RAWANews: Zarmina Paryani, a woman who protested against the Taliban, was imprisoned and tortured by the regime. She managed to escape Afghanistan with several of her sisters and sought asylum in Germany. In a Facebook post, she revealed that the Taliban had forcibly stripped her naked in prison and took photos of her. Zarmina and her three sisters were arrested in Kabul in early 2022 and, after enduring three weeks of imprisonment and torture, were released. Her revelations had a widespread coverage on social media and sparked collective outrage against the Taliban.      Full news...

The Associated Press: The Taliban’s morality police are contributing to a climate of fear and intimidation among Afghans, according to a U.N. report published Tuesday. Edicts and some of the methods used to enforce them constituted a violation of human rights and fundamental freedoms, the report said. The Taliban set up a ministry for the “propagation of virtue and the prevention of vice” after seizing power in 2021. Since then, the ministry has enforced decrees issued by the Taliban leadership that have a disproportionate impact on women and girls, like dress codes, segregated education and employment, and having a male guardian when they travel.      Full news...

The Guardian: The Guardian has seen video evidence of a female Afghan human rights activist being gang-raped and tortured in a Taliban jail by armed men. There have been mounting reports that sexual violence is being inflicted on women and girls being held in detention in Afghanistan, but this video is believed to be the first direct evidence of these crimes occurring. According to the activist, the mobile phone footage was later sent to her as a threat that it would be shared more widely if she continued to speak out against the Taliban regime.      Full news...

The Guardian: Teenage girls and young women arrested by the Taliban for wearing “bad hijab” say they have been subjected to sexual violence and assault in detention. In more than one case the arrests and sexual abuse that young women faced while in custody earlier this year led to suicide and attempted suicide, reporters from the Afghan news service Zan Times were told. In one case, a woman’s body was allegedly found in a canal a few weeks after she had been taken into custody by Taliban militants, with a source close to her family saying she had been sexually abused before her death.      Full news...

Deccan Herald: It is the ultimate act of bad faith. The United Nations (UN) has decided to exclude women from its upcoming global conference on Afghanistan. Why? The Taliban, it seems, insisted on it. The Islamic fundamentalist group wasn’t invited to the first meeting in May 2023, and refused to attend the next one in February because the UN wouldn’t accept the list of preconditions for its participation. “These conditions first of all denied us the right to talk to other representatives of the Afghan society and demanded a treatment that would, I would say, to a large extent be similar to recognition” of the Taliban as the governing authority, Secretary-General António Guterres said at the time.      Full news...

The Diplomat: In the first week of June 2024, locals in the remote Tangi Shadan village of Allahyar district of Afghanistan’s Ghor province discovered the bodies of a 45-year-old widow and her 7-year-old granddaughter. Both had disappeared about two months earlier and are believed to have been killed for their property by men close to Mawlawi Jaber, the Taliban district governor. As her relatives approached the local Taliban office, the governor reportedly asked for the reason for a widow living without remarrying.      Full news...

Forbes: In June 2024, in the build-up to the 56th session of the Human Rights Council, U.N. Special Rapporteur on the situation of human rights in Afghanistan, Richard Bennett, published his report on “The phenomenon of an institutionalized system of discrimination, segregation, disrespect for human dignity and exclusion of women and girls.” The report follows a litany of reports on how, since the Taliban takeover in August 2021, the rights of women and girls in Afghanistan have been perishing one by one.      Full news...

Human Rights Watch: On June 18, the United Nations special rapporteur on human rights in Afghanistan, Richard Bennett, will present to the UN Human Rights Council his latest report, which powerfully calls for the Taliban to be held accountable for their crimes against women and girls. The report, issued today, examines the Taliban’s “institutionalized system of discrimination, segregation, disrespect for human dignity and exclusion of women and girls.”      Full news...

Long War Journal: In the latest issue of pamphlets released by al Qaeda’s central as-Sahab media entitled “This is Gaza: A War of Existence, Not a War of Borders,” Sayf al-Adl, believed to be al Qaeda’s current overall emir, calls on supporters around the world to migrate to Afghanistan. In doing so, this offers the most clear and open call for foreigners to join al Qaeda’s ranks in Afghanistan since the Taliban captured the country in 2021. Adl’s message thus acts to officially pronounce Afghanistan as a safe-haven for al Qaeda and its future plans.      Full news...

Fox News: The United Nations is condemning the Taliban after it publicly flogged more than 60 people at a sports stadium in northern Afghanistan. The United Nations Assistance Mission in Afghanistan wrote on X that 63 people were “publicly lashed” by “Afghanistan’s de facto authorities” on Tuesday in the Sari Pul province. “UNAMA reiterates its condemnation of corporal punishment and calls for respect for international human rights obligations,” it added. Taliban’s supreme court in a statement confirmed the public flogging of 63 people including 14 women who had been accused of crimes including sodomy, theft and immoral relations.      Full news...

