TEHRAN: Nearly 33,000 children have been killed and maimed in Afghanistan amid its 20-year war, an average of one child every five hours, an Iranian media outlet has said.

“The numbers were a devastating insight into the deadly cost of war on children,“ PressTV reported Wednesday, citing data from Save the Children, a London-headquartered international humanitarian organisation which is said to have worked in Afghanistan since 1976 to deliver lifesaving services to children and their families, Xinhua news agency reported.

“The real number of direct child casualties of the conflict will likely be much higher than the estimated 32,945, and this number does not include children who have died due to hunger, poverty and disease in that time,“ the organisation added, according to the PressTV report.

“What remains after 20 years is a generation of children whose entire lives have been blighted by the misery and impact of war. The magnitude of human suffering of the past two decades is beyond comprehension,“ said Hassan Noor, Asia regional director for Save the Children.

The United States on Monday ended its two decades of war in Afghanistan, the longest war in American history, when the last U.S. planes flew out of the Asian country’s capital, Kabul. -Bernama