Foreign Policy: The Taliban’s failure to make the leap from insurgency to governance is coming under scrutiny this week as they meet with representatives of countries that are growing increasingly concerned that after almost year in power, the extremists have again transformed Afghanistan into a global terrorist haven. The July 25-27 conference in Tashkent, the capital of Uzbekistan, follows the latest report on Afghanistan by the United Nations Security Council, which contains alarming details on the activities of terrorist groups, including al Qaeda, now enjoying the Taliban’s protection in Afghanistan. The report indicated that Afghanistan has essentially reverted to the state it was in before Sept.      Full news...

UN news: The de facto authorities have limited dissent by cracking down on protests and curbing media freedoms according to the report. The report condemns arbitrary arrests of journalists, protestors, and civil society activists. “The rights to freedom of peaceful assembly, freedom of expression and freedom of opinion, are not only fundamental freedoms, they are necessary for the development and progression of a nation”, said Fiona Frazer, UNAMA Chief of Human Rights.      Full news...

THE DIPLOMAT: It is unlikely that Afghan Sikhs and Hindus, age-old minority communities in Afghanistan, will survive the Taliban’s second time in power. The religious intolerance prevalent in Afghan society and rising security challenges posed by the Islamic State Khorasan (ISK), together with the exodus facilitated by the international Sikh NGOs, might end an era in Afghanistan sooner or later.      Full news...

ANI: Afghanistan and Pakistan have emerged as unsavoury joint ventures comprising several arms and narcotics traffickers, insurgent groups, Islamist entities and organized crime syndicates, according to experts. The Asialyst article talked about the Haqqani network and its proximity to the Pakistani intelligence services while adding that it materializes the link between the world of crime and the nebula of radical terrorism.      Full news...

Human Rights Watch: Taliban security forces have summarily executed and forcibly disappeared alleged members and supporters of an Islamic State offshoot in eastern Afghanistan, Human Rights Watch said today. Since the Taliban took power in August 2021, residents of Nangahar and Kunar provinces east of Kabul have discovered the bodies of more than 100 men dumped in canals and other locations.      Full news...

8am Daily, Kabul: Taliban have warned the taxi drivers who take women without muharram into their taxis by monitoring the traffic of city taxis. A taxi driver told 8am Daily in Kabul on Sunday, July 3rd, that the Taliban angrily warned him that he should follow the “law” after they saw him getting off a woman with two children from his taxi.      Full news...

Etilaat-e-Rooz: A number of female students in Balkh University, who are from other provinces, say that the officials of the Taliban do not allow them to travel to their provinces without muharram –male escort. According to them, the Taliban have forced back some students from the road.A representative of the students of one of the provinces, who does not want her identity to be revealed, told Etilaat-e-Roz that the Taliban did not allow the girls who live in the government hostels to go to their homes without a muharram.      Full news...

Etilaat-e-Rooz: Sources in Balkh say that Taliban have arrested a female teacher in Mazar-e-Sharif, the provincial capital, for allegedly violating the hijab.Today (Thursday; June 23, 2022), a source told Etilaat Roz that the woman was arrested two days ago and her fate is still unknown. According to the source, this woman is called Ustad Mobina and is a teacher of Sultan Razia Girls’ School.      Full news...

Washington Examiner: Desperation among Afghans from all walks of life is again on the rise. Prices continue to spike, donor fatigue has hit nongovernmental organizations hard, and Taliban rulings affect economic participation. Leslie Merriman has been distributing food packages to Afghan special immigrant visa applicants since September. At her latest food drop, delivery personnel were swarmed by hordes of hungry Afghans.      Full news...

8am:The Taliban’s Administration for Promoting Virtue has installed advertising posters in most parts of Kandahar depicting women without a ‘head-to-toe cover’ as animals.The posters read: “A Muslim woman who does not wear the Islamic hijab pretends to be an animal.”In these posters, it is explained that short and tight clothes are also considered un-Islamic, adding that disobeying God’s order is a sin.      Full news...

8am: Local sources in Takhar province told Hasht-e Subh that Taliban fighters have arrested 30 female students who were living in Takhar university’s hostels on charges of leaving the hostel without Taliban permission. Sources in Takhar University say the students took a Friday break to go to a park for fun.      Full news...

Jinha Agency: KABUL - Every time we visit social media or interact with people in different provinces, we are sadly informed of the murder and suicide of women in different parts of Afghanistan. With the takeover of the Taliban, these killings have increased more than ever. The victims range from mothers with children to girls two or three years old. The main reason for each killing, according to Taliban officials, is unknown.      Full news...

Etilaat-e-Rooz: As Taliban continue to restrict female students at Balkh University, female Taliban-appointed agents inspect students’ handcuffs and break their cosmetics. Some female students, who did not want to be named in the news, told the daily Ettelaat-e-Rooz that female Taliban-appointed agents had broken their cosmetics after inspecting their handcuffs.      Full news...

UN news: “In the wake of years of conflict, and since the takeover by the Taliban in August last year, the country has been plunged into a deep economic, social, humanitarian and human rights crisis,” said High Commissioner Michelle Bachelet.She admired the courage of Afghan women in demanding their inalienable rights while facing a “critical” situation under increasingly repressive Taliban codes of conduct.      Full news...

Khaama Press: According to The Wall Street Journal, some key Afghan officials and their families spent millions of dollars in the final years of the war on luxurious mansions in the United States and other countries, and when they fled the rising violence in Afghanistan. Some officials who held senior roles during former President Ashraf Ghani’s administration, which began in 2014, are now residing in “mansions along California’s coast”, according to a Wall Street Journal analysis of public records, interviews, and other evidence.      Full news...

