Horror upon horror in Afghanistan
Two women shot to death while in labour.
A mom sheltering her preemie newborn from spraying gunfire with her own bulletriddled body.
Eighteen surviving infants, casualties of an endless conflict, left without mothers — sorted out only by the names on their bracelets.
Even for Afghanistan, which has known nothing but barbarity for nearly four decades of war and violent austerity, what happened in a Kabul maternity ward last week was an unprecedented horror.
Just when you think it couldn’t get any worse …
A peace deal in ashes. Because there’s no way to salvage any truce in the wake of this abominable crime — a truce wrested and wrestled from the Taliban by the United States, over the protestations and sidelining of the central government.
It wasn’t worth the paper it was written on, when signed on Feb. 29 in Doha. It’s worth even less than spit on a skittle now.
Which maybe was the point — to obstruct any incremental step toward an accord, whether engineered by the Taliban or ISIS acolytes.
And still the U.S. special representative whose arm-twisting produced that historic agreement, Zalmay Khalilzad, had the gall to preach calm, to urge restraint. “Rather than falling into the ISIS trap and delay peace or create obstacles, Afghans must come together to crush this menace and pursue a historic peace opportunity,” Khalilzad tweeted Thursday.
As if there should be no limit to what Afghans can abide. As if the agenda of a Washington administration that came into power vowing an end to the longest, dragged-out war in American history should take precedence over unspeakable agonies. Amid the cradle-tograve terrorism of one day in May that began with an assault on a Kabul hospital and ended, 150 km to the east in Nangarhar, with a suicide bomber’s blast tearing through the funeral of a police commander.
At least 56 people were killed and 100 wounded in the morning and evening mayhem.
But the babies — my God, the babies. Born into carnage — two newborns slain, another had his nose broken — when militants wearing police uniforms stormed the 100-bed hospital in the capital run by Doctors Without Borders. They’d bypassed other wards, including the ICU and operating rooms, making directly for the maternity wing, deliberately targeting the infants and their helpless mothers.
“Who attacks newborn babies and new mothers?” the head of the UN mission in Afghanistan, Deborah Lyons, asked on Twitter. “The most innocent of innocents, a baby! Why? Cruelty has no followers from humanity.”
I know this hospital. I watched a terrified teenage girl give birth to a daughter there a few years ago. It’s located in the city’s western sector, Dasht-eBarchi, a mostly Shiite neighbourhood home to the endlessly persecuted Hazara minority and repeatedly attacked by ISIS in the past. What remains of the NATO deployment in the capital helped rescue the surviving blood-soaked newborns, transferred to other hospitals, while their dead mothers — and nurses — were removed in body bags. By the weekend, 18 of the infants had been claimed by their families, those bracelet IDs scrawled as well on swatches of tape affixed to their bellies. (Most hospitals in Afghanistan don’t have the capacity for DNA testing.)
The assailants were killed in an ensuing gunfight that lasted for hours.
The Taliban — via Twitter, of course — insist they were responsible for neither attack. As if they have ever been constrained in monstrosities. The U.S. has, on evidence not disclosed, laid the blame for both attacks on ISIS. And Afghan President Ashraf Ghani — his authority contested because rival Abdullah Abdullah also claimed victory in the February election; bizarrely, there were duelling oaths of office — blames the Taliban. On Sunday, Ghani and Abdullah announced a resolution to the electoral impasse, with Ghani, the technocrat, investing Abdullah with taking charge of peace efforts with the Taliban.
What peace, though? As distant a possibility as it has ever been since the U.S.-led toppling of the Taliban regime in 2001, in the wake of 9/11.
Ghani wasted no time shifting national security forces from “active defensive” — a nod to the peace agreement — to an offensive footing, directing troops to begin operations against “the enemy.”
“The Taliban, with the stoking of foreigners, have intensified the war and are shedding Afghan blood,” Ghani said in a televised address. “Don’t see our invitation for peace and ceasefire as our weakness, but as deep respect to the demand and will of our people.”
First Vice-President Amrullah Saleh, who has consistently rejected the theory that ISIS affiliates operate independently in Afghanistan, lashed out via Twitter at the “terrorist Taliban, their current or former allies or their ideological twins … Evidence shows that the Taliban are in a celebratory mood for massacring Shiites in a maternity hospital in Kabul.” Adding, sarcastically: “This is the behaviour of the changed Taliban after they took courses on humane conduct in Doha.”
Again, there is no evidence of Taliban cheering or anything else. And, while denying responsibility for the hospital attack, ISIS did claim credit for the funeral assault in Nangarhar, which was once the hub for the Islamic State in Afghanistan, until the U.S. dropped the “mother of all bombs” on it in 2017.
But, while the hospital assault has all the hallmarks of ISIS handiwork — the death cult prefers “soft” civilian targets — the Taliban can never be believed. They have zero credibility and have refused to honour the promised ceasefire from
February’s interim agreement. While avoiding direct attacks against U.S. forces — its leaders gave oral assurance to Khalilzad they would reduce violence by up to 80 per cent — the Taliban has actually escalated attacks on Afghan government forces in recent months, killing dozens a day, with civilians, as always, among the casualties. (The group claimed responsibility for a suicide bombing Monday that killed at least nine soldiers at a military base in eastern Afghanistan, according to Afghan officials.)
According to the UN, 1,293 civilians were wounded or killed in Kabul during the first quarter of 2020, a total surging upwards in March, with the death of civilians attributable to militant groups increasing by 22 per cent compared to the first quarter of 2019.
The fragile peace had already hit a snag regarding a prisonerexchange avowal, wherein 5,000 jailed Taliban fighters were to be released. Again, over the objections of the central government. The Taliban won’t negotiate directly with Ghani’s government until that happens. According to Ghani, 1,000 prisoners have been let go. The Taliban claim only 171 have been freed.
A bitter pill for Ghani, but digestible for Washington. Accepted by U.S. President Donald Trump, the same person who’d flayed his predecessor, Barack Obama, for releasing five Taliban prisoners in a swap for captured U.S. army Sgt. Bowe Bergdahl in 2014.
Meanwhile, the epidemiological models show Afghanistan, with its overstretched health facilities, might suffer 110,000 deaths due to COVID-19 — more than the 100,000 civilians killed since the conflict began 18 years ago.
At the maternity hospital, husbands had been prevented from entering the ward to see their wives and babies because of the pandemic.
The assailants didn’t wear masks. They knew they’d never survive the heinous raid anyway. Kill babies and die.