Category Archives: Afghanistan

‘I don’t know where to go’: uncertain fate of the women in Kabul’s shelters

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Women in refuges have been sent home to their abusers or to prison since the Taliban takeover. Those in the few shelters still open fear what lies ahead

Zari was seven years old when her parents died, forcing her to move in with her uncle. But when he died four years later, his two widows beat Zari and forced her to work long hours weaving carpets. During her teenage years, Zari tried to kill herself.

After her suicide attempt, Zari, now 28, moved into a shelter for abused women. For the past eight years she has held on to the belief that things would get better. She made friends and learned to sew clothes, eventually teaching others to do the same.

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‘I pleaded for help. No one wrote back’: the pain of watching my country fall to the Taliban

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As the fighters advanced on Kabul, it was civilians who mobilised to help with the evacuation. In the absence of a plan, the hardest decisions fell on inexperienced volunteers, and the stress began to tell

In the weeks before Kabul fell, my mind was strangely calm. There is a moment just before the world falls apart, when human beings almost believe they can reverse the sequence of events that has brought them to this point – a flash of magical thinking in which they can will a different reality into existence.

On 2 July, when the Americans left Bagram airbase, I woke up in London with a horrible headache. My phone was inundated with messages of disbelief. “I am so sorry about it,” a few friends wrote, but they couldn’t name “it”. I couldn’t name it either.

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Trump-Taliban deal had ‘psychological’ effect on Afghan government says top US general – video

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The collapse of the Afghan government and its security forces can be traced to a 2020 agreement between the Taliban and the Trump administration that promised a complete US troop withdrawal, senior Pentagon officials have told Congress.

Gen Frank McKenzie, the head of central command, told the House 'the signing of the Doha agreement had a really pernicious effect on the government of Afghanistan and on its military'. He identified a troop reduction ordered by Joe Biden as the 'second nail in the coffin'.

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Top US general says Afghan collapse can be traced to Trump-Taliban deal

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The Doha agreement, signed in February 2020, set a date for the US to fully withdraw troops by May 2021

The collapse of the Afghan government and its security forces can be traced to a 2020 agreement between the Taliban and the Trump administration that promised a complete US troop withdrawal, senior Pentagon officials have told Congress.

Gen Frank McKenzie, the head of central command, told the House armed services committee that once the US troop presence was pushed below 2,500 as part of President Joe Biden’s decision in April to complete a total withdrawal by September, the unraveling of the US-backed Afghan government accelerated.

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Fears grow for photojournalist arrested by Taliban as executions resume

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Taliban deny Morteza Samadi, 21, has been sentenced to death but family concerned for his safety after he was detained while covering women’s protests in Herat

Fears are growing for a photojournalist who has been detained by the Taliban for more than three weeks after being arrested while covering the women’s protests in Herat.

Morteza Samadi, 21, a freelance photographer, was one of several journalists who were arrested at street protests at the beginning of September. All were quickly released except Morteza, whose whereabouts is not known. Some of those detained in Kabul have alleged they were badly beaten and tortured.

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‘Living in a cave is no life’: Pakistani villagers trapped by Taliban and poverty

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Seven years after fleeing army clashes with militants, 100 families eking out an existence on a hillside near the Afghan border are unable to return home

“Don’t talk to me about the government. They don’t help.”

Ninety-year-old Shah Mast is angry. He has been living in the cave he calls home for seven years, ever since an offensive by the Pakistan army against the Islamist militant group Tehrik-i-Taliban Pakistan (TTP) destroyed his home.

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Blame-shifting over US withdrawal ignores deeper failings in Afghanistan

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Analysis: Senators’ questions to military leadership a contest in sharing out responsibility for failures

The deeply partisan US Congress is rarely a conducive place for national introspection and Tuesday’s Senate hearing on the Afghanistan withdrawal did not provide an exception.

In the midst of the point-scoring and blame-shifting on display in the senators’ questions to the nation’s military leadership, it was clear that it was a contest to apportion shares in failure.

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US Afghanistan withdrawal a ‘logistical success but strategic failure’, Milley says

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  • General and other military leaders in heated cross-examination
  • Milley defends loyalty to country and rejects suggestion to quit

The withdrawal from Afghanistan and the evacuation of Kabul was “a logistical success but a strategic failure,” the chairman of the joint chiefs of staff has told the Senate.

Gen Mark Milley gave the stark assessment at an extraordinary hearing of the Senate armed services committee to examine the US departure, which also became a postmortem on the 20-year war that preceded it.

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Fears for Afghan psychiatrist abducted by armed men

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Dr Nader Alemi, who opened the country’s first private psychiatric hospital, had received death threats before being taken on his way home from work last week

One of Afghanistan’s most prominent psychiatrists has been abducted on his way home from work by a group of armed men.

Dr Nader Alemi, 66, who opened the country’s first private psychiatric hospital in the northern city of Mazar-i-Sharif, was stopped by seven men in a white car last week, said his family.

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Ambassador in limbo makes plea for Afghans to be allowed into EU

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Former Afghan government’s ambassador in Greece appalled by Athens’ media blitz against ‘illegal migrant flows’

In other times, Mirwais Samadi would have welcomed a campaign to deter his compatriots from opting to become illegal migrants and embarking on the often dangerous trek from Afghanistan to Europe.

By far the worst part of his job as Afghanistan’s ambassador to Athens – apart from the strange limbo he has found himself in representing a nation whose leaders he refuses to recognise – is notifying families back home of loved ones who died along the way. Invariably they are the victims of smuggling networks motivated solely by profit.

