Healing Afghanistan - Upholding the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child in the Islamic Republic of Afghanistan

When he wasn't chasing stories, Elyas Dayee loved tending to his flowers, cooking with his wife and playing with his toddler daughter, the only survivor of triplets, now bereft that her father has stopped coming home, and too young to understand why.

The 34-year-old became the latest Afghan killed in a nationwide campaign of targeted killings, when a bomb twisted his car into a lethal pile of metal and glass as he drove to work in Lashkar Gah, the capital of Helmand province.

Around the country, journalists, human rights workers, moderate religious scholars and civil society activists have been picked off as they go about their daily lives, often blown up in their cars.

The UN and Afghanistan's independent human rights commission have both documented sharp rises in these kind of attacks compared with 2019.

The steady drum beat of killings has cast a shadow of fear across the country, even as the government and Taliban are meant to be hammering out a peace deal, hundreds of miles away in Qatar.

Targeted assassinations are unlikely to draw US reprisals, or register much in the news beyond Afghanistan's borders, but they have a powerful demoralising effect in Afghan cities, spreading a sense of insecurity.

Fear caused by the deaths has been exacerbated by failure to investigate the murders.

The family of Yama Siawash, a central bank adviser and former TV presenter, killed five days before Dayee in another car bomb, have issued an open letter threatening legal action if the government doesn't do more to track the people who killed him.

Shaharzad Akbar, the head of the Afghan Independent Human Rights Commission, has called on the Taliban to speak out against the killings, and the government to take stronger steps to investigate them. "We are very concerned about the impact of this trend on civic space, and public participations in the peace talks, and we are very concerned that many of these killings are not fully investigated [...]" Hence the Taliban must give clear instruction to all their fighters about not attacking civilians; and the Afghan government must arrest, charge and convict those who are behind these targeted killings - so that the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child can finally be upheld and protected in the Islamic Republic of Afghanistan.