Afghan Military, Civilian Casualties Have Sharply Risen in Past Year

The holiday of Nowruz, the Persian New Year, is on March 21 this year. As the calendar generally observed in Afghanistan, this has meant Afghan reporters are looking back at the year gone by, and noticed the same trend as everyone else: casualties are soaring.

The Afghanistan Independent Human Rights Commission statistics showed that over the past year, 3,010 civilians were killed, and 7,500 wounded. This is a major increase over the previous year, itself an increase over the years before.

The Afghan Interior Ministry reported hundreds of Afghan Taliban were killed, and that as many as 600 of them were “commanders” or “shadow governors.” They offered no data on the casualties among Afghan forces.

It’s clearly far more than a few hundred, of course, with the Taliban routinely launching attacks that wipe out entire Afghan military companies, and overrun Afghan bases regularly. They’ve been losing ground nationwide throughout the year.