KABUL (Dispatches) – Armed conflict, intercommunal violence and insecurity continued to take a toll on thousands of children throughout 2021, the UN Children’s Fund (UNICEF) says.
As a result of protracted and new conflicts, UNICEF has documented grave violations against young people in Afghanistan, Yemen, Syria, and northern Ethiopia.
Henrietta Fore, UNICEF’s executive director, said conflict parties continue to show a dreadful disregard for children’s rights year after year.
The executive director said more than 28,500 children have been killed in Afghanistan over the past 16 years.
“Afghanistan, for example, has the highest number of verified child casualties since 2005, at more than 28,500 – accounting for 27 percent of all verified child casualties globally,” UNICEF Executive Director Henrietta Fore said in a statement.
The UN has also verified 266,000 cases of grave violations against children in more than 30 conflict situations across Africa, Asia, West Asia and Latin America over the past 16 years.
According to the statement, these are only the cases verified by UN-led monitoring and reporting mechanisms, meaning that the true figures may be far larger.
UNICEF also warned about deteriorating situation of children in Afghanistan, saying millions of Afghan kids are increasingly vulnerable to disease due to malnutrition and an unprecedented food crisis.
Afghanistan is facing what UN agencies have described as “one of the world’s worst humanitarian disasters” since the collapse of Kabul in mid-August, which came after the United States’ disastrous withdrawal from the country.
The U.S. military withdrew its forces from Afghanistan 20 years after they invaded the country to topple the Taliban, in a war that killed, according to one estimate, between 897,000 and 929,000 people.
The United Nations’ special representative for Afghanistan warned in November that the country is “on the brink of a humanitarian catastrophe” and that its collapsing economy is heightening the risk of terrorism.
Since the Taliban regained power in Afghanistan, the U.S. and its allies have imposed sanctions on the Central Asian country and deprived Afghans of any aid and assistance on the pretext of pressuring the Taliban. However, human rights activists maintain that economic sanctions generally do not punish the rulers, but rather hurt the population, lead to mass starvation, and fuel extremism in the targeted country.