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US Senator Calls to Cut Funding to Afghanistan

October 18, 2023 Current News Articles

TOLOnews

TV Network

17 Oct 2023

Limitations on Afghan Women Harms 20-year Gains: UK Minister

October 18, 2023 Current News Articles

Fatima Adib

Tolo News

18 Oct 2023

The British official also criticized the Afghan caretaker government’s policies against Afghan women and girls.

The foreign affairs committee of the UK parliament arranged a meeting on the county’s policies vis-a-vis Afghanistan.

Lord Ahmad, UK’s Minister of State for the Middle East, North Africa, South Asia, who was also speaking at the meeting said that women and girls’ rights have had setbacks in Afghanistan after the withdrawal of foreign troops from the country.

Lord Ahmad said that ongoing limitations on Afghan women and girls will damage the gains of the past two decades in Afghanistan.

“And I think many of the gains that we were able to achieve, particularly on the rights of minorities, on the rights of women and girls and the progress we saw in education — those are real setbacks on what we had achieved and that has been reflected and evidenced by what we have seen in the subsequent… I think it is deep regret for many who operated that NATO team,” said Lord Ahmad, UK’s Minister of State for the Middle East, North Africa, South Asia.

The British official also criticized the Afghan caretaker government’s policies against Afghan women and girls.

“The Taliban’s philosophy is nothing to do with Islam, it is a draconian subversive philosophy which is against different people and different communities and as we know against women and girls, ” said Lord Ahmad, UK’s Minister of State for the Middle East, North Africa, South Asia.

Lord Ahmad further added that UK has provided the Afghan people with over a half million pounds in the first 18 months of the Islamic Emirate rule over Afghanistan.

“We provided over half a million pounds in that first 18 months… to reach 50 percent Afghan women with our humanitarian assistance,” said Lord Ahmad, UK’s Minister of State for the Middle East, North Africa, South Asia.

Earlier, UK’s defense minister, in his interview with the Daily Mail on the first anniversary of the Islamic Emirate, said that the UK had come with correct goals to Afghanistan and added that the UK had done much for Afghanistan’s security, economic development, education and other sectors while arguing that the goals had failed.

He had also said that UK’s mission in Afghanistan failed with the loss of hundreds of its soldiers

UN Experts Urge Pakistan to Cancel Refugees’ Repatriation Plan

October 18, 2023 Current News Articles

Nazir Shinwari

Tolo News

18 Oct 2023

World Food Program appeals for $19 million to provide emergency food in quake-hit Afghanistan

October 18, 2023 Current News Articles

BY RAHIM FAIEZ

Associated Press

October 18, 2023

ISLAMABAD (AP) — The United Nations’ World Food Program on Wednesday appealed for $19 million to provide emergency assistance to tens of thousands of people affected by a series of devastating earthquakes and aftershocks that has rocked western Afghanistan.

Ana Maria Salhuana, deputy country director of the World Food Program in Afghanistan, said it was helping survivors but it urgently needed more funding because “we are having to take this food from an already severely underfunded program.”

The group said it is working to provide emergency food assistance to 100,000 people in the region.

“Disasters like these earthquakes pound communities who are already barely able to feed themselves back into utter destitution,” the WFP said.

A 6.3 magnitude earthquake struck part of western Afghanistan on Sunday, after thousands of people died and entire villages were flattened by major quakes a week earlier. It was the fourth quake the U.S. Geological Survey has measured at 6.3 magnitude in the same area in just over a week.

The initial earthquakes on Oct. 7 flattened whole villages in Herat province and were among the most destructive quakes in the country’s recent history.

The WFP said staffers responded within hours of the first earthquakes, distributing fortified biscuits, pulses and other food items to affected families in destroyed villages.

“An estimated 25,000 buildings have been destroyed,” the group said a statement. “The survivors are currently sleeping in tents next to the rubble of their homes, desperate and afraid of further earthquakes and aftershocks.”

