourteen percent of civilian casualties were women, with 219 killed and 508 wounded, the report said.
The US-NATO withdrawal is more than 95 per cent complete and due to be finished by August 31.
'Stop the Afghan against Afghan fighting'
While making swift gains on the ground, the Taliban have also said they do not want to monopolise power.
However, they insist there won't be peace in Afghanistan until there is a new negotiated government in Kabul and President Ashraf Ghani is removed from office.
"Stop the Afghan against Afghan fighting. Protect the Afghan people and give them hope for a better future," she said. Ms Lyons, the UN envoy who also heads the UN mission in Afghanistan, called on the Taliban and Afghan leaders to intensify their efforts at the negotiating table.
The UN report warned that without a significant de-escalation in violence, Afghanistan was on course for 2021 to have the highest ever number of documented civilian casualties in a single year since UN record-keeping in the country began.
The number of civilians killed and wounded in May and June is almost as many as recorded in the preceding four months.
During May and June there were 2,392 casualties, with 783 killed and 1,609 wounded.
That's the highest for those months since systematic documentation began in 2009, the report said.
Thirty-two percent were children, with 468 killed and 1,214 wounded. Fourteen percent of civilian casualties were women, with 219 killed and 508 wounded, the report said.
The US-NATO withdrawal is more than 95 per cent complete and due to be finished by August 31.
'Stop the Afghan against Afghan fighting'
While making swift gains on the ground, the Taliban have also said they do not want to monopolise power.
However, they insist there won't be peace in Afghanistan until there is a new negotiated government in Kabul and President Ashraf Ghani is removed from office.
"Stop the Afghan against Afghan fighting. Protect the Afghan people and give them hope for a better future," she said. Ms Lyons, the UN envoy who also heads the UN mission in Afghanistan, called on the Taliban and Afghan leaders to intensify their efforts at the negotiating table.
The UN report warned that without a significant de-escalation in violence, Afghanistan was on course for 2021 to have the highest ever number of documented civilian casualties in a single year since UN record-keeping in the country began.
The number of civilians killed and wounded in May and June is almost as many as recorded in the preceding four months.
During May and June there were 2,392 casualties, with 783 killed and 1,609 wounded.
That's the highest for those months since systematic documentation began in 2009, the report said.
All of u should read this ABC trash with thrice thinking!
ReplyDeleteMany territories within Afghanistan were 'captured' by the Taliban, w/o a single bullet been fired!
All these territories were either been abandoned by the 'govt' forces or negotiated surrender to the Taliban when the Yankee quietly & quickly making his exit!
There r signs that the current Afghan Taliban r more sopo 'malleable' than those hardcored theocratic dickheads mentioned in all those western press!
Perhaps after all these yrs of internal fightings, with the russko & yank interferes, the Taliban have come to their sense of how Afghanistan should be governed peacefully by them.
That's also the reason WHY the Taliban make an initiated move to befriend China by paying an official diplomat visit on the first opportunity.
Taliban needs economic helps/supports to be able to successfully govern a long war-torned nation. Peaceful stability & sustain eco-industral developments r a given.
& only China COULD provide that opportunity while the rest of the world have long been indoctrinated about the religious zealotry of the Taliban to be able to offer ANY helps!
KT talk rubbish. Muslim fundamentalists in Afghanistan were persecuting women and children long before the Allied forces arrived. During the 20-year occupation there was some respite. Now after leaving the Taliban are back with a vengeance. So don't blame the Allied forces' occupation.
ReplyDeleteabove article:
Delete"The number of civilians killed and wounded in May and June is almost as many as recorded in the preceding four months.
During May and June there were 2,392 casualties, with 783 killed and 1,609 wounded"
were Talibans killing so many prior to US invasion and occupation?
You talk rubbish just to protect your White Sahib - just keep sucking and you may soon transform into your idol Grannie Wong, wakakaka
Don't blame foreigners for religious fundamentalism practiced in Afghanistan for centuries. 20 years of occupation is not going to change that. When Asians kill millions of their own civilians like Original Mao did during the Great Leap Forward or Cultural Revolution, or sapoting the Evil Khmer Rouge I (as an Asian ha ha ha) highlight as well.
DeleteThe Great Leap Forward caused up to 45 million civilian deaths, more than Hitler and Stalin killings combined, the biggest man made disaster in history. But Bullyland Yellow-Wash the entire incident, hang up a Giant Picture of the Mass Murderer in Tiananmen Square and Worship Him.
QUOTE
THe Guardian
China's Great Famine: the true story
Book by Yan Jisheng
The famine that killed up to 45 million people remains a taboo subject in China 50 years on.
Tania Branigan
Tue 1 Jan 2013
...A decade after the Communist party took power in 1949, promising to serve the people, the greatest manmade disaster in history stalks an already impoverished land. In an unremarkable city in central Henan province, more than a million people – one in eight – are wiped out by starvation and brutality over three short years. In one area, officials commandeer more grain than the farmers have actually grown. In barely nine months, more than 12,000 people – a third of the inhabitants – die in a single commune; a tenth of its households are wiped out. Thirteen children beg officials for food and are dragged deep into the mountains, where they die from exposure and starvation. A teenage orphan kills and eats her four-year-old brother. Forty-four of a village's 45 inhabitants die; the last remaining resident, a woman in her 60s, goes insane. Others are tortured, beaten or buried alive for declaring realistic harvests, refusing to hand over what little food they have, stealing scraps or simply angering officials.
When the head of a production brigade dares to state the obvious – that there is no food – a leader warns him: "That's right-deviationist thinking. You're viewing the problem in an overly simplistic matter."
Page after page – even in the drastically edited English translation, there are 500 of them – his book, Tombstone, piles improbability upon terrible improbability. But Yang did not imagine these scenes. Perhaps no one could. Instead, he devoted 15 years to painstakingly documenting the catastrophe that claimed at least 36 million lives across the country, including that of his father.
The Great Famine remains a taboo in China, where it is referred to euphemistically as the Three Years of Natural Disasters or the Three Years of Difficulties. Yang's monumental account, first published in Hong Kong, is banned in his homeland.
He had little idea of what he would find when he started work: "I didn't think it would be so serious and so brutal and so bloody. I didn't know that there were thousands of cases of cannibalism. I didn't know about farmers who were beaten to death.
"People died in the family and they didn't bury the person because they could still collect their food rations; they kept the bodies in bed and covered them up and the corpses were eaten by mice. People ate corpses and fought for the bodies. In Gansu they killed outsiders; people told me strangers passed through and they killed and ate them. And they ate their own children. Terrible. Too terrible."
"To start with, I felt terribly depressed when I was reading these documents," he adds. "But after a while I became numbed – because otherwise I couldn't carry on."...
UNQUOTE
Blurred mfer hasn't u read the CIA disclosures:
DeleteGreat Leap Forward (CIA Archives)
The CIA’s reports prove the Great Famine didn’t happen!
Also, there are survivors and family-members who lived through the Great Famine to repute the oft-quoted numbers in western press.
Why this China famine keeps appearing in Anglo-media is bcoz Great Famine-propagation is a purview of the Anglosphere, not the Sinosphere.
Similarly with the atrocities committed by the Khmer Rough - a constant display of fake western humanitarianism with zilch retrospect for its causality in whitewashing the faults of yr uncle Sam.
There r many mfers, coming out with horrendous stories, with evil intentions to disparaging the CPC/China/Chinese.
U r just one of the many in doing so to justify yr banana pride!
Thanks Bullyland......for Welcoming Taliban in Beijing in July 2021, after they Murder 783 and wounds 1,609 in May and June.
ReplyDeleteQUOTE
China says Taliban expected to play 'important' Afghan peace role
Reuters
KABUL, July 28 (Reuters) - China told a visiting Taliban delegation on Wednesday it expected the insurgent group to play an important role in ending Afghanistan's war and rebuilding the country, the Chinese foreign ministry said.
Nine Taliban representatives met Foreign Minister Wang Yi in the northern Chinese city of Tianjin on a two-day visit during which the peace process and security issues were discussed, a Taliban spokesperson said.
Wang said the Taliban is expected to "play an important role in the process of peaceful reconciliation and reconstruction in Afghanistan", according to an account of the meeting from the foreign ministry.
He also said that he hoped the Taliban would crack down on the East Turkestan Islamic Movement as it was a "direct threat to China's national security," referring to a group China says is active in the Xinjiang region in China’s far west.
The visit was likely to further cement the insurgent group's recognition on the international stage at a sensitive time even as violence increases in Afghanistan. The militants have a political office in Qatar where peace talks are taking place and this month sent representatives to Iran where they had meetings with an Afghan government delegation.
Taliban delegates speak during talks between the Afghan government and Taliban insurgents in Doha, Qatar September 12, 2020. REUTERS/Ibraheem al Omari/File Photo
Mohammad Naeem, spokesman for the Taliban's political office, speaks during a joint news conference in Moscow, Russia March 19, 2021. Alexander Zemlianichenko/Pool via REUTERS
Taliban delegates speak during talks between the Afghan government and Taliban insurgents in Doha, Qatar September 12, 2020. REUTERS/Ibraheem al Omari/File Photo
1/2
Mohammad Naeem, spokesman for the Taliban's political office, speaks during a joint news conference in Moscow, Russia March 19, 2021. Alexander Zemlianichenko/Pool via REUTERS
"Politics, economy and issues related to the security of both countries and the current situation of Afghanistan and the peace process were discussed in the meetings," Taliban spokesperson Mohammed Naeem tweeted about the China visit.
Naeem added that the group, led by Taliban negotiator and deputy leader Mullah Baradar Akhund, was also meeting China's special envoy for Afghanistan and that the trip took place after an invitation from Chinese authorities.
UNQUOTE
Afghanistan democratically elected a Parliament in 2018 and a President in 2019, yet Bullyland chooses to welcome the Murderous Taliban to Beijing.
ReplyDeleteThanks Bullyland, all the Taliban atrocities from now on are on you.
Wakakakakaka…
DeleteU didn't know WHICH cointry initiated talks with the Murderous Taliban in the Taliban initial yrs?
Yr uncle Sam not only did that BUT also put in financial & military efforts in that Murderous Taliban's formation. With the aim of destabilizing the geopolitics within Afghanistan/Russia.
Wakakakaka…
Can u tell HOW demoNcratically elected was that Afghanistan Parliament in 2018 and a President in 2019?
So using yr f*cked logic, all the Taliban atrocities from THEN on are on WHO?
The geo-sopolitical interaction s of China with the current Taliban is at the very early day. & the current Taliban r not the same breed that it uncle Sam used to trained!
Keep farting as usual with yr c&p fun induced by yr dreary living. Yr know-nothingness needs an outlet to parade.
I sincerely hope that with the situation in Afghanistan, the Taliban can be an inclusive government and reach out to the rebels. It's funny the same group of people refused to fight/did not fight properly as government troops, only to fight as a rebel forces in Panjshir Valley?
ReplyDelete