UN Reports Casualties in Kunduz, Afghanistan – No Word about Causes of the Conflict

December 12th, 2015

Awake Goy

Christof Lehmann (nsnbc) : At least 848 Afghan civilians have lost their lives during two weeks of fighting in and around the city of Kunduz in September 2015, reports the United Nations. Among the casualties are those who lost their lives during the United States’ bombing of a hospital operated by Doctors without Borders. The UN has, since 2001, failed at preventing the war in Afghanistan and to broker a peace in accordance with international law.

The United Nations Assistance Mission in Afghanistan (UNAMA) issued a report, detailing casualties in Afghanistan’s Kunduz province during two weeks of heavy clashes between Taliban forces, Afghan government forces and ISAF / NATO forces in September.

The UNAMA reports 289 dead and 559 injured, stressing that the numbers were likely to rise as further information becomes available. The UNAMA notes that the unstable situation in the region means that its officials had been unable to conduct detailed investigations.

The casualties in the report include the casualties cause by a U.S. airstrike against a hospital operated by the international NGO Doctors Without Borders (MSF) on October 3. At least 30 were killed and 37 were injured during the airstrike. MSF has presented an internal review that stresses that all combatant forces in the area, including U.S. forces were aware about the exact coordinates of the hospital, that it has a “ne weapons policy” at hospitals it operates, and that it called U.S. forces while the attack was in progress.

The UNAMA reports that it in most cases was unable to attribute the casualties to a specific party to the conflict. Apart from the U.S. air raid on October 3, it states, most of the civilian casualties had been caused by small arms fire or explosives during two weeks of heavy fighting in and around Kunduz in September.

Photo courtesy of MSF.

The UNAMA has joined Doctors Without Borders call for an independent investigation into the attack on the hospital, stressing that the attack may amount to a war crime if it can be proven that the attack was a deliberate act.

While the UNAMA notes that it had problems to deploy investigators due to security concerns and that the number of reported casualties is likely to rise, it stresses that the chaos that ensued during the heavy fighting created an environment conducive of extrajudicial killings. The report notes that:

“This chaos enabled an environment in which arbitrary killings, and other forms of violence against civilians and civilian objects, criminality and destruction of civilian property took place.”

Some 150,000 people were trapped in the city. Some 13,000 families fled Kunduz, adding to the hundreds of thousands who already had been displaced by the war.

The UNAMA report notes that the Taliban had “created a climate of fear” with systematic searches for women’s rights activists and civilians working for human rights organizations.

Map plottings, Major (r) Agha Humayum Amin

UN Fails Afghans by Omitting Context

The UNAMA report fails to question the legality of the war that was launched by the United States and NATO in 2001, on the grounds of the still largely un-investigated attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon in the USA on September 11, 2001. The Afghan war was the first incidence in which a NATO member State invoked NATO’s Article 5 – calling on a collective defense.

The USA invoked NATO’s Article 5, despite the fact that it claimed that the attacks on September 11 had been planned carried out by non-State actor Al-Qaeda and Osama bin Laden.

The at that time Taliban-led government proposed that it would extradite bin Laden to the United States if it received evidence to support the claim that bin Laden had been behind the attack.

The United States Federal Bureau of Investigations (FBI) has never attributed the attacks on September 11, 2001 to Osama bin Laden, stressing that the FBI has no evidence to prove bin Laden’s involvement.

The United Nations has thus far failed to take notice of and act upon the fact that NATO launched the war against Afghanistan, using the euphemism “war on terror”, in violation of the Charter of the United Nations, without a mandate from the UN Security Council, and in violation of international as well as humanitarian law.

The UN also fails to take measures to defuse the geopolitical context. That is, the role of conflicting U.S, Chinese and Russian geopolitical interests in the region, the protracted conflict between India and Pakistan that prompts Pakistani governments to perceive Afghanistan as strategic depth, and other factors including a divergence in energy security interests of regional and international players that are among the root causes of the war.

CH/L – nsnbc 12.12.2015