Casualty recording in Afghanistan
Multiple actors have attempted to account for civilian casualties in Afghanistan since the international coalition invasion in 2001. These efforts primarily focused on documenting harm to civilians in order to influence military policies and procedures. The International Security Assistance Force, the Afghan government and national forces, and the United Nations Assistance Mission in Afghanistan all conducted casualty tracking in various formats. There was significant overlap and collaboration between these mechanisms, which helped raise standards of verification.
However, these initiatives did not aim to produce public records for memorialisation purposes, and their data remain confidential. Following the departure of international forces and the fall of the Afghan Republic government in 2021, it is unclear what continued efforts exist to document and identify victims of armed violence – both ongoing and historic.
Efforts to publicly acknowledge and memorialise victims of the conflict have been led by civil society organisations, often Afghan-led but located outside the country. Ongoing security concerns for witnesses and other survivors have been exacerbated since the return of the Taliban to power, and this has limited the amount of information which is currently made publicly available.
Casualty tracking by international forces
The International Security Assistance Force (ISAF), led by the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), was active in Afghanistan between 2001 and 2014. In 2008, ISAF created a Civilian Casualty Tracking Cell (CCTC) to monitor and report on civilian casualties caused by ISAF activities.
The initial CCTC mechanism was modest, requiring little planning and reallocation of resources. A small CCTC staff collected and centralized data reported from the field, using the data to attempt to verify civilian casualty allegations and keep ISAF leadership informed. By late 2009, the CCTC had amassed enough data to analyse it for trends, and in 2011 it was expanded into the Civilian Casualty Mitigation Team. The expansion gave the mechanism more personnel, resources, and responsibility, including increased engagement with civil society on civilian casualty concerns.
Analysis of the CCTC and CCMT data on casualties led the ISAF leadership to issue new tactical directives and guidelines to mitigate civilian harm. These had a transformational impact on reducing harm to civilians. The number of civilian casualties caused by ISAF / pro-government forces dropped from 828 in 2008 to 316 in 2012.
The CCTC and CCMT only reported on casualties caused by ISAF forces, not on civilian casualties more broadly (including those caused by insurgents). As a result, they do not provide a comprehensive record of deaths across the period of operation. Their records were intended primarily for internal analysis purposes, and for identifying families eligible for compensation. They were not intended for wider public use, and only limited information on individual casualties was published.
There has been substantial analysis of the development and impact of ISAF’s approach to tracking civilian casualties, including the report by CIVIC, Civilian Harm Tracking: Analysis of ISAF efforts in Afghanistan (2014).
United Nations casualty tracking in Afghanistan
The Human Rights unit of the United Nations Assistance Mission in Afghanistan (UNAMA) began systematically recording civilian casualties of the armed conflict in Afghanistan in 2007, as part of its Protection of Civilians mandate. UNAMA’s records included all civilian victims, regardless of the party responsible for their death, and are therefore broader than the casualty tracking records compiled by ISAF.
UNAMA made effective use of its casualty records to support advocacy with parties to the conflict to revise their policy and operational practices, in order to reduce harm to civilians. UNAMA’s records also helped to draw attention to changes in patterns and levels of violence over the years.
Since the Taliban returned to power in 2021 UNAMA has continued to operate, but as of July 2025 it has only published two reports on civilian casualties during this period.
Other UN actors in Afghanistan have also documented specific categories of casualties, including children (Country Task Force on Monitoring and Reporting, which reports to the UN Security Council) and victims of landmine or other explosive remnants of war (the Mine Action Coordination Centre of Afghanistan).
None of the individual details within UNAMA’s casualty records, or records of other UN entities, are made publicly available. Every Casualty Counts conducted a detailed examination of UNAMA’s methods and impact in the report, The UN and Casualty Recording (2014). The impact of UNAMA’s casualty recording in relation to UN practice and policy on Protection of Civilians is analysed further in OCHA’s report, Building a culture of protection: 20 years of Security Council engagement on protection of civilians (2019).
Afghan government-led casualty tracking
In 2012, the Government of the Islamic Republic of Afghanistan began establishing its own Civilian Casualty Tracking Mechanism, in collaboration with ISAF officials. The President’s Information Coordination Centre had also been involved in tracking civilian casualties. It is not clear what happened to these entities after the fall of the Republic in 2021. None of these records are publicly available.
Civil society casualty recording in Afghanistan
The Afghanistan Independent Human Rights Commission was a formally recognised National Human Rights Institution, mandated by the Afghan constitution but independent of government. It was established in 2002 and began recording civilian casualty information in 2007. Since the return of the Taliban, it has been unable to continue its work.
Information on individual casualties
Sources of information about people killed in the armed conflict in Afghanistan:
Rawadari is an Afghan-led human rights organisation which investigates, documents and records all forms of violations of the right to life in Afghanistan, including those related to armed conflict. Since 2022 it has produced regular reports on casualties in Afghanistan, although for security reasons personal details are often ommitted from publication. The organisation has staff based inside Afghanistan as well as outside the country.
Afghanistan Human Rights and Democracy Organization (AHRDO) was founded in 2009. Its aims include documenting and developing public memory of Afghan war victims as an antidote to the deep-seated culture of impunity and the profoundly ingrained ethos of war and violence in the country.
AHRDO established Afghanistan Memory Home as an online museum and database dedicated to preserving the stories and honoring the memories of Afghan war victims dating from 1978 to the present day. It uses a victim-centred approach to memorialise victims’ lives and provides a platform for families and survivors to share their experiences, and plays a crucial role in documenting evidence of victims and incidents related to decades of conflict.
Afghanistan Independent Human Rights Commission (AIHRC)
The AIHRC was established by the Government of the Afghan Republic in 2002 but has been forced to suspend its operations since the Taliban return to power in 2021. From 2007 to 2021, the AIHRC produced regular demographic reports on civilian casualties. Although its website is now defunct, its reports can still be accessed through other sites, including RefWorld.
UNAMA began documenting civilian casualties in 2007 within its protection of civilians and human rights mandate. It produced regular public reports on civilian casualty demographics and trends from 2007 to August 2021, when the Taliban returned to power, but did not publish identifying information about individual victims. As of July 2025, UNAMA has only published two reports on civilian casualties since the Taliban takeover.
Information on casualties 1978 – 2001
In 2004, the United Nations published a report detailing war crimes and human rights violations committed in Afghanistan between 1978 and 2001, but it was quickly removed from public sites due to political pressure. In 2005, the Afghanistan Justice Project published a further report covering the same time period and including additional witness testimonies.
Although they are not comprehensive or systematic attempts to document all casualties of the conflict during this time period, together these reports are probably the most complete record available of massacres and other unlawful killings.
