Taliban bomb and suicide attacks have killed more than 700 Afghan civilians this year, with schools increasingly a target, a NATO spokesman said in Brussels on Thursday.
A total of 519 civilians have been killed in bombings and another 205 in suicide attacks, accounting for 91 percent and 93 percent respectively of the victims, spokesman James Appathurai said after a meeting between NATO, the World Bank and the UN on the reconstruction of Afghanistan.
"Despite a 65 percent rise in Taliban attacks on schools, a thousand school buildings have been built or opened this year," he said.
World Bank director in Afghanistan Alastair McKechnie said the Taliban's tactics were "counter-productive" as "the demand for education in Afghanistan is enormous".
Appathurai stressed that nevertheless six million children were being schooled in the country, six times the figure in 2001.
Thursday's meeting, attended by representatives of the 37 countries involved in the NATO-led International Security Assistance Force (ISAF), was organised to consider the challenges of reconstruction and development in Afghanistan and to explore ways "of improving co-ordination and co-operation within the international community and with the Afghan authorities," according to a NATO statement.