The Head of the UN Assistance Mission in Afghanistan called on all stakeholders to find ways to end violence in the country immediately.
More than 100,000 civilians have been killed or injured as a result of various terrorist acts or hostilities in Afghanistan over the past 10 years. Such figures were cited Thursday by Tadamichi Yamamoto, Special Representative of the UN Secretary-General in Afghanistan and head of the UN Assistance Mission in Afghanistan (UNAMA).
“The number of civilian deaths and casualties in Afghanistan has exceeded 100,000 from 2009 to the present day,” Asharq AL-awsat, an Arabic newspaper, quotes him in its electronic version. Yamamoto explained that “all these people have been killed or injured since UNAMA began systematically recording civilian casualties in Afghanistan in 2009”.
He called on all stakeholders “to find ways to end violence in the country immediately and achieve peace in Afghanistan”. In this regard, the representative of the UN Secretary General noted with regret that one of the main warring parties in the country, the radical movement “Taliban”, still refuses to negotiate directly with the official Afghan authorities.
In the autumn of 2018, the U.S. began virtually separate negotiations with the Taliban. The government in Kabul did not take part in them and was only informed about the results post facto by the American side. As a result of nine rounds of meetings, the U.S. Special Representative for Afghanistan, Zalmay Khalilzad, confirmed in early September that a peace agreement in principle had been reached with the Taliban, providing for the withdrawal of more than 5 thousand U.S. troops from Afghanistan. But then American President Donald Trump announced the cancellation of a secret meeting with his Afghan counterpart and Taliban leaders at his residence in Camp David. That decision came after a terrorist attack in Kabul by supporters of the movement, which killed 12 people,