- Both Sides in Battle for Aleppo, Syria Guilty of Repeated War Crimes: UN
Almost simultaneous attacks in Kabul have left at least 16 people dead and 44 injured, the health ministry says.
The two suicide attacks took place at about midday local time (07:30 GMT) on Wednesday, targeting a police station and intelligence agency offices.
Taliban spokesman Zabihullah Mujahid claimed responsibility for the attacks.
It is the latest in a string of attacks to challenge the Afghan authorities after the resurgent militant group started its spring offensive early.
Condemning the bombings, President Ashraf Ghani said: “After the killing of [prominent commander] Mullah Salam and the Taliban’s defeat on many other fronts, the terrorists are launching such attacks to raise the moral of their fighters.”
Salam was killed in a US air strike on Sunday.
The first of Wednesday’s attacks began when a suicide car bomber detonated his explosives outside a police station – which is next door to a military training facility – in the west of the city. This was followed by a five-hour gun battle between officers and another attacker.
Most of the fatalities reportedly occurred in this attack.
Soon afterwards a suicide bomber blew himself up outside Afghanistan’s intelligence agency, in eastern Kabul.
Officials originally said just three people had died in the attack, but revised the number up later in the day.
The attacks came a day after the Taliban killed 12 policemen in an “insider attack” in the southern Afghan province of Helmand.
In another development, both sides in Syria’s civil war committed repeated war crimes during the battle for Aleppo last year — indiscriminately killing men, women and children during months of “unrelenting violence,” a United Nations report said Wednesday.
Airstrikes by the Syrian government and its Russian backers were responsible for “claiming hundreds of lives and reducing hospitals, schools and markets to rubble,” according to U.N. investigators.
The Syrian government was also accused of repeatedly violating international law by dropping chlorine bombs on its own people, including children. The report said there was no evidence Russia had used chemical weapons in the conflict.
Similarly, the report said that that Syrian “and/or” Russian forces used cluster bombs — although it could not conclusively say which military force had used these weapons.
Nevertheless, the report agreed that “government forces and their allies employed brutal tactics to force the armed groups to surrender.”
On the other side, some rebel groups “fired indiscriminately in attacks that killed and injured dozens, including women and children.” These attacks were launched “without a clear military target” and “intentionally terrorized the civilian population,” it said.
The rebels’ use of an improvised mortar — known as the “hell cannon” — “terrorized” residents of government-held western Aleppo, according to the report. And it said that some armed groups also withheld humanitarian aid and restricted the movement of local residents, instead using them as human shields.
The battle to claim the city ended in December after the Russian-backed Syrian government besieged the rebels and thousands of civilians in the eastern part of the city.
President Donald Trump has suggested that the United States could work with Russia to defeat ISIS, which is fighting both the government and rebels in the complex conflict.
Syrian President Bashar al-Assad said earlier this month that Trump’s stance was “promising.”
However, this week Nikki Haley, the new U.S. ambassador to the U.N., criticized Russia and China after they voted new U.N. sanctions on Syria. She accused them of ignoring “defenseless men, women and children who died gasping for breath when Assad’s forces dropped their poisonous gas.”
As part of Wednesday’s report, U.N. investigators described the “particularly egregious episode” when an aid convoy was bombed in the Aleppo countryside, killing 15 aid workers and denying civilians of vital supplies.
The investigators also said Syrian forces were responsible for the attack — something the regime has denied.
BBC with additional report from NBC