AFP: When she first heard the gunshots, French tourist Anne-France Brill thought for a split second there was a celebration in the Afghan market where she and her fellow travelers stopped to buy fruit. But then she heard one of her companions screaming: “I realized she had blood all over her stomach.” The 55-year-old had been sitting in a van during a group tour in the mountainous city of Bamiyan on Friday evening when a gunman approached their vehicles and opened fire.      Full news...

RSF News: Reporters Without Borders (RSF) is alarmed by a worrying increase in the restrictions imposed on journalists, with authoritarian directives on women journalists' dress, restrictions on women’s access to the audiovisual media and a ban on filming or photographing Taliban officials. The Afghan repression continues to intensify and specifically targets women’s access to the media, whether as journalists or as listeners and spectators. A series of directives issued since February illustrate this. The governor of Kandahar, in the south of the country, has banned video footage of local Taliban leaders. The chief of police in the eastern province of Khost has banned calls from women during radio or television broadcasts.      Full news...

Khaama Press: In videos circulated on social media, protesters in Badakhshan are heard expressing their opposition to the Taliban in the province, rejecting the “Islamic Emirates” presence. The residents of Darayim district, Badakhshan province, staged widespread protests against The Taliban on Friday, May 3rd. Residents of Badakhshan stated that protests continued following the killing of at least one person due to Taliban gunfire.      Full news...

RAWA NEWS:The people of Farah have endured a myriad of social, economic, and cultural challenges for over four decades, and similar to the residents of other provinces, never enjoyed freedom, prosperity, and welfare. However, in the past couple of years, under the oppressive rule of the Taliban, these difficulties have escalated. The impoverished population, mostly daily wage laborers and farmers, are tackling a triple threat of hardships - psychological, economic, and drought - like three deadly misfortunes.      Full news...

Amnesty International: Responding to the double public executions by the Taliban yesterday, Livia Saccardi, Amnesty International’s interim Deputy Regional Director for South Asia, said: “We oppose all executions as a violation of the right to life. The Taliban has been repeatedly carrying them out publicly which is a gross affront to human dignity as well as a violation of international laws and standards and cannot be tolerated.      Full news...

Independent News: The Taliban in Afghanistan have announced plans to restrict or completely block access to Facebook, a move condemned by rights activists. The Taliban’s acting minister of telecommunications and information technology Najibullah Haqqani confirmed the plans in an interview with Kabul-based TOLO News last week.Reeling from two decades of siege and war, millions of people in Afghanistan have limited access to cellular services and internet connection in a widening information blackout.      Full news...

AP News: The Taliban held a public execution on Monday of a man convicted of murder in northern Afghanistan as thousands watched at a sports stadium, the third such death sentence to be carried out in the past five days. The execution took place in heavy snowfall in the city of Shibirghan, the capital of northern Jawzjan province, where the brother of the murdered man shot the convict five times with a rifle, according to a witness. Security around the stadium was tight, said the witness, who spoke on condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to talk to the media.      Full news...

The Guardian: The Taliban’s announcement that it is resuming publicly stoning women to death has been enabled by the international community’s silence, human rights groups have said. Safia Arefi, a lawyer and head of the Afghan human rights organisation Women’s Window of Hope, said the announcement had condemned Afghan women to return to the darkest days of Taliban rule in the 1990s.“With this announcement by the Taliban leader, a new chapter of private punishments has begun and Afghan women are experiencing the depths of loneliness,” Arefi said.      Full news...

Foreign Policy: Al Qaeda is back to its old tricks in Afghanistan. Much as it did before masterminding the 9/11 attacks, the terrorist group is running militant training camps; sharing the profits of the Taliban’s illicit drug, mining, and smuggling enterprises; and funneling the proceeds to affiliated jihadi groups worldwide. An unpublished report circulating among Western diplomats and U.N. officials details how deeply embedded the group once run by Osama bin Laden is in the Taliban’s operations, as they loot Afghanistan’s natural wealth and steal international aid meant to alleviate the suffering of millions of Afghans.      Full news...

THE Nation: Pakistan’s Special Representa­tive on Afghanistan Ambassador Asif Durrani has said that Paki­stan’s peace talks with the banned Tehreek-e-Taliban Pakistan (TTP) failed in the past because the mili­tant group was neither ready to sur­render nor swear allegiance to the constitution of Pakistan. The third primary reason for the deadlock in talks was that the group didn’t want to face the law for the heinous crimes it committed, including the attack on the Army Public School (APS) in Peshawar, he added.      Full news...

