Every day, Didier François deals with an international topic.
At least 34 people were killed and 17 wounded in Afghanistan on Wednesday, civilians, mostly women and children traveling by bus, who jumped on a Taliban-held mine. This drama reminds us that 18 years after the beginning of the American intervention, the war is far from over.
Indeed, whether in the form of an attack, a skirmish or a skirmish, the incidents are daily. They affect the whole country, no region is immune. The small remote villages are no more spared than the big cities, beginning with the capital Kabul which is regularly hit by explosions of car bombs. In the province, it is the artisanal mines laid by the Taliban at night on the roadside that represent a deadly trap with an extremely heavy toll, an average of ten policemen and Afghan soldiers killed every day and nearly 3,000 killed per year . But civilians also pay a huge price, unacceptable for the United Nations mission in Afghanistan. His report, published on Wednesday, lists 3,800 killed and 7,189 wounded in 2018, a record year according to his counts. In the first six months of 2019, 1,366 civilians have already been killed and 2,446 others injured. A third of these victims are children.
Killed indiscriminately by both sides?
This is the drama! Civilians are literally caught between two fires in this insurrectional war without a real front line. The Taliban most often avoid direct confrontation, multiplying the trapping, the attacks or the assassination. To limit their losses, Afghan security forces also prefer shelling with helicopters or artillery. A strategy that is modeled on those of American troops since the United States still has 14,000 men on site, even if they are practically no longer engaged at the front and provide mainly training and support to the Afghan military. In this type of remote combat, collateral damage increases almost mechanically.
The only hope for Afghan civilians today lies in the negotiation process between the Americans and the Taliban?
Yes, yes. But, as we can see, at this stage the ongoing discussions have not brought down the violence. Recall that a car bomb attack ravaged a school in the city of Ghazni at the same time that were held in Qatar last talks on July 7 and 8 last. So indeed, a new round of talks is to take place in Doha in the coming days. The US negotiator is rather confident knowing that Donald Trump would withdraw his troops from Afghanistan before the 2020 presidential campaign and that this departure is the main requirement of the Taliban to open a direct dialogue with the Afghan authorities in Oslo, Norway. Only then can we hope for a return, an end to the fighting and a return to peace, if a solution is found between Afghans.