His book includes parts that make revelations about the royal family and, worse, he admits killing 25 people in Afghanistan.
“During my second deployment in the Afghanistan war, I was sent to this country 6 times, and I killed a total of 25 people, but I am neither ashamed nor proud of this.” He wrote in his book, adding “In the heat of the war, I did not think that these 25 people were from the people (of Afghanistan), but like chess pieces, they were taken off the board,” an excerpt of the book said.
The Daily Telegraph wrote that it is the first time that the 38-year-old prince is mentioning the number of Afghan forces he killed during his military service in Afghanistan.
Harry’s revelations made controversy at home. The retired British Army Colonel Tim Collins suggested that Prince Harry’s words about the casualties could cause security risks to him. Some others in London said that Harry has wrongly described the victims in Afghanistan as chess pieces, showing an inhuman face of Britain in his memoir. The spokesman of the Ministry of Defense said that the army will not comment on the claim of the number of people killed by Harry.
At the same time, the interim government of the Taliban in Afghanistan condemned the words by the British prince during his military service, and accused Britain of killing innocent civilians.
Top Taliban official Anas Haqqani told Aljazeera that the group launched an inquiry and found that in days mentioned by Prince Harry in the killing account, no militants were killed, which means that he killed innocent civilians.
“This account is part of the 20 years of war crimes in Afghanistan during the Western military presence,” he further maintained. However, this is still not the complete picture of the crimes committed by them and the crimes committed are much more than this incident.
Referring to Prince Harry’s description that removing what he said were “enemy fighters” was like taking off chess pieces from the board, Haqqani in a Twitter post said: “Mr. Harry! Those you killed were not chess pieces, but humans. The truth is what you said. Our innocent people were chess pieces for your soldiers, military commanders, and political leaders. However, you lost that game.”
Costs of war for Afghanistan
The American war from 2001 to 2021 imposed irreparable costs on the Afghans. The collapse of the economy, public health, security and infrastructure caused by the war led to the destruction of the lives of millions of Afghans. According to statistics provided by the Watson Institute at Brown University, 92 percent of the current population of Afghanistan is facing food insecurity and 3 million children are at risk of acute malnutrition. Also, some regions of Afghanistan are currently facing the risk of famine and at least half of the population lives on less than $1.90 per day.
“The US military in 2017 relaxed its rules of engagement for airstrikes in Afghanistan, which resulted in a dramatic increase in civilian casualties. From the last year of the Obama administration to the last full year of recorded data during the Trump administration, the number of civilians killed by US-led airstrikes in Afghanistan increased by 330 percent,” a report by Watson Institute at Brown University said.
The costs of war are not limited to airstrike casualties. The CIA, continues Watson Institute, armed Afghan militia groups to fight Islamist militants and these militias are responsible for serious human rights abuses, including extrajudicial killings of civilians.
Even in the absence of fighting, unexploded ordnance from this war and landmines from previous wars continue to kill, injure, and maim civilians. Fields, roads, and school buildings are contaminated by ordnance, which often harms children as they go about chores like gathering wood.
The war has also inflicted invisible wounds. The Afghan Ministry of Public Health in 2009 reported that fully two-thirds of Afghans suffer from mental health problems. This even increased due to deteriorating conditions.
The effects of war also include increased disease rates due to shortage of fresh water, malnutrition, and reduced access to health care. Almost all of the factors associated with premature death like poverty, malnutrition, poor sanitation, lack of access to health care, and environmental degradation were exacerbated by the US war in Afghanistan.
The data of war victims suggest that since 2001 about 243,000 people
were killed on Afghanistan-Pakistan battlefields, with over 70,000 of
them civilians.
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