UN NEWS: Police enforcement has increased harassment in public spaces and further limited women’s ability to leave their homes, according to testimony from 745 Afghan women participating in the latest survey by UN Women, International Organization for Migration (IOM) and the UN’s Assistance Mission in Afghanistan (UNAMA).The insights follow recent reports of the arbitrary and severe enforcement of the hijab decree, particularly in Kabul, the agencies said – which began publishing quarterly consultations with diverse Afghan women a year after the Taliban took power in August 2021.      Full news...

Rukhshana News: Eight people have been flogged and sentenced to prison on charges of “abuse and dishonor” in western Herat province, a Taliban court said Thursday.The Taliban Supreme Court newsletter said the eight people were punished with 20 lashes each and sentenced to five months imprisonment. The decision by Herat’s military court was endorsed by the Taliban Supreme Court, it added. Following its takeover of Afghanistan, the Taliban has resumed its rule by severe corporal punishment and swift executions, sometimes as a public spectacle.      Full news...

The Independent: The Taliban on Thursday executed two men convicted of stabbing by gunfire in Afghanistan’s southeastern Ghazni province. Thousands of people watched the public execution in broad daylight after the Taliban-led Supreme Court convicted the two men for a murder by stabbing. The court identified the two men as Syed Jamal from central Wardak province and Gul Khan from Ghazni but did not clarify who carried out the stabbings.      Full news...

Afghan Women News: Local sources in Balkh province report the shooting of a young woman by unidentified armed individuals in the province. According to the sources, the body of a woman who had been shot was discovered in the village of Kol Ambu in the Balkh district of Balkh province on the morning of Monday, February 5. According to an informed source, this woman was shot by unidentified armed individuals around 4 a.m. Her identity and the motive behind her murder are not yet clear.      Full news...

Human Rights Watch: In the last two and a half years after regaining power in Afghanistan, the Taliban, have created the world’s most serious women’s rights crisis. They have systematically violated the rights of women and girls including as they relate to education, paid employment, freedom of speech and movement, and political participation among many others. The response of the international community has been tepid and seems to lack an appreciation of how the situation in Afghanistan has grave implications for the rights of women and girls globally. More needs to be done to prevent this from developing any further and to reinforce global commitment to gender equality.      Full news...

Dawn News: ALMOST two years after they seized control of Kabul, the Afghan Taliban are still engrossed in suffocating Afghan women. Education for girls in secondary school and women in university was banned a while ago. Then a ban was imposed on women working in NGOs, adding to the restrictions on women working for the government. This plethora of curbs eliminating and erasing women from the public sphere was not enough for the Taliban. Recently, women working in beauty parlours came to work to find out that the faces of women on signs advertising their parlours had been erased.      Full news...

Khaama Press: According to the report published on Tuesday, January 30th, al-Qaeda has managed to maintain a “holding” position under the rule of the Taliban, leading to tensions between the Taliban and some al-Qaeda leaders due to the Taliban’s efforts to restrict the group’s activities in Afghanistan.The United Nations Security Council had previously expressed concerns about the presence of terrorist groups and their activities in Afghanistan. The latest report from the council indicates that al-Qaeda lacks the operational capacity to organize large-scale attacks with its remaining members.      Full news...

Khaama Press News:The Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction (SIGAR) reported on Friday, January 19th, citing the United Nations Office (UNAMA) that this cash is held in a dedicated account at a private bank and is not transferred to the Central Bank under the Taliban control. However, critics argue that the Taliban still influence how this money is spent. In June 2023, a reliable source at the Central Bank of Afghanistan under Taliban control confirmed that $40 million packages of humanitarian aid are being sent to Kabul, but the Taliban no longer publicizes this news through the media.      Full news...

Al Jazeera: After five years of medical training, Lima, 28, should be one year into her residency as a doctor, perfecting her diagnostic skills. Instead, she takes temperatures and administers injections, tasks she has been doing at an emergency room in Kabul for three months now. While this is not the work she expected to be doing at this point in her career, she’s happy to at least be doing this.“Being at the hospital means I can stay close to my field.It helps me to stay connected to it,” Lima told Al Jazeera over the course of several telephone calls. She is identified by her first name only for safety reasons.      Full news...

Arab News: KHOST, Afghanistan: Zubaida traveled from the rural outskirts of Khost in eastern Afghanistan to give birth at a maternity hospital specializing in complicated cases, fearing a fate all too common among pregnant Afghan women — her death or her child’s.She lay dazed, surrounded by the unfamiliar bustle of the Doctors Without Borders (MSF)-run hospital, exhausted from delivery the day before, but relieved.Her still-weak newborn slept nearby in an iron crib with peeling paint, the child’s eyes lined with khol to ward off evil.      Full news...