U.S., Taliban Start Weeklong Partial Truce in Effort to End Afghan War by Ehsanullah Amiri - Wall Street Journal
KABUL—As the U.S. and the Afghan Taliban started Saturday a seven-day partial truce ahead of a possible peace deal to end more than 18 years of war, the United Nations provided evidence of the conflict’s massive toll on civilians.
More than 10,000 civilians were killed and injured from fighting in Afghanistan for the sixth straight year in 2019, the U.N. said in a report. The number of civilian casualties has now surpassed 100,000 after more than a decade of the U.N. documenting the war’s impact on civilians, it said.
While the 3,403 civilians killed in 2019 represented a 10.5% decrease from the year before, mainly due to a reduction in civilian casualties caused by Islamic State’s branch in Afghanistan, known as ISIS-Khorasan, deadly attacks from the Taliban and other groups increased.
“Almost no civilian in Afghanistan has escaped being personally affected in some way by the ongoing violence,” said Tadamichi Yamamoto, the U.N. Secretary-General’s Special Representative for Afghanistan and head of the organization’s Assistance Mission in Afghanistan…