BBC: Abdul Rahman Taybi said that women should not take a taxi without a muharram or male escort and stressed that women are not allowed to sit next to a taxi driver. Speaking at a news conference in Kandahar, Mr Taybi said music and singing are “absolutely forbidden” and that television and radio stations would not be allowed to broadcast music from today.      Full news...

8am: The Taliban gunmen have shot dead a brother and sister in Baghlan province, sources in the province reported. On Monday night, the Taliban fighters raided the house of Mehrabuddin, a resident of Khost district, arresting and torturing his son named Sohrab for affiliation with the National Resistance Front, according to sources. Sources have stated that during the torture of Sohrab, his 17-year-old sister threw herself on her brother in order to protect him, as a result of which the Taliban shot dead both of them.      Full news...

Afghan Women News Agency: 33-year-old Rita, who was killed by her husband and her brothers-in-law, had her head, arms and legs amputated and buried in a well. She was found three months later after searching by her brothers. Mohammad Asif Waziri, a spokesman for the Balkh Police Command, said that her name was Rita and that she had been killed by her husband and her brothers-in-law three months earlier due to family problems, had her head and limbs amputated and buried in a water well.      Full news...

Gandhara: Chanting “Bread, work, freedom,” some two dozen women took to the streets of the Afghan capital of Kabul on May 29 to protest against the Taliban’s harsh restrictions on their rights. The Taliban has rolled back women’s rights since returning to power in August 2021. Girls have been banned from school beyond the sixth grade in most of Afghanistan. In March, the Taliban ordered girls’ high schools closed on the morning they were scheduled to open.      Full news...

8am: A dozen of women launched a demonstration against the closure of education doors to girls and obstructing the right to work for women in Kabul, Afghanistan. According to sources, while women protestors were chanting the slogans, the Taliban fighters scattered the march by shooting.      Full news...

Rukhshana: At least nine civilians were killed and 15 wounded in Wednesday’s back-to-back explosions which targeted passenger vehicles in Mazar-e-Sharif city in northern Afghanistan, confirmed reports said. All victims were members of ethnic Hazara and religious Shia community, including Maryam Madadi, a former female journalist. Madadi worked at Rabia Balkhi radio station in Balkh, according to Mobina Saiee, the radio station’s former manager.      Full news...

CNN: Sirajudin Haqqani, a secretive Taliban leader, spoke to CNN in an on-camera interview aired Tuesday. He said "good news" is in store for Afghan girls who want to attend secondary school. At the same time, he joked that the Taliban wants to “keep naughty women at home.” When asked to clarify his comment, Haqqani said: “By saying naughty women, it was a joke referring to those naughty women who are controlled by some other sides to bring the current government into question.”      Full news...

Al Jazeera: Taliban authorities in Afghanistan have told television broadcasters to ensure that female presenters working in local stations cover their faces when on air, a government official said.The order follows a recent directive from Taliban authorities that Afghan women must cover their faces in public and is seen as the latest sign of a possible return to the Taliban’s ultraconservative rule of the past and an escalation of restrictions on women that are causing anger at home and abroad.      Full news...

BBC: Hidden away in a residential neighbourhood is one of Afghanistan’s new “secret” schools - a small but powerful act of defiance against the Taliban.Around a dozen teenage girls are attending a maths class. “We know about the threats and we worry about them,” the sole teacher tells us, but she adds, girls’ education is worth “any risk”.      Full news...

Save the Children: KABUL, 9 May 2022 – 9.6 million children in Afghanistan are going hungry every day due to a dire combination of economic collapse, the impacts of the war in Ukraine and the ongoing drought, new figures released today show. Immediate food assistance is needed to save lives in the short-term, but aid alone is not enough to tackle the country’s worst hunger crisis on record, Save the Children said.      Full news...

CNA: KABUL: About a dozen women protested in the Afghan capital on Tuesday (May 10) against the Taliban’s new edict that females must fully cover their faces and bodies when in public. Afghanistan’s supreme leader and Taliban chief Hibatullah Akhundzada issued a mandate over the weekend ordering women to cover up fully, ideally with the traditional all-covering burqa.      Full news...

8am: Following the reactions to the Taliban’s compulsory hijab, the Women’s Movement for Justice and Freedom has said that the Taliban have insulted all Muslim women and girls in Afghanistan with their baseless vague religious decrees. In a protest rally on Monday, they said that the Taliban are interfering in the most personal affairs of women by forcing them to wear the hijab.      Full news...

Pixstory: A poll by an Afghan research organization shows that the majority of Afghans disagree with the Taliban’s values ​​and way of governing. The popularity of the Taliban among the people is 7% in total. In this survey, 81% of people in Afghanistan’s cities and villages support women’s education and work. In this study, the Afghanistan Research and Analysis Organization interviewed nearly 10,000 Afghans in 2020 and 2021, according to which more than 77 percent of the population rejected the Taliban’s way of governing, especially its religious extremism.      Full news...

Reuters: Afghanistan’s Taliban government ordered women on Saturday to cover their faces in public, a return to a signature policy of their past hardline rule and an escalation of restrictions that are causing anger at home and abroad. A decree from the group’s supreme leader, Haibatullah Akhundzada, said that if a woman did not cover her face outside home, her father or closest male relative would be visited and face potential prison or firing from state jobs.      Full news...

Afghan Women News Agency: Popular sources in Nimroz province reported finding the strangled body of a woman, which was found on Wednesday afternoon (May 4, 2022) in the Nad Ali area north of Zaranj, the capital of the province. Sources say the woman was a teacher and was abducted by unknown individuals at 2pm and then her strangled body was found at 5pm that day.      Full news...