Afghan civilians being targeted, says U.N.

KABUL, Afghanistan — An annual U.N. report released Thursday offered a stark assessment of the 16-year Afghan war, showing a slight decline in civilian casualties from an alltime high but a rise in complex bombing attacks that have taken a heavy toll in the capital.

The report said at least 10,453 Afghan civilians had been wounded or killed in 2017.

At a time when the U.S. and Afghan governments are releasing fewer statistics — the Afghan army stopped publishing military casualty numbers in November, for example — the U.N. report on civilian casualties is one of the few reliable indicators of how the war is proceeding.

“The chilling statistics in this report provide credible data about the war’s impact,” Tadamichi Yamamoto, the U.N. secretary-general’s special representative for Afghanistan, said in a statement.

The report came out a day after the top U.S. commander in Afghanistan, Gen. John Nicholson, issued an upbeat assessment of the Afghan army’s recent progress, saying that “the Taliban cannot win.”

In contrast, the U.N. report focused on a rise in attacks deliberately targeting civilians in 2017. Those attacks, intended to undermine the authority of the U.S.-backed government, accounted for 27 percent of all civilian casualties last year.

This category includes casualties caused by suicide bombers detonating in populated areas and targeted killings, but excludes those caused by ground fighting, airstrikes and explosions aimed principally at military targets, like some roadside bombs.

Overall, the 84-page report notes, the number of civilian casualties declined 9 percent compared with the record numbers seen in 2016, driven primarily by a drop in casualties caused by ground clashes. It was the first decline in overall civilian casualties since 2012.

The report also says that despite a stepped-up pace of aerial bombardments aimed at the Taliban and Islamic State militants under President Donald Trump’s new strategy for the war, civilian casualties from airstrikes rose only 7 percent. The U.N. credited better targeting in the U.S.-led air campaign, compared with previous years.

The Taliban’s response to the airstrikes, however, has been ferocious, indicating that what Afghan officials openly call a Pakistani-backed insurgent group is hardly a spent force.

The report put a spotlight on “complex attacks,” a type of suicide assault that is becoming more deadly, U.N. officials say. These involve two or more commandos with suicide vests seizing a building or taking hostages, fighting for hours and detonating their explosives only when security forces close in.

Deaths from complex attacks and other suicide bombings rose to 605 last year from 398 in 2016, according to the report, with the highest number of civilian casualties in Kabul.

The Taliban have also stepped up assassinations in the countryside, targeting doctors delivering polio vaccinations, workers on demining teams and religious leaders who preach against the group, among others, the U.N. said. The report blamed the Islamic State’s Afghan branch for 1,000 civilian casualties — 399 killed and 601 wounded.

In a statement that the U.N. included with the report, the Taliban denied targeting civilians and blamed the United States and its allies for waging war in Afghanistan in the first place.

“For the past 17 years, hundreds of thousands of innocent Afghans were killed after the influx of foreigners, and they are still being killed,” it said.