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Taliban carries out deadly raid on ISIL hideout in Afghanistan

April 4, 2023 Current News Articles

Al Jazeera

4 April 2023

A police spokesman says an ISIL hideout in Nahri Shahi district was targeted and six fighters were killed.

The raid comes as the Taliban rulers crack down on the regional affiliate of the ISIL group – known as the Islamic State in Khorasan Province (ISKP), which has carried out several deadly attacks in recent months killing dozens, including Balkh governor Mohammad Dawood Muzammil last month.

According to Mohammad Asif Waziri, a spokesman for the police chief in Balkh, the operation late on Monday night targeted an ISIL hideout in Nahri Shahi district. Six members of the armed group were killed, he added.

Muzammil was known for his resistance to ISIL in the area. The group has emerged as the biggest security threat to the Taliban, which took over Afghanistan in August 2021 after US-led foreign forces withdrew after 20 years of war.

A blast in January killed at least five people and injured dozens at the Ministry of Foreign Affairs as employees streamed out of the building at the end of their work day.

The ISIL group has also claimed other recent attacks in Kabul, including a bombing near a checkpoint at the city’s military airport that killed and wounded several people and also an assault on a Kabul hotel in mid-December.

ISIL attacks in Afghanistan have often targeted the minority Shia communities, as well as foreigners and foreign interests.

SOURCE: AL JAZEERA AND NEWS AGENCIES

Afghanistan Only Country That Bans Girls from Secondary School: HRW

April 3, 2023 Current News Articles

Mitra Majeedy

Tolo News

3 April 2023

“Without educated girls and women, Afghanistan is facing a dark future,” HRW said.

Human Rights Watch said on Twitter that Afghanistan is the only country in the world that bans girls from going to secondary school.

“Without educated girls and women, Afghanistan is facing a dark future,” HRW said.

This comes as Sheikh Abdul Sami Ghaznawi, an instructor from Central Jihadi Madrassa in Kabul, said in a video that there is no conflict regarding girls’ education. He says that “Hadiths” have indicated that “modern knowledge is obligatory” and if anyone wants to deny it, they should first refer to “the Quran and Hadith.”

“We will solve the issue (education). We will sit with the scholars and they will make a decision. I am surprised about this dispute,” he said.

The UN Assistant Mission in Afghanistan (UNAMA) also said that access to education is a human right and that quality education is considered an international priority.

“The barring of girls and women from education is not only damaging the females in Afghan society but will also severely harm the social fundamentals of Afghanistan gradually, which will be difficult to recover from,” said Marriam Arveen, a human rights defender.

“It has been three years that we have not gone to school. A one-year stop was due to Covid-19 and the rest of the time– two years–was due to the Islamic Emirate’s takeover. We hope that as the schools are reopened for boys, the Islamic Emirate will reopen it for girls as well,” said Nargis, a student.

This comes as residents of Kabul called on the interim government to provide educational opportunities for women and to reopen secondary schools for girls.

“If we want to have a brilliant future and a developed country, then it is essential that the schools for our sisters be reopened,” said Ameen, a resident of Kabul.

“Without universities and educational institutions, good governance and enduring stability will be difficult,” said Mohammad Sarwar, a resident of Kabul.

It has been nearly 560 days since female students above grade six have been banned from schools, and their fate has yet to be clarified.

Trafficking of Military Equipment Abroad Prevented: MoD

April 3, 2023 Current News Articles

By Banafsha Binesh

Tolo News

3 April 2023

Three UK citizens held in Taliban custody in Afghanistan

April 3, 2023 Current News Articles

Al Jazeera

2 Apr 2023

Non-profit group says charity medic, traveller and unnamed third man ‘being well-treated’ as UK foreign office seeks contact with them.

Three British men, including a charity worker, are being held in Taliban custody in Afghanistan, a UK non-profit organisation says, and the UK foreign ministry says it is working to secure contact with them.

In a statement released on Saturday, the foreign office said it was providing support to their families.

The Presidium Network said it is assisting two of the detainees, charity medic Kevin Cornwell, 53, and an unnamed man.

It also confirmed that the third man is Miles Routledge, 23, a British holidaymaker who received widespread attention and criticism on social media in August 2021 for having travelled to Afghanistan despite the Taliban’s return to power after US-led foreign forces withdrew from the country.

“We believe they are in good health and being well treated,” Scott Richards of the Presidium Network told UK-based Sky News. “We have no reason to believe they’ve been subject to any negative treatment such as torture, and we’re told that they are as good as can be expected in such circumstances.”

There had been “no meaningful contact” between authorities and the two men Presidium is assisting, he said, adding that their arrests came in relation to a misunderstanding over what he said was a licensed weapon in Cornwell’s room.