The latest quake was centered about 30 kilometers (19 miles) outside the city of Herat, the capital of Herat province, and was 6 kilometers (4 miles) below the surface, the U.S. Geological Survey said.

More than 90% of the people killed were women and children, U.N. officials said. The quakes struck during the daytime, when many of the men in the region were working outdoors.

Taliban officials said the earlier quakes killed more than 2,000 people across the province. The epicenter was in Zenda Jan district, where the majority of casualties and damage occurred.

The WFP said affected families will need help for months with winter just weeks away. It said that if there is funding, the emergency response will be complemented by longer-term resilience programs so vulnerable communities are able to rebuild their livelihoods.

The UN body was forced earlier this year to reduce the amount of food families receive and to cut 10 million people in Afghanistan from life-saving food assistance due to a massive funding shortfall.

In addition to the earthquake response, the WFP also urgently needs $400 million to prepare food before winter, when communities are cut off due to snow and landslides. In Afghanistan, these include communities of women who are being increasingly pushed out of public life.

The initial quake, numerous aftershocks and a third 6.3-magnitude quake on Wednesday flattened villages, destroying hundreds of mud-brick homes that could not withstand such force. Schools, health clinics and other village facilities also collapsed.

Besides rubble and funerals after that devastation, there was little left of the villages in the region’s dusty hills. Survivors are struggling to come to terms with the loss of multiple family members and in many places, living residents are outnumbered by volunteers who came to search the debris and dig mass graves.

Earthquakes are common in Afghanistan, where there are a number of fault lines and frequent movement among three nearby tectonic plates

Afghanistan’s terrible earthquakes

October 17, 2023 Current News Articles

ZINDA JAN

The Economist

Oct 12th, 2023

Over 2,000 have died in the country’s latest calamity

Afghans must think their country cursed. In the past two years they have seen the Taliban return to power, a huge cutback in Western aid that has pitched most of the population into poverty—and a series of horrific natural disasters. In recent days powerful earthquakes have devastated over a dozen villages near the western city of Herat, close to the border with Iran. Over 2,000 people are reported to have been killed and many more injured or made destitute.

The epicentre of the earthquakes, which included two of magnitude 6.3 on October 7th and another on the 11th, was the district of Zinda Jan, around 40km north of Herat. Thirteen villages in the district were largely obliterated, their mud-brick buildings turned to heaps of suffocating earth. In the village of Nayeb Rafi on October 9th a crowd of volunteers could be seen helping survivors dig out their living and dead relatives. It was a terrible scene.

Muhammad Amin, a 56-year-old shepherd lying on the rubble of his former house, said his six close relatives had all been killed inside it. He had been outside the village when the first earthquake struck. “I ran back but everything had been destroyed,” he said. “Collapsed houses, dust in the air, people crying and shouting for their families.”

A Taliban spokesman initially put the death toll at over 2,000. A spokesman for the regime’s National Disaster Management Authority said around 4,000 people had been killed or injured. The government’s disaster response was patchy. A village elder in Zinda Jan said the Taliban had sent bulldozers to his shattered village, but they had arrived late and were manned by inexperienced drivers, whom he accused of killing some of the people they were trying to dig out.

The quakes, which followed severe recent floods, mudslides and an earthquake last year that killed over a thousand people, showed up the meagreness of the Taliban state. According to a recent study by the World Bank, 60% of government spending last year went on the ministries of defence, interior and the intelligence department. According to Michael Semple, an Afghanistan expert based at Queen’s University Belfast, this was primarily to keep the Taliban’s own members in line. “They’re using security expenditure to keep the movement together, by promising jobs to all and sundry in the armed forces.”

