UNAMA says Afghan war civilians still wait for justice

Most civilian victims of Afghanistan's 2001-2021 war remain without justice, reparation or even a public acknowledgement of what happened to them, the United Nations Assistance Mission in Afghanistan said on 1 September. UNAMA's tally for those twenty years is more than 40,000 civilians killed and 77,000 wounded. The dead and injured include people hit by Taliban and Islamic State attacks and people hit by operations of the former Afghan republic and the U.S.-led coalition.

The mission interviewed nearly 200 victims. Ninety-five percent described lasting psychological harm: memory loss, depression, suicidal thoughts. In Logar province, farmer Khan Yousufi, 46, told UNAMA and AFP that his eight-year-old son was playing in front of the house when an Afghan republic police tank opened fire and killed the boy at once. Yousufi said no one in authority had ever answered him. Another man in Kabul told AFP, "the world has forgotten us."

A government action plan titled Peace, Reconciliation and Justice was launched in 2006 and never fully carried out. The 2020 agreement between the United States and the Taliban set terms for foreign withdrawal and intra-Afghan talks. UNAMA notes that it contained no clause on victims' rights, justice or accountability. After taking Kabul in 2021 the Taliban passed an amnesty law and have not announced prosecutions for wartime breaches of humanitarian law.

The Taliban authorities say they have paid about $695 million to families of people they call martyrs since 2021. That programme covers their own dead. It is not a reparations scheme for civilians killed by any party, and it is not an investigation. UNAMA's conclusion is blunt: domestic and international efforts to hold perpetrators to account have been limited and have met many barriers.

The International Criminal Court opened an Afghanistan file and then narrowed it. The prosecutor chose to focus on alleged crimes by the Taliban and Islamic State, citing gravity, persistence and scarce resources. Coalition and former-republic cases dropped down the list. For families whose children were killed by a police tank or an airstrike, that choice means the court they were told would hear them is not looking at their file.

Twenty-five years after the 11 September attacks that triggered the intervention, the civilian ledger is still an archive without an owner. UNAMA can count, interview and publish. It cannot compel the de facto authorities to open graves, name units or pay families who sit outside the martyr lists. Donor governments that funded the republic can fund pensions. They have not built a victim registry that survives the change of regime.

The practical next step in the UN text is modest: keep documenting, and keep asking both the Taliban and the states that fought in Afghanistan to say what they will do for people who were not combatants and who received nothing. Yousufi's son has been dead for years. The tank crew was never tried. That single case is the report in miniature.