The two men being assisted by Presidium were detained by Taliban secret police on January 11. It is unclear how long Routledge has been held for.

“Anyone travelling to dangerous parts of the world should take the utmost caution,” UK Home Secretary Suella Braverman told Sky News. “If they are going to do that, they should always act on the advice of the foreign office travel advice.” “If there are risks to people’s safety, if they’re a British citizen abroad, then the UK government is going to do whatever it takes to ensure that they’re safe. The government is in negotiations and working hard to ensure people’s safety is upheld.”

Al Jazeera reached out to Taliban officials for comment but had not gotten a response at the time of publication.

SOURCE: AL JAZEERA AND NEWS AGENCIES

USIP Expert Says Intl Aid to Afghanistan ‘Slipping,’ Changes Needed

April 1, 2023 Current News Articles

Fatema Adeeb

Tolo News

1 April 2023

According to the ministry’s figures, there are now 360 NGOs operating in the nation, with the majority of them engaged in providing humanitarian help.

William Byrd, a United States Institute of Peace (USIP) expert writing for the LAWFARE blog, said that international aid to Afghanistan is decreasing, and he proposed a number of changes to the world’s approach to helping Afghanistan—including coordinating aid efforts and utilizing the Afghan Trust Fund in Switzerland—to improve the situation.

Byrd wrote: “International humanitarian aid is critical in responding to natural disasters and other short-term emergencies. But as the U.N. itself recognizes, such aid is not well positioned to respond to—let alone resolve—a prolonged economic crisis such as the one currently occurring in Afghanistan.”

He continued:

“This is particularly true when humanitarian aid is a primary source of external financial support propping up the economy and when the national government—the Taliban regime—is at odds with donors and harms the welfare of its own population, especially women and girls, as evidenced by the Taliban’s bans on female education and women working in nongovernmental organizations (NGOs). Given these challenges and the myriad humanitarian needs elsewhere in the world, support for continuing massive aid to Afghanistan is slipping.”

Along with proposing ways to empower the Afghan private sector, Byrd spotlighted a failing of the international community: “there has been too much focus on Taliban behavior and the international community’s unsuccessful efforts to influence the Taliban. Too little attention, meanwhile, has been devoted to aid agencies’ and donor countries’ own aid practices and performance and delivery modalities, which lie within their control.”

Byrd lays out a plan for how humanitarian aid should be gradually lessened on the one hand, but how on the other hand long-term stability for the Afghan economy should be increased. He writes:

“The international community should make much greater use of the Afghan private sector in the delivery of aid, which will reduce associated costs while providing a modest economic boost. There is a widespread consensus that humanitarian aid alone is not the solution to Afghanistan’s economic crisis, but unfortunately there is little prospect for traditional development aid to ramp up.”

In response to Byrd’s comments that the ban on women working in NGOs and the ban on women and girls’ education are contributing to the precarity of continued international aid, the Ministry of Economy said that it has not placed any restrictions on the activities of humanitarian organizations.

According to the ministry’s figures, there are now 360 NGOs operating in the nation, with the majority of them engaged in providing humanitarian help.

“There are 360 NGOs operating in the country right now, most of their activities are in the relief and humanitarian section,” said Abdul Latif Nazari, deputy of the Ministry of Economy.

Some economists said that banning women from working at NGOs will reduce humanitarian aid.

“Banning women’s work in NGOs, especially organizations that provide health care, might have a negative impact on the continuance of these institutions’ activities and the supply of services,” said Shakir Yaqobi, an economist.

“The international community has given its help, including its humanitarian aid, which relies on employment policies of women in Afghanistan,” said Sayed Masoud, an economist.

Byrd in the blog post also said: “The international community should explore ways to use the $3.5 billion of Afghan central bank reserves in the Afghan Fund in Switzerland to strengthen the country’s balance of payments and support the private sector, without directing these funds to the Taliban regime.”

Over 800,000 Afghans Returned From Iran Last Year: MoRR

April 1, 2023 Current News Articles

Mitra Majeedy

Tolo News

1 April 2023

Taliban close women-run Afghan station for playing music

April 1, 2023 Current News Articles

Associated Press

1 April 2023

JALALABAD, Afghanistan (AP) — A women-run radio station in Afghanistan’s northeast has been shut down for playing music during the holy month of Ramadan, a Taliban official said Saturday.

Sadai Banowan, which means women’s voice in Dari, is Afghanistan’s only women-run station and started 10 years ago. It has eight staff, six of them female.

Moezuddin Ahmadi, the director for Information and Culture in Badakhshan province, said the station violated the “laws and regulations of the Islamic Emirate” several times by broadcasting songs and music during Ramadan and was shuttered because of the breach.