Foreign aid agencies are struggling to make up the shortfall. The un has raised only a third of the $3.2bn it has targeted for Afghanistan this year. Perhaps the earthquakes will change that. The Taliban said that aid from Iran and Turkey had reached the devastated area, and that Australia, China, the eu, Japan and Pakistan had made additional pledges. Meanwhile, the disaster has made the existing suffering of the affected areas very much worse. ■

This article appeared in the Asia section of the print edition under the headline “Rubble of a country”

Precipitation Dropped 37% Compared to Last Year: NEPA

October 17, 2023 Current News Articles

Naveed Samadi

Tolo News

16 Oct 2023

Aid Continues for Earthquake Affected Areas in Herat

October 17, 2023 Current News Articles

TOLOnews

TV Network

16 Oct 2023

Earthquake victims whose houses were destroyed in Herat demand shelter from government and global aid agencies.

The distribution of aid from global institutions and domestic and foreign charities to all villages affected by the earthquake is continuing.

The assistance includes food, tents, blankets, clothing and hygiene materials.

Earthquake victims whose houses were destroyed in Herat demand shelter from government and global aid agencies.

Nasir Ahmad Salehi reports that the process of distributing aid from global institutions and domestic and foreign charities in all villages affected by the earthquake is continuing.

A Germany-based charity has provided food and non-food aid for hundreds of families in the village of Nayeb Rafi in Herat’s Zenda Jan district.

Mohammad Aalem Shahab, responsible for a charity organization, said: “We have brought aid to the sisters and brothers affected by the earthquake, including tents, blanket, tea, sugar, oil and flour.”

Menhajudin Hashemi, Afghan Red Crescent Representative, said “for 78 families food and non-food items distributed. From now on، we want to bring tents to some families whose tents have been destroyed and help them.“

The victims who have lost their homes and everything in this earthquake called the aid vital.

They say that global aid agencies have saved their lives.

Mohammad Hashem, earthquake victim: “Every day help comes to us, but we lost all our possessions and our lives are ruined.”

Abdul Basir, earthquake victim: “Now we survive with this aid and if it continues، it is good، but if the aid is cut off، we need a lot of things including winter clothes.“

Earthquake victims in Herat are calling for permanent shelter from government and global aid agencies.

They say that life is hard because of the cold weather, and their children are sick.

Habibullah, earthquake victim: “It’s too cold and if the cold increases, we’ll have more problems.“

Mohammad Naeim, earthquake victim: “We can’t live here and we want to be sheltered everywhere، in every village and every province، because there are children and women who can’t come here.“

Tents were distributed to all villages affected by the earthquake, including Zenda Jan, Anjil and Kashk of Herat.

In addition to the United Nations, Turkiye, Iran, China, Kazakhstan, the United Arab Emirates and some other global institutions have helped by giving food and tents to the victims of the Herat earthquake.

A Father, an Earthquake and the Desperate Search for a Missing Son

October 17, 2023 Current News Articles

Reporting from Seya Aab village, in northwest Afghanistan

The New York Times

Oct. 16, 2023

Over a week since a major earthquake decimated his village in northwest Afghanistan, Noor Ahmad is on a harrowing hunt to find his 5-year-old.

Noor Ahmad didn’t know where else to look. For days after a powerful earthquake leveled his village in Afghanistan, he scoured the district for his family. He dug under the rubble that was once their home. He combed through the trauma rooms in the regional hospital. He searched every body bag at the morgue, twice.

He found his wife and his five young daughters — all crushed to death. But his 5-year-old son, Sardar, was nowhere to be found. Now, lying by a makeshift tent outside what was once his home, Mr. Ahmad, 40, was torn between the incomprehensible pain of losing his family and the tiny spark of hope that somewhere, somehow, his son might still be alive.

“I am just begging with God,” he said.

Sardar is one of hundreds of people who are still missing more than a week after the first in a series of devastating earthquakes rocked northwestern Afghanistan. Families desperate for answers have been left in an agonizing limbo, yearning to find a way forward.

The temblors — the deadliest in Afghanistan in decades — killed roughly 1,300 people and injured 1,700 more, most of whom lived in only a few villages tucked in a stretch of desert along the Iran border. What were once clusters of mud-brick homes nestled between hillsides have been transformed into heaps of dust, makeshift tents and freshly dug graves.

Like Mr. Ahmad, many men in these villages had been in Iran, working as day laborers, when the quakes struck. Rushing back home, they found their families and neighbors scattered. Some remained in the area to dig through the rubble, while the injured were rushed to hospitals and clinics. Others were seeking refuge in relatives’ homes nearby.

It took days for many of the men to be reunited with their families. But more than a week since the first quake, Mr. Ahmad and scores of others were still desperately searching. Here there are no fingerprints and DNA tests to help families find their missing loved ones. Instead, they are largely on their own.

For many, the inability to answer a question so basic as whether their loved ones were alive or dead has only amplified the sense of powerlessness they felt when the earth shook violently beneath them.

“It’s worse for those people than if they knew their relatives are dead,” said Freshta Yaqoobi, managing director of the Organization for Sustainable Aid in Afghanistan, an aid group helping families affected by the quakes. “If you don’t know the fate of your loved ones it feels like you’re dying every second, you have a wound that can’t heal.”

Mr. Ahmad has spent his entire life in Seya Aab village. He went to primary school nearby and then started going to Iran for work when he was 16, or as he put it, “Before I even had a beard.” He joined dozens of men from the village for two or three months at a time, collecting and then selling scrap metal on the outskirts of Tehran, he said. He earned around $200 a month.

When he was 18, he married his wife, Fatima, whom he had known since childhood. She was his rock, able to soothe Mr. Ahmad when he was stressed about money or aching with the pain from an old injury from a car crash.

“Whenever I was not feeling relaxed, she would come up and massage my shoulders,” he said. “In the past 22 years, she never complained. Not once.”

He hated leaving her and their children, but there was no work in the village or the surrounding area. Going to Iran allowed him to ensure they had just enough to eat and to go to the hospital if necessary, he said.

Every time he returned home he was met with sheer joy. Farahnaz and Shukria, his two most rambunctious daughters, jumped all over him, smothering him in kisses. His 65-year-old mother always circled him three times, inspecting his lean frame to make sure he had not lost any weight.

“I would say, ‘You’re my mother, I should be the one checking on you,’” Mr. Ahmad said.

It was a tiring but stable life. Then just over a week ago, on the outskirts of Tehran, he received a call from another man from Seya Aab who told him a major earthquake had hit the village. He rushed to find a car to take him back across the border to Afghanistan. He called Fatima dozens of times. She did not pick up.

Mr. Ahmad arrived at the village in the late afternoon the next day, as the sun hung low over the hilltops. The village was no more.

He started frantically digging near where his home had stood. He called his neighbors to get an excavator to help him. He asked everyone: Where was Fatima? Where were his children? He got only blank stares in response. After hours of digging, he thought perhaps they had been rescued and set off for the nearest hospital, in Herat City.

There he went room to room, checking the ICU, the children’s ward and the maternity wing. Then, with a pit deep in his stomach, he went to the morgue.

And there he found Farahnaz, 14. Her face was pristine, almost as if she were sleeping, but the life had left her auburn eyes — the ones he always thought looked like his own.

“I started kissing her. I thought, thank God, at least she didn’t suffer,” Mr. Ahmad said.

Next, he found 6-year-old Shukria. Then 12-year-old Shahnaz. He didn’t recognize her battered face until his cousin pointed out her two front teeth, which hung longer than the rest.

After Shahnaz, came Zhina, 10. His wife. His mother. And his youngest, 9-month-old Amina, her life so short he had barely gotten to know her.

The grief was more than overwhelming. Standing in that morgue, it felt as if his world had ended.

Then he remembered: Sardar, his son. The skinny 5-year-old boy who was always doted on by his older sisters.

Mr. Ahmad inspected the bodies again. He ran back through the hospital. He asked his surviving neighbors to dig further into the ground where his home stood and check nearby clinics. His mind turned to questions that now consume him.

Had Sardar somehow survived? Was he sitting under the fluorescent white lights of a different hospital, wondering where his father was? Had someone taken his body mistakenly, thinking it was their own young boy, and buried him in another village somewhere? Or had he, unclaimed by anyone, been thrown into a mass grave?

Nearly a week since he first visited the morgue, Mr. Ahmad is still searching for answers. Until he finds Sardar, he said, he will be stuck in this state of suspension, as if caught himself between the living and the dead.

“I don’t know if my son is alive or dead,” he said. “I don’t know my future. I don’t know anything at all.”

Powerful Earthquakes Hit Afghanistan for the Fourth Time in Just Over a Week

October 17, 2023 Current News Articles

By Christina Goldbaum and Yaqoob Akbary

Reporting from Kabul, Afghanistan

The New York Times

Oct. 15, 2023

Herat Province, near the site of three earlier quakes that killed more than 1,000 people in recent days, was shaken violently again early Sunday.

Two powerful earthquakes struck Herat Province in northwestern Afghanistan early on Sunday, jolting a region already hit by three major quakes over the past eight days that have killed more than 1,000 people.

The magnitude-6.3 and magnitude-5.4 temblors struck the province just after 8 a.m. local time at a depth of about six miles, according to the U.S. Geological Survey. The epicenter of the quakes was around 20 miles northwest of Herat City, the provincial capital and a major economic hub near the country’s border with Iran.

At least two people died and more than 150 people were injured in Sunday’s quakes, according to Masoud Danish, the director of the Herat governor’s office.

The episode on Sunday capped an already devastating week in Herat. It began last on Oct. 7, when two major earthquakes hit the region, killing around 1,300 people and injuring about 1,700 more in the country’s deadliest natural disaster in decades, according to the United Nations.

Those quakes decimated entire villages in Zinda Jan district outside the city, turning clusters of mud-brick homes scattered across the desert into little more than piles of rubble.

Days later, another magnitude-6.3 quake hit just outside the city, injuring around 120 people and rattling Herat residents who were already on edge after the initial quakes. Thousands of people left their homes to live in makeshift tents scattered across the city, terrified of another tremor that they feared could bring buildings crashing down around them.

Then, early Sunday, those fears were realized.

Mohammad Ghaznawi, 30, had been sleeping in a tent with his wife and two children in a park on the outskirts of the city after the first quakes struck. On Sunday morning, they woke up shivering from the biting wind and decided to return to their third-floor apartment, thinking that the temblors were finally over.

But as his wife put on a kettle for tea, the apartment building began to shake around them. Mr. Ghaznawi saw his iPad fall from the table, its screen smashing on the ground. Small pieces of white concrete from their ceiling crashed to the floor. He and his wife grabbed their son and daughter and rushed outside.

When the shaking finally ended, Mr. Ghaznawi decided he had had enough. He’s planning on taking his family to a relative’s home in Ghazni Province — around 500 miles from Herat in southeast Afghanistan — on Sunday afternoon until they feel it’s safe to return.

“I’m full of stress, I just want to leave Herat,” said Mr. Ghaznawi, who owns a handicraft shop in the city.

Around 20 minutes after the quake struck, ambulances began arriving at Herat’s regional public hospital, ferrying injured people from the outskirts of the city. One man was pulled onto a stretcher, his head and face coated in blood, according to Nazif Padshah, 27, who was at the hospital pharmacy when the quake struck.

Across the city, fresh cracks snaked up the walls of apartment buildings and people’s homes, photos from residents show. Toilet paper, boxes of tissues and small containers of hand sanitizer were strewn across the floor of one grocery store, next to shattered bottles of ketchup and cooking oil.

Like Mr. Ghaznawi, some residents who had been sleeping outside now plan to leave the province entirely, shaken by the seemingly relentless wave of quakes. Others are at a loss for what to do.

Hussain Karimi, 34, had been sleeping in a makeshift tent in the alley outside his home along with his wife, 4-year-old son and 2-year-old daughter.

On Sunday morning, they went inside their home to make tea and breakfast. A glass of tea was in his hand when suddenly the ground began to tremble beneath him. He dropped the glass, grabbed his daughter and ran to an alleyway opposite their home.

