The forgotten casualties of war in Afghanistan

The stooped and withdrawn 18-year-old breathed painfully as he relived the day last month when shrapnel from a missile ripped through his lung and bowels.

It was 9am and he was out collecting fruit from his family's trees in a village so small it is not included on most maps of Helmand province.

Civilian casualties of the war in Afghanistan

Although it was the day of the Afghan elections he, like everyone else in his neighbourhood, had no interest in voting in an area too insecure for polling stations to open. "I was just a few steps outside my front gate when about eight rockets landed," he says, sitting in a hospital in the provincial capital of Helmand, bandages around his chest. "I was hit and ran into the house where women and children were yelling because a rocket had also landed on one of the rooms." More