“If this radio station accepts the policy of the Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan and gives a guarantee that it will not repeat such a thing again, we will allow it to operate again,” said Ahmadi.

Station head Najia Sorosh denied there was any violation, saying there was no need for the closure and called it a conspiracy. The Taliban “told us that you have broadcast music. We have not broadcast any kind of music,” she said.

Sorosh said at 11:40 a.m. on Thursday representatives from the Ministry of Information and Culture and the Vice and Virtue Directorate arrived at the station and shut it down. She said station staff have contacted Vice and Virtue but officials there said they do not have any additional information about the closing.

Many journalists lost their jobs after the Taliban takeover in August 2021. Media outlets closed over lack of funds or because staff left the country, according to the Afghan Independent Journalists Association.

The Taliban have barred women from most forms of employment and education beyond the sixth grade, including university. There is no official ban on music. During their previous rule in the late 1990s, the Taliban barred most television, radio and newspapers in the country.

A Shepherd, a Cook, a Palace Chef: Making Food With Less Under the Taliban

March 31, 2023 Current News Articles

By Hannah Beech

The New York Times

Reporting from Kabul, Afghanistan.

March 31, 2023

In a time of famine and money shortages, meals are a rallying point — and a topic of worry — during a season of change in Afghanistan.

The last lunch for the last president of Afghanistan was vegetable fritters, salad and steamed broccoli.

Nasrullah, the head chef at the presidential palace in Kabul, fried the fritters and steamed the vegetable himself. He tasted it all to make sure it was good — it was, although steamed broccoli has a limited range of gastronomic possibility — and to prove that no poison had infiltrated President Ashraf Ghani’s food.

The precaution was unnecessary. The broccoli and other lunchbox dishes went uneaten that day, Aug. 15, 2021, as the Afghan capital suddenly fell and the Taliban walked in. Mr. Ghani had fled Afghanistan already.

Part of an ethnic group unfavored by the Taliban, Mr. Nasrullah was demoted to vegetable scrubber at the palace. His skills coaxing sweetness out of onions and carrots sautéed in sesame oil, of building layers of flavor with raisins and a variety of spices for the favorite lamb and rice dish of another Afghan president, Hamid Karzai, are wasted these days. His new bosses, he said, come from the countryside. They prefer their meat unadorned.

“All the Taliban want to eat is meat, meat, meat,” he said. “No vegetables, no spices.”

The shifting tastes at the presidential palace are just one example of how Afghanistan has changed since the Taliban returned to power after more than two decades of insurgency. From once-bustling eateries in Kabul to the frozen mountains shadowing the capital, a nation is having to learn how to survive on less.

Gone are the formal banquets of saffron-stained, rose-scented languor — and the protein-bar and light-beer cravings of the American contractors who roamed the secure confines of Kabul’s Green Zone diplomatic enclave.

President Ashraf Ghani standing and speaking into a microphone at the head of a long, lavishly set table lined with people in different kinds of attire. — *President Ashraf Ghani dining with lawmakers in 2017. Nasrullah was his head chef.Credit…Afghan Presidency*

Famine and the hardship it brings have reasserted themselves, too, as a bone-chilling winter has been made more desperate by a dearth of international aid.

About 100 miles from Kabul, along a road that runs through the snowy folds of the Hindu Kush mountains, apricot and peach trees were frosted in ice during a recent visit by Times journalists. So were the beards of shepherds, who led dwindling flocks.

In the blue twilight, after nearly a week in the hills and snows, Jomagul brought his flock to a village for refuge. He recited a shepherd’s elegy: He started with 45 sheep; 30 remain. Three died the night before. One carcass lay near the road, ringed by traps for the foxes that, like the frost, steal animals from the herd.

Often the sheep are slaughtered, salted and dried for laandi, a kind of jerky that sustains Afghans through the cold. Laandi is favored at the palace with the new crop of Afghan officials. But with the thinning of sheep herds, there is less laandi for the rest of the population. In just two weeks in January, 260,000 head of livestock died, according to the Ministry of Agriculture, Irrigation and Livestock.

Mr. Jomagul, the shepherd, described how he liked to eat laandi in a soup thick with chickpeas, alliums, tomatoes and root vegetables, enlivened by ground ginger, turmeric and coriander. A jolt of dried unripe grapes and two fistfuls — exactly two — of cilantro, and the soup is done, he said.

“It makes you warm from the inside,” Mr. Jomagul said. “You can face the winter.”

This past drying season, when the temperature began to plunge, the shepherd could not prepare laandi for himself and his family. There were no animals to spare.

In Kabul, even middle-class families have cut back on meat. Salaries are down. The government has prevented most women from working.

