Holding U.S. Responsible

Report Says 1,600 Afghan Children Killed in Past 5 Years

Date: 07 May 2021 - 20:50

News ID: ۸۹۹۵۲

KABUL (Dispatches) – A new report says forty percent of all civilian airstrike casualties in the past five years in Afghanistan were children, adding the U.S. has launched the majority of the attacks.
Data published on Thursday by Action on Armed Violence (AOAV) said of the 3,977 deaths caused between 2016 and 2020, nearly 1,600 were children.
"Sadly, these numbers are no surprise,” said Chris Nyamandi, country director for Afghanistan at Save the Children International. "Afghanistan has been the deadliest country for children for years.”
Leading up to the departure of U.S.-led forces expected later this year, casualties from international coalition airstrikes more than tripled from 247 in 2017 to 757 in 2019, according to data from United Nations Assistance Mission in Afghanistan (UNAMA).
The UN body’s concerns over airstrikes on structures and in support of Afghan ground operations raised in 2018 went unheeded.
Nyamandi said for the past 14 years five children were killed or maimed in Afghanistan every single day.
"These are gut-wrenching numbers when you realize that these were children with futures, families, children who went to school and just wanted to live their lives in safety,” he said.
Iain Overton, executive director of Action on Armed Violence, said in 2018-19 the U.S. military dropped more munitions on Afghanistan than at the height of bombing in 2011 – a rate of more than 20 a day. Such heavy bombardment resulted in the deadliest year of airstrikes for children in Afghanistan on record.
In 2018, there was an 85 percent increase from the year before, resulting in a rate of four child casualties every three days. The majority of these child casualties, 57 percent, were caused by U.S.-led troops.
The U.S. has failed to restore peace to the country as violence has not subsided since the invasion of the country by American forces in 2001.
The Taliban have captured Afghanistan’s second-biggest dam after fierce fighting in their former bastion of Kandahar as militants step up raids around the war-torn country following a missed U.S. troop withdrawal deadline for May 1.
Local officials said on Thursday that Dahla Dam in Arghandab district, which provides irrigation to farmers via a network of canals as well as drinking water for the provincial capital, was now under the Taliban control.
Haji Gulbuddin, the governor of an adjacent district, confirmed that government forces had lost the dam to the Taliban.
"Our security forces... asked for reinforcements but they failed to get it,” he said.
Taliban spokesman Qari Yousuf Ahmadi said the group had seized the strategically important dam after clashes in the southern province.