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UK urged to resettle fleeing Afghan women’s football team

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Leeds United have offered support but players face return to Taliban regime unless accepted soon

The UK government is being asked to urgently resettle female players from Afghanistan’s junior football team who fled the Taliban and have been offered a new life with Leeds United.

The 35 young women – many of whom are in their teens – their families and football coaches are in Lahore, Pakistan, on 30-day visas. But the 136-strong group face returning to Afghanistan unless they are accepted by a third country soon – they have to leave Pakistan by 12 October.

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Haitians fleeing and Hotel Rwanda case: human rights this fortnight – in pictures

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A roundup of the struggle for human rights and freedoms, from Myanmar to Germany

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Mismatch of mindsets: why the Taliban won in Afghanistan

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Analysis: the west tried to impose its alien values and it is time to try a new approach, as Joe Biden has indicated

Some years ago, in Afghanistan, the anthropologist Scott Atran asked a Taliban fighter what it would take to stop the fighting, because families on both sides were crying. The fighter replied: “Leave our country and the crying will stop.”

The crying may not have stopped, but the Taliban have taken control of Afghanistan without an air force, heavy arms or expensive training, against US-backed Afghan government forces that outnumbered them four to one. In doing so, they have taken an important step closer to realising their stated goal, which is the creation of an Islamic emirate governed according to their interpretation of sharia law.

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‘Necessary for security’: veteran Taliban enforcer says amputations will resume

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Nooruddin Turabi, in charge of Afghan prisons, says executions and removal of hands will restart, but possibly not in public

The Taliban will resume executions and the amputation of hands for criminals they convict, in a return to their harsh version of Islamic justice.

According to a senior official – a veteran leader of the hardline Islamist group who was in charge of justice during its previous period in power – executions would not necessarily take place in public as they did before.

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‘We buried our sportswear’: Afghan women fear fight is over for martial arts

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Female taekwondo and karate trainers are forced to practise in secret since the Taliban takeover and fear they may never compete again

On the morning of 15 August, when the Taliban were at the gates of Kabul, Soraya, a martial arts trainer in the Afghan capital, woke up with a sense of dread. “It was as though the sun had lost its colour,” she says. That day she taught what would be her last karate class at the gym she had started to teach women self-defence skills. “By 11am we had to say our goodbyes to our students. We didn’t know when we would see each other again,” she says.

Soraya is passionate about martial arts and its potential to transform women’s minds and bodies. “Sport has no gender; it is about good health. I haven’t read anywhere in Qur’an that prevents women from participating in sports to stay healthy,” she says.

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Zahra Joya: the Afghan reporter who fled the Taliban – and kept telling the truth about women

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As a child in Afghanistan, she pretended to be a boy in order to get an education, before starting her own women’s news agency. Now living in Britain, her fight continues

Just over a month ago, Zahra Joya left her house in Kabul to walk to her office, as she had been doing every day. From this small office, Joya, a journalist, ran Rukhshana Media, the news agency she founded last year to report on the stories of women and girls across Afghanistan. By the time she returned home in the afternoon, however, men with guns were on street corners and her sisters were shut inside their house, shaking with fear. In just a few hours, normal life had been obliterated.

“Right to the end, on that afternoon of 15 August, I couldn’t believe what was happening,” she says. “It was like a bad dream. Even on that day, it just seemed impossible that the Taliban could come to power so quickly, wipe away 20 years and drag us all back to the past.”

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‘The challenge for us now is drought, not war’: livelihoods of millions of Afghans at risk

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After years caught in the crossfire between the Taliban and security forces, farmers in Kandahar face a new threat, as water sources dry up

The war in Afghanistan might be over but farmers in Kandahar’s Arghandab valley face a new enemy: drought.

It has hardly rained for two years, a drought so severe that some farmers are questioning how much longer they can live off the land.

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‘The Taliban will have no mercy’: LGBTQ+ Afghans go into hiding

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Gay and trans people in Afghanistan already faced stigma, but now even a call from an unknown number sparks fear

Laila, a transgender woman in Afghanistan, rubs her eyes to wipe tears away. “I am terrified. It’s like a nightmare. I don’t feel safe even in my room. I’m scared of the Taliban. When I see them I feel they will know who I am and they will come to beat me, kick me or send me to prison.”

After the chaotic US withdrawal from Afghanistan in August, Laila is far from an isolated case. Rehmat, a gay man, said: “Our lives are in danger. We are afraid of having mobile phones. I get afraid when I receive calls from unknown numbers, worried that it might be the Taliban.”

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‘It’s heartbreaking’: Steve McCurry on Afghan Girl, a portrait of past and present

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The US photographer’s image of Sharbat Gula captured the story of a country, its people and refugees across the world. Thirty six years on, another picture tells a similar tale – but also one of hope

On 1 September, a young Afghan girl stood in line with her family at a US base in Sicily waiting to board a flight to Philadelphia. She is about nine years old and is one of more than 100,000 people evacuated from Kabul by allied forces after the Taliban took control of the country in August.

Her photo, taken for the Guardian by Italian photojournalist Alessio Mamo and featured on the front page of the UK print edition, resembles the Afghan Girl by American photographer Steve McCurry. McCurry’s portrait, of a Pashtun child, Sharbat Gula, which appeared on the June 1985 cover of National Geographic, became the symbol, not only of Afghanistan, but of displaced refugees across the world.

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One month in Kabul under Taliban rule– a photo essay

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Photojournalist Stefanie Glinski reports from Kabul on the events of the past four weeks and the capital’s new rulers

Above its tightly clustered houses and peaks of the Hindu Kush mountains, Kabul’s blue skies were once dotted with countless colourful kites, flown by children from the hilltops or their rooftops. Since the Taliban took the Afghan capital a month ago, they have disappeared.

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