The old hospitality remains, if subdued by circumstances. Traditionally, hosts serve visitors bowls of dried fruits and nuts: floral-scented green raisins, apricots twisted into sugary helixes, pistachios fat like rosebuds about to bloom. Sometimes there is tea tinted gold by strands of saffron.

Mr. Nasrullah, the palace chef, still puts out offerings for guests. His home, he said, was not grand, not like the ones celebrity chefs in the West inhabited, with gleaming tools and kitchens bathed in light. In the weak glow of a bulb wired to a jug of fuel, during one of many power cuts, Mr. Nasrullah laid out a plate of bread and a pot of cardamom tea on the carpet. He apologized for the limited spread. Everyone wore their winter coats inside.

“In other countries,” he said, “someone who worked at the palace as a chef would have a beautiful life.”

His father and uncle were the first to work at the palace, part of the assembly line of feast-making for Mohammad Zahir Shah, the last king of Afghanistan, who was ousted in a coup in 1973. Mr. Nasrullah began his apprenticeship at 15 or 16 years old, scrubbing vegetables and washing dishes.

It was a time of upheaval. Government after government fell in the wake of the Soviet intervention and invasion. Eventually, the anti-Soviet mujahedeen brawled for power, with the Taliban coming out on top in 1996. With the formation of the first Islamic Emirate under the Taliban, Mr. Nasrullah’s family decamped to its native Panjshir, a stronghold of the Tajik ethnic group. In the green valley grew apples, walnuts and mulberries.

After American-led forces drove the Taliban from power in 2001 with the help of Tajik and other fighters, Mr. Nasrullah returned to Kabul. He worked for Mr. Karzai, the first U.S.-backed president and a devotee of royal Afghan cuisine. When President George W. Bush dined at the palace, he complimented Mr. Nasrullah’s kabuli pulao, the famed national rice and lamb dish, Mr. Karzai told his chef.

“President Karzai told me, ‘Even if I want you to prepare a banquet for 100 guests at 11 o’clock at night, you will do it successfully,’” Mr. Nasrullah said.

“Yes, I could do it,” he added.

During Mr. Ghani’s presidency, Mr. Nasrullah was promoted to head chef. But Mr. Ghani, who had part of his stomach removed because of cancer, required smaller meals delivered more often. The grand banquets became rarer, and then disappeared after the summer of 2021.

Since the American military withdrawal and the new government’s formation, Mr. Nasrullah’s salary has been slashed to less than $150 a month. It has been a while since he has indulged in making his finest dishes. At home, his wife cooks.

But he still recounts the recipe for his kabuli pulao, made in the Uzbek style with sesame oil, gesturing like a conductor. His hands mimic the slicing and stirring, the laying of cloth to steam the long grains of rice with warming spices — cardamom, clove, nutmeg, cinnamon and black pepper — and onions softened to the hue of the skin of a pear.

In his retelling of the recipe, Mr. Nasrullah might have withheld an ingredient or two. That was a chef’s prerogative.

The recipe for pulao is slightly different — though still done in the Uzbek style — at one popular restaurant in Kabul. On a recent day, hungry men hunched at low tables, waiting for their food. Upstairs, the seating accommodated women. A bukhari stove offered a bit of smoky warmth. Outside, street children kicked dirty snow.

Amanullah, the restaurant’s pulao master and the son of a man who spent his life cooking only rice and mutton, lifted a conical lid from a vast pot set into a stove. Perfumed steam rose from the rice. In an adjoining, windowless room, two men in fuzzy caps sat cross-legged, threading meat and fat on skewers.

The family that runs the restaurant — the Andkhoi Tordi Pulao Restaurant — is ethnically Turkmen, not Uzbek, but the pulao is practically the same, they said. (Many Turkmen fled repression in the Soviet Union and settled in Afghanistan, as did many Uzbeks.) Sesame oil pressed in their home province of Jowzjan in northwestern Afghanistan arrives every couple of days by bus, a 15-hour journey. Each day, the restaurant goes through almost 90 pounds of rice, more than 20 pounds of carrots and 15 pounds each of raisins and onions.

Mr. Amanullah has cooked in Kabul for 16 years. He is illiterate, he said, “but I know the flavors in my mind.”

The restaurant’s business is down by about 40 percent because most people don’t have enough income for dining out. Mr. Amanullah himself hadn’t eaten meat at home for 20 days, he said. Many restaurants in Kabul have closed. In public places, the authorities have indicated that music is no longer welcome, and men and women are generally disallowed from dining together.

Still, the restaurant survives. There are enough customers who pine for the pulao.

“People need to eat,” Mr. Amanullah said.

Kiana Hayeri and Zabihullah Padshah contributed reporting.

Hannah Beech is the senior correspondent for Asia based in Bangkok. She was previously the Southeast Asia bureau chief.

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