“The quake made me dizzy,” he said. “Both my legs are shaking even now.”

Now, he says, he does not know where to go to keep his family safe.

“We can’t sleep outside because of the cold. We can’t stay in our home because of the fear,” Mr. Karimi said. “I don’t know what to do.”

Islamic State Attack Kills 17 at Shiite Mosque in Northern Afghanistan

October 17, 2023 Current News Articles

By Christina Goldbaum and Najim Rahim

Christina Goldbaum reported from Kabul, Afghanistan, and Najim Rahim from San Francisco.

Oct. 14, 2023

A suicide attack by the Islamic State at a Shiite mosque in northern Afghanistan killed at least 17 people on Friday, according to hospital officials and eyewitnesses, in a bloody reminder of the insecurity that remains in the country and has spread to Pakistan two years after the end of the U.S.-led war.

The attack occurred around 1:30 p.m., just as hundreds had gathered at the mosque for Friday prayers in Pul-i-Khumri, the capital of Baghlan Province, a coal-rich and mountainous stretch of northern Afghanistan.

The blast hit the Imam Zaman Mosque, the largest Shiite mosque in the city, and witnesses and Taliban officials said they believe the assault was carried out by a single suicide attacker.

“The explosion occurred in the midst of a crowd of worshipers,” said Mustafa Hashemi, the director of the province’s department for information and culture.

Disputing the death toll provided by hospital staff, Taliban officials said that only seven people were killed in the blast. Eyewitnesses who spoke to The New York Times said that dozens of people were injured in the attack.

Sayed Mujtaba Hashemi, whose father is the imam of the mosque, was kneeling in the last row of worshipers as his father was finishing his sermon, he said. Then, as prayers were about to begin, he heard a loud sound and was thrown to the ground.

When he opened his eyes, he saw people’s bodies splayed across the carpeted floor. Screams and wails filled the air. Some people began stumbling out of the building, many limping from injuries they had sustained in the blast.

“As everyone left, one thought crossed my mind: Where is my father?” he said. He rushed to the pulpit and saw him, alive but with pieces of metal lodged into his neck and hand.

Videos and photos of the attack’s aftermath on social media show the emerald green walls of the mosque splattered with red blood. Pieces of the white concrete ceiling were scattered across the floor, much of its red carpet shredded to pieces.

Hours later, the Islamic State affiliate in the region, known as the Islamic State Khorasan or ISIS-K, took responsibility for the attack, according to SITE Intelligence Group, which tracks extremist organizations.

ISIS-K is a Sunni extremist group that was founded in 2015 and has targeted Shiite Muslims in Afghanistan, particularly those from the predominantly Shiite Hazara ethnic minority. Shiites make up around 10 percent of Afghanistan’s population, the vast majority of which is Sunni.

After the Taliban seized power in 2021, ISIS-K stepped up its attacks in Afghanistan, reaching into parts of the country that had previously been spared its violence and were far from the group’s stronghold in the east along Afghanistan’s border with Pakistan.

ISIS-K has been antagonistic toward the Taliban administration, claiming it is not implementing true Shariah law, the legal code of Islam, and carrying out hit-and-run attacks on Taliban security forces.

The violence has drawn a heavy-handed response by the Taliban, which has carried out a brutal crackdown on the group over the past two years. That offensive has pushed some ISIS-K fighters into Pakistan, where the group has carried out a string of major attacks in recent months.

Since the beginning of the year, the Taliban have killed eight high-ranking Islamic State officials, according to American officials. In that time, Afghanistan has been spared the spate of high-profile blasts on Shiite mosques and education centers in predominantly Shiite neighborhoods that rocked the country in the first year of Taliban rule.

But the attack on Friday offered a heartbreaking reminder that Afghanistan had not yet shaken free from the threat posed by the terrorist group.

“We thought the situation had improved,” said Bezhan Timory, 22, a worshiper at the mosque. “But now the targeting of the Shia community has started again. This is very worrying for us. I am really worried.”

Over 2,000 have died in the country’s latest calamity

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