US watchdog: Taliban attacks increased in Afghan capital

Taliban attacks in the Afghan capital of Kabul are on the rise, with increasing targeted killings of government officials, civil-society leaders and journalists, a report by a U.S. watchdog said Monday.

It comes as the Biden administration plans to take a new look at the peace agreement between the U.S. and the Taliban signed last February under President Donald Trump.

The report said Taliban-initiated attacks across Afghanistan during the last quarter of 2020 were slightly lower than in the previous quarter, but exceeded those of the same period in 2019, according to numbers provided by U.S. forces in Afghanistan.

“Enemy attacks in Kabul were higher than during the previous quarter,” the report quoted U.S. forces. “They were much higher than in the same quarter last year.”

The Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction, known as SIGAR, monitors the billions of dollars the U.S. spends in war-ravaged Afghanistan.

The Taliban unleashed a wave of attacks in Afghanistan in December, including strikes in northern Baghlan and southern Uruzgan provinces over a two-day period that killed at least 19 members of the Afghan security forces. In Kabul, a roadside bomb struck a vehicle, wounding two, and a lawyer was shot in a targeted killing.

Resolute Support, the NATO-led mission in Afghanistan, reported 2,586 civilian casualties from Oct. 1 to Dec. 31 last year, including 810 killed and 1,776 wounded, according to the SIGAR report.

The report said the proportion of casualties caused by improvised explosive devices increased by nearly 17% in this quarter, correlating with an increase in magnetically attached IEDs or “sticky bomb” attacks, the report said…..read more

Source: AP News