UN’S concerns over ‘deliberate attacks’ on Afghanistan medics

A United Nations report expresses concerns over “deliberate attacks” on healthcare workers and hospitals in Afghanistan during the Covid-19 pandemic.

The UN Assistance Mission in Afghanistan, or Unama, said it had documented 12 incidents of deliberate acts of violence between 11 March and 23 May.

The report said eight of the attacks were carried out by Taliban terrorists, while three incidents were attributed to Afghan security forces.

An attack on a maternity ward last month at a Kabul hospital that killed 24 people remains unsolved.

“At a time when an urgent humanitarian response was required to protect every life in Afghanistan, both the Taliban and Afghan national security forces carried out deliberate acts of violence that undermined healthcare operations,” Deborah Lyons, the secretarygeneral’s special representative for Afghanistan and head of Unama, said.

“There is no excuse for such actions; the safety and wellbeing of the civilian population must be a priority.”

Afghanistan has 28,833 confirmed coronavirus cases, and 581 deaths.

But international aid organisations monitoring the pandemic’s spread in the country say the numbers are much higher because of a lack of access and testing capabilities.

Following the attack on the Kabul maternity hospital, Doctors Without Borders decided last week to end its operations in Kabul.

The international charity said it would keep its other programmes in Afghanistan running but did not go into details.

The attack at the maternity hospital led to a gun battle with Afghan police that lasted hours and left more than a dozen people wounded.

The hospital in Dashti Barchi, a mostly Shia district, was the group’s only project in the Afghan capital.

The Taliban denied involvement in the 12 May attack, whose victims included two infants, nurses and several young mothers.

The United States said it bore all the hallmarks of the so-called Islamic State’s affiliate in Afghanistan and that the attack targeted the country’s minority Shia in a part of Kabul that IS terrorists have repeatedly attacked in the past.

The UN report emphasised that deliberate acts of violence against healthcare facilities, including hospitals, and related personnel were prohibited under international humanitarian law and constituted war crimes.