The Killid Group: The Property Registration Unit in the High Office of Oversight and Corruption (HOOAC) is mandated to register properties of all high-ranking authorities. But former officials in the unit say it has neither been successful nor countered administrative corruption. Full story ...
Reuters: War took an increasing toll on Afghanistan’s civilians in 2013 as fighting intensified between the government and insurgents, the United Nations said in a report on Saturday, with total casualties rising 14 percent. The gradual withdrawal of foreign troops has left Afghan government forces more vulnerable to attack by insurgents, and the resulting battles helped account for last year’s rise in casualties, according to the report. Full story ...
The Associated Press: He has been called a mentor to accused 9/11 mastermind Khalid Sheikh Mohammed and the man who welcomed Osama bin Laden to Afghanistan in the 1990s. He was accused of war crimes and atrocities, and even has a terror group named after him in the Philippines. But these days, Abdul Rab Rasoul Sayyaf has refashioned himself as an influential lawmaker, elder statesman and religious scholar — and possibly the next president of Afghanistan. Full story ...
The Huffington Post: Two weeks ago in a room in Kabul, Afghanistan, I joined several dozen people, working seamstresses, some college students, socially engaged teenagers and a few visiting internationals like myself, to discuss world hunger. Our emphasis was not exclusively on their own country’s worsening hunger problems. The Afghan Peace Volunteers, in whose home we were meeting, draw strength from looking beyond their own very real struggles. Full story ...
PAN: At least 32 polling stations have been closed in central Sar-i-Pul province due to growing insecurity and continuous threats from militants, a top security official said on Thursday. Col. Ghulam Sakhi Haidari told Pajhwok Afghan News that a total of 143 polling stations were active in the province but 32 had been shut in Shiram, Kohistanat, Sayad, Sancharak and Sozma Qila areas. Full story ...
The Guardian: A new Afghan law will allow men to attack their wives, children and sisters without fear of judicial punishment, undoing years of slow progress in tackling violence in a country blighted by so-called “honour” killings, forced marriage and vicious domestic abuse. The small but significant change to Afghanistan’s criminal prosecution code bans relatives of an accused person from testifying against them. Full story ...
FirstNews: Across the country over the past few weeks, children have been seen waiting for hours at donation points. Research by the United Nations global peace organisation suggests that 55% – more than half – of children in Afghanistan are failing to grow or develop properly. Experts say that this is because young people in the country are often not given enough food in the first two years of their lives. Full story ...
USA Today: As two of the nation’s longest wars finally end, most Americans have concluded that neither achieved its goals. Those grim assessments in a USA TODAY/Pew Research Center poll underscore the erosion in support for the invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan and the loss of faith in the outcome of the wars, both launched in the aftermath of the Sept. 11, 2001, terror attacks. Full story ...
The Washington Post: They look like victims of an insurgent attack — their limbs in need of amputation, their skulls cracked — but the patients who pour daily into the Ghazni Provincial Hospital are casualties of another Afghan crisis. They are motorists who drove on the road network built by the U.S. government and other Western donors — a 4 billion USD project that was once a symbol of promise in post-Taliban Afghanistan but is now falling apart. Full story ...
Mother Jones: A hospital in Afghanistan’s Parwan province, which cost US taxpayers almost 600,000 USD, is so ill-equipped, hospital staff are washing newborn infants using untreated river water, the Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction (SIGAR) reported on Wednesday. Full story ...
PAN: Unidentified gunmen shot dead a woman and a girl in Kunduz while a bride was found hanged in central Daikundi province, officials said on Tuesday. Armed men stormed a house last night, leaving a woman and a girl dead in the Chehl Dukhtaran area on the outskirts of Kunduz City, police said. Full story ...
FoxNews.com: A school being built in Afghanistan with foreign contractors and funds from American taxpayers has become a money pit that is not even safe for students, a U.S. government watchdog said. The Mazar-e-Sharif school in the northern Afghanistan region of Balkh, one of 16 schools built in the war-torn nation under a U.S. Agency for International Development plan, has been deemed structurally unsafe, according to Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction John Sopko. Full story ...
PAN: Residents of the Burka district of northern Baghlan province on Monday held a protest against gunmen involved in killing civilians and accused a provincial council member of backing outlaws. Tens of people gathered in front of the police headquarters in Pul-i-Khumri, the provincial capital, blasting government for failing to take action against the gunmen who killed three teenage boys in Burka in one month. Full story ...
The Hindu: At least six people including two Army officers were killed and 30 others injured on Sunday in two separate attacks in Afghanistan, officials confirmed. A roadside bomb hit a vehicle on its way to a wedding in the eastern province of Nangarhar, killing two civilians and injuring eight others. Full story ...
PAN: The Taliban kidnapped an 18-year-old man on Friday, shot him dead and set his body alight in a gruesome incident in northern Balkh province, police said. Balkh police spokesman Lal Mohammad Ahmadzai told Pajhwok Afghan News the morning incident in the Sholgar district prompted a security operation that left three rebels dead. Commander Mullah Janak was among six others detained. Full story ...
NBC News: Women’s rights in Afghanistan have regressed in the past year, increasing worry about what the future holds, according to a Human Rights Watch report released Thursday. As the country faces a large-scale troop withdrawal by the end of 2014, the organization expressed concern that, “with international interