APF Community Contact us
News : Article

AIHRC calls attacks on maternity ward, funeral ‘war crimes’

Graphic: AIHRC logo

The AIHRC has called for the perpetrators who planned and carried out the attacks to be held to account.

Two recent attacks on civilian targets have been condemned as "war crimes" by the Afghanistan Independent Human Rights Commission (AIHRC).

Gunmen attacked a hospital in Kabul that houses a maternity clinic on 12 May, killing 16 women and two newborn babies, and a suicide bomber killed at least 24 others at a funeral in Jalalabad on the same day.


Will their lives, like ours, continue to be shaped by war?

Afghanistan Independent Human Rights Commission Logo Shaharzad Akbar, Chairperson, Afghanistan Independent Human Rights Commission

The AIHRC called for the perpetrators who planned and carried out the attacks to be held to account.

"The attacks on a 100-bed hospital in Dashte-e-Barchi and in Jalalabad fall in the category of major crimes. These are not incidents to simply forget," Naeem Nazari, AIHRC Deputy Chairperson, told Tolo News.

"The Human Rights Commission will follow the case and will continue its call for justice at the international level," he added.

"These newborns, among the first voices they heard, on the first day of their lives, was the sound of gunfire … and among their first experiences, being targeted in a war they and their mothers had no part in," Shaharzad Akbar, AIHRC Chairperson, tweeted.

Human Rights Watch also described the attack on the maternity hospital in Kabul a war crime.

Date: 14 May 2020


Image credits

  1. AIHRC logo - AIHRC