• Home
• /
• Opinion

Non-combat casualties

Collateral damage statistics in Afghanistan are of horrendous proportion. The civilians are caught in fire, and the United Nations says that the previous year was one of the deadliest as around 4,000 people lost their lives. Though more than a million people have died in the last 13 years of insurgency, which followed another decade of Soviet occupation, the prospects were never as dismal as they are these days. With the re-bouncing of Taleban and Al Qaeda, which the United States claimed had been exterminated, casualties are on the rise.

The modus operandi has been the green-on-blue attacks also termed as ‘turban suicides’, which were not target-oriented and led to massive destruction of men and material. The tabulation of the world body states that more than 6,800 were seriously injured and maimed during the year 2014. The International Committee of the Red Cross says fighting between government forces and the Taleban accounted for just over a third of civilian casualties, while roadside bombs were responsible for 28 per cent of civilian deaths and injuries. 

Being the year wherein the coalition troops pulled out and ended their combat mission, the civilians had paid a heavy toll in blood. Kabul continues to be knocked intermittently by the militants and even military bases are not spared. The Taleban along with a number of other splinter groups have broadened their reach countrywide and now apart from the southern provinces, they are seen in action in even far-off northern areas. The least that should be ensured by President Ashraf Ghani administration is that civilians are protected and the dreaded groups are engaged in a manner that does not result in undesired losses.