Insurgents responsible for most casualties, U.N. says

KABUL — Afghan civilians are dying in record numbers in the country’s increasingly brutal war, noting that more civilians died in July than in any previous onemonth period since the United Nations began keeping statistics, according to a U.N. report released Thursday.

The report also said that for the first time this year insurgents were responsible for more casualties than U.S. and progovernment forces.

Tadamichi Yamamoto, the U.N. secretarygeneral’s special representative for Afghanistan, said neither side is doing enough to protect civilians.

The report said 2,563 civilians were killed and 5,676 were wounded in the first nine months of this year. Insurgents were responsible for 62 percent. July to September were the deadliest months so far this year.

“Civilian casualties at recordhigh levels clearly show the need for all parties concerned to pay much more attention to protecting the civilian population, including through a review of conduct during combat operations,” said Yamamoto.

“Civilian casualties are totally unacceptable, especially in the context of the widespread recognition that there can be no military solution to the conflict in Afghanistan,” he added.

The U.N. report said that progovernment forces caused 2,348 civilian casualties, including 1,149 killed and 1,199 wounded, a 26% increase from the same period in 2018.

Besides detailing civilian casualties and their causes, U.N.’s latest report indicates that 41% of all civilian casualties in Afghanistan were women and children. In the first nine months this year, a total of 261 women and 631 children were killed.

Efforts have been stepped up to restart talks to end Afghanistan’s 18year war.

Earlier this month, U.S. peace envoy Zalmay Khalilzad visited Pakistan, where he met with the Taliban’s top negotiator, Mullah Abdul Ghani Baradar, a cofounder of the hardline Taliban movement and head of a Taliban delegation to the Pakistani capital.

The meeting was significant and the first that Khalilzad has held with the Taliban since last month, when President Trump declared that the talks were “dead,” blaming an uptick in violence by the Taliban that included the killing of a U.S. soldier.