KABUL — Taliban suicide attacks and a fierce battle for the northern city of Kunduz made 2015 the worst year for Afghan civilian casualties since the United Nations began tracking the data in 2009, officials said Sunday.
It was a reminder of the cost of the conflict at a time when the prospect of peace seems as distant as ever.
The UN documented 3,545 civilians killed and 7,457 injured last year, the UN Assistance Mission in Afghanistan and the UN Human Rights Office said in a report presented at a news conference in Kabul, the Afghan capital.
The total casualty figure, 11,002, was 4 percent above the 2014 level. The number of civilian injuries rose 9 percent, though there were 4 percent fewer deaths, compared with 2014.
The statistics do not “reflect the real horror of the phenomenon we are talking about,’’ Nicholas Haysom, the UN’s special representative for Afghanistan, told journalists.
“The real cost we are talking about in these figures,’’ he said, “is measured in the maimed bodies of children, the communities who have to live with loss, the grief of colleagues and relatives, the families who make do without a breadwinner, the parents who grieve for lost children, the children who grieve for lost parents.’’
Battles between insurgents and Afghan government forces or their affiliated militias produced the largest number of civilian deaths and injuries, the UN found, followed by improvised explosive devices.
Suicide attacks and “complex attacks’’ — in which Taliban attackers detonate explosives, then send in gunmen on suicide missions — also contributed to civilian casualties, as did “targeted and deliberate killings’’ on both sides of the conflict.
About one-quarter of all the civilian dead and wounded were children, and about a tenth were women.
Afghans have endured armed conflict to one degree or another since 1979, when the Soviet Union invaded to install a Moscow-friendly government.
The departure of most NATO combat troops at the end of 2014 coincided with an increase in attacks by the Taliban, who are seeking to reinstate the strict Islamist rule they established in the 1990s but lost to the United States and its Afghan allies after the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks.
The deteriorating security situation has led hundreds of thousands of people to leave their homes in the last few years, with some seeking refuge within Afghanistan and others fleeing to neighboring countries or Europe.
The violence shows little sign of abating. While there are no official figures available for this year, dozens of people have already been killed by fighting in Baghlan, Nangarhar and Helmand provinces, and the Taliban have begun targeting media workers, as evidenced by an attack on employees of Tolo Television in Kabul in January.
James R. Clapper, the US director of national intelligence, warned last week that “Afghanistan is at serious risk of a political breakdown during 2016, occasioned by mounting political, economic and security challenges.’’
The Taliban were responsible for 62 percent of the civilians killed or wounded last year, down 10 percentage points from 2014, the report found.
Danielle Bell, the UN director of human rights for Afghanistan, said it was important to note that the number of unattributed casualties, including civilians caught in the middle of fighting between pro- and antigovernment forces, had risen sharply, suggesting that the Taliban’s responsibility might be understated.
Efforts to reach a Taliban spokesman for comment were not immediately successful.
