NATO summit’s forgotten people: Afghan civilians

AFGHANISTAN: Far from the bright lights of Chicago where world leaders met to shape NATO’s exit from Afghanistan, one of the war’s victims, 12-year-old Aleema, sums up her life in three words:

“It’s the worst.” Aleema, who has lived in a mud hovel in a refugee camp on the outskirts of Kabul for four years since her family fled fighting in southern Afghanistan, is one of the forgotten people of the NATO summit, which ended on Monday.

There the focus was on the soldiers who fight the war: getting 130,000 NATO combat troops out by a fixed deadline of 2014 and finding funds to pay Afghan forces to continue the decade-long battle against Taliban insurgents.

But civilians have borne the brunt of the war. More died in 2011 alone than the total number of NATO troops killed in 10 years.

Last year’s 3,021 civilian deaths marked the fifth straight year that the toll has risen, UN figures show, while 3,007 NATO soldiers have died since the 2001 US-led invasion, according to icasualties.org.

Meanwhile the number of internal refugees last year hit nearly half a million, the highest for about a decade, part of what Amnesty International has called “a largely hidden but horrific humanitarian and human rights crisis”. And more than 30,000 Afghans sought asylum abroad last year -- another 10-year high. Thousands of others make their way abroad illegally.

Aleema, a sad-eyed girl in ragged clothes, is one of the 447,547 “internally displaced persons” who have fled their homes, mainly in the war-torn south.

Explaining why her life is “the worst”, she says simply: “We don’t have proper food and we don’t have a proper house.” She wants to go home to Helmand province, but knows that won’t happen while the fighting continues. AFP