Afghan soldiers attend their graduation ceremony in Herat this month
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Donald Trump’s decision to escalate air strikes in Afghanistan and bomb the Taliban into a weaker negotiating position led to a sharp rise in civilian casualties from air attacks, a US report has claimed.
The numbers of Afghan civilians killed in air strikes jumped more than three-fold from 2017, after the United States loosened its criteria for air attacks and ramped up the air campaign against the Taliban.
The number of civilians killed annually in US and coalition air strikes soared by 330 percent to some 700 civilians in 2019, said Neta Crawford, co-director of the Costs of War Project at Brown University.
While US air strikes had fallen sharply since American signed February’s Doha troop withdrawal deal with the Taliban, the fledgling Afghan air force was now killing many civilians, the research said.
A spokesman for US forces in Afghanistan called the analysis “one-sided”, saying it relied on disputed data and ignored atrocities by the Taliban.
Mr Trump sharply increased air strikes and relaxed guidelines for using air power when he attempted to overhaul America’s Afghanistan strategy in 2017.
He vowed that US forces would be “fight to win” and would crush the Taliban and local branch of Islamic State group.
The number of air strikes jumped sharply in 2019 as America sought to pressure the Taliban into reaching an agreement with Washington.
This year, the uptick in civilians killed by Afghan air force strikes in recent months had been “particularly striking”, the analysis said.
“In the first six months of this year, the AAF killed 86 Afghan civilians and injured 103 civilians in airstrikes.”
Col Sonny Leggett, spokesman for US forces in Afghanistan, said: “We disagree with the one-sided analysis presented in ‘Costs of War,’ which relies on disputed data and ignores civilian casualties caused by Taliban and ISIS attacks.”
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