The first death was soon after midnight, a policeman killed on night watch near the Tajik border. The bloodshed continued as the sun rose then set again, ending only as the day did.

Three beheadings at a school, and an airstrike around 11.30pm were the last conflict-related violence recorded in Afghanistan on June 30; the culmination of a day of murder and maiming, shootings, explosions, air strikes and one unclaimed political assassination.

For everyone except injured survivors, and the families of the dead, it was an unexceptional day in a war that much of the world appears to have forgotten. There were no major attacks in big cities, no key battles, no catastrophic air strikes, just the ceaseless grind of war.

On October 7, it will be 17 years since US troops and Afghan allies began their march to topple the Taliban in Kabul, launching the latest iteration of Afghanistan's civil war.

In the intervening years foreign troop numbers have surged and been cut back again; leaders in the US and the UK have declared "our war" in Afghanistan over, and "mission accomplished".

Yet the Taliban have kept fighting and a regional affiliate of Islamic State has joined them on the battlefield. Today insurgents control or threaten more territory than they have done since 2001, and civilian casualties are setting grim records.

In a bid to capture the relentless nature of the war, and the spread of violence around the country, the Bureau of Investigative Journalism and the Observer have compiled a list of all attacks reported on a single day, using unpublished official documents and on the ground reporting, to give a snapshot of the war today.

The snapshot details the death of at least 60 people, and the wounding of over a dozen more, in more than 50 different attacks spread across 16 provinces - nearly half the country. Every outbreak of violence that we could identify, from a few shots fired at a police station in eastern Ghazni, to an airstrike on Taliban positions in western Farah, is listed.



June 30 is particularly poignant because it was the first day of fighting after an unprecedented and unexpectedly successful three day ceasefire between government and Taliban forces ended. Desperately weary of war, many Afghans were hopeful that the truce would be extended. This is what they got instead: