More and more Afghan civilians are being deliberately targeted by militant attacks and suicide blasts, new UN figures published Thursday show, as the Taliban and the Islamic State group ramp up their assaults on urban areas. The number of civilians killed or wounded across the country dipped by a welcome nine percent overall in 2017, the report by the United Nations Assistance Mission in Afghanistan (UNAMA) showed, with 10,453 total civilian casualties including 3,438 deaths and 7,015 wounded.
But as the Taliban and the Islamic State group have come under more pressure they have increasingly carried out indiscriminate assaults in cities, with casualties from suicide bombings and attacks jumping by 17 percent. Nearly 2,300 civilians were killed or wounded in suicide bombings and attacks in Afghanistan last year, more than any previous year of the conflict on record, the report said. The figures come after US President Donald Trump said last August the American presence in Afghanistan would remain open-ended and Washington stepped up air strikes on rural militant strongholds.
"2017 recorded the highest number of civilian casualties from suicide and complex attacks in a single year in Afghanistan," the report said, with 605 killed and 1,690 wounded from such incidents. "Afghan civilians have been killed going about their daily lives - travelling on a bus, praying in a mosque, simply walking past a building that was targeted," Zeid Ra'ad Al Hussein, UN high commissioner for human rights, was quoted as saying in the report.
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