Thanks to the Taliban and coronavirus – Afghanistan is facing a dark and uncertain time

Afghanistan could potentially be heading for more deaths from coronavirus than the those killed in the last 18 years of war, unless immediate and urgent action are taken with vast numbers of infections remaining undetected.

The warning came from the Ministry of Public Health after random tests in Kabul on 500 people found 156 of them had contracted the virus. Shattered infrastructure, poverty, an over-burdened medical system and thousands refugees living in cramped, unsanitary conditions makes it one of the most exposed countries to the pandemic.

But the dozens of deaths just this week were not due to Covid-19. They were inflicted by insurgents, the Taliban and other Islamist groups, who have refused repeated calls for a humanitarian ceasefire to cope with the disease sweeping across the land.

One of the most appalling attacks in recent times even by Afghanistan’s grim standards took place on Tuesday in a hospital in Dashti Barchi, a Shia neighbourhood of Kabul with a large Hazara population. I had gone there in the past, as had colleagues, to speak to injured patients who were treated there after the area had been targeted for sectarian assaults by Sunni insurgents.

This time the hospital itself was targeted. It is known for having a large maternity ward run by Médecins Sans Frontières​ (MSF), one of the few such specialist units in the city, and the gunmen appeared to be fully focused on who they wanted to kill.

The attackers had come disguised in police uniforms. They headed directly, say hospital staff, to the maternity ward, ignoring ones with other patients. Twenty-four people died, 16 of them women, expectant mothers and nurses. Two newborn babies were also among the dead. One photograph from the carnage was of a young woman holding her baby in death as she had done in life. Nearby lay two young children shot down as they were trying to run away.

Zainab, a 27 year old woman from Bamiyan in the north, had given birth at the hospital after seven years of attempting to conceive, said her family. She survived, but her baby boy named Omid, "Hope" in Dari, was killed. Zainab’s mother-in-law, Zahira Muhammadi, who was at the hospital said a gunmen had aimed at the cradle where the baby was lying. She passed out. “When I opened my eyes, I saw my grandson’s body had fallen to the floor, covered in blood”, she said. “ I brought my daughter-in-law to Kabul so that she would not lose her baby. Today, we will take the baby’s body back to Bamiyan.”

One woman, due to give birth, was killed along with her unborn baby. A mother gave birth during the shooting. She and her baby were safely evacuated, said MSF. Eighteen babies have been left motherless, the process of finding their families were under way.

The head of the UN mission in Afghanistan, Deborah Lyons, tweeted: “who attacks newborn babies and new mothers? The most innocent of innocents, a baby! Why? Cruelty has no followers from humanity.” Wahid Marjooh, the deputy minister of health, said: “today, my doctors, my medical personnel, the poor mother who is in labour are left in chaos : the doctor who is there to rescue her is covered in blood and falls next to her bed.”

Among other attacks on the same day was one in Nangarhar where a suicide bomber blew himself up at the funeral of a police commander. At least 32 people were killed and 68 injured. The officer, Shaikh Akram, had died of a heart attack after surviving years of combat. His body was shredded by shrapnel; even the dead, it seems, cannot escape violence in Afghanistan.

There was another bombing on Tuesday, in Khost, where a device placed in a cart at the local market killed a child and injured four others. Four bombs had gone off the previous day in Kabul injuring four people, including a child. The killings have continued. A truck packed with explosives blew up near a court in Gardez, in the east, on Thursday, killing five people and injuring 14 others.

This lethal strife is taking place after a much publicised peace deal was signed between the US and the Taliban in Doha, Qatar, which was supposed to end two decades of conflict.

But talks between the Taliban and the Afghan government at a power sharing agreement are at an impasse over a prisoner exchange scheme - a condition effectively imposed on the government by Washington. The Taliban have demanded that 5,000 of their fighters are released from prison. The Afghan government say they have released a thousand prisoners, and received only 171 back in return.

Meanwhile the Taliban and other insurgent groups are carrying out increasingly frequent attacks from their bases in Pakistan, focusing on Afghan forces rather than the Americans in an effort to avoid air strikes in retaliation. Six weeks after the Doha deal, there is little evidence of the reduction of violence by 80 per cent which the Americans claim the Taliban assured them would take place.

Mike Pompeo, speaking of the killings at the hospital and the funeral, said: “We note the Taliban have denied have denied any responsibility and condemned both attacks as heinous. The Taliban and the Afghan government should cooperate to bring the perpetrators to justice.”

The difficulty, as the US Secretary of State must know, is ascribing responsibility for these attacks with the insurgent groups in the habit of using flags of convenience and claims and counter-claims over culpability between them and the Afghan government.

The Taliban denied being behind the hospital killings, but the Afghan government say they hold them responsible after a spate of assaults. The Taliban claimed credit for the Gardez bombing: but the Afghan intelligence services believe it was the work of the Haqqani Network.

Meanwhile the Trump administration has punished Afghanistan by cutting $1bn in aid, with the threat of slashing another $1bn next year, for the failure by Ashraf Ghani and Abdullah Abdullah, who both claim victory in the last presidential election, to come to a political agreement.

Ghani has ordered Afghan forces, which have been on an “active defence” posture, to go back on the offensive following the upsurge in violence. His National Security Advisor, Hamdullah Mohib, who had high expectations of peace when I met him in Kabul a few months ago, tweeted: “ The reason to pursue peace is to end this senseless violence. This is not peace, nor its beginning.”

The human rights group Amnesty International said after Tuesday’s attacks: “The unconscionable war crimes in Afghanistan today, targeting a maternity hospital and a funeral must awaken the world to the horrors civilians continue to face. There must be accountability for these grave crimes.”

Donald Trump’s response to being asked about the murders of babies and young mothers was: “We’ve been there for many years, we’re like a police force. We’re not fighting in Afghanistan, we’re a police force in Afghanistan and at some point they are going to have to be able to take care of their country.”

With the US election approaching, Trump is likely to continue to present the Doha agreement with the Taliban as a great triumph even as it falls apart.

Meanwhile, the cut in US aid has undermined the government’s civil and military programmes. It’s also seriously hampering the efforts to combat coronavirus in a steadily worsening scenario of shortage of medical staff, equipment and medicine. A maternity hospital which had been turned into a treatment centre for the pandemic is being returned to its former use after the attack on the hospital at Dashti Barchi.

Afghanistan looks to be heading for a dark and uncertain time, facing a virulent virus and vicious violence, with little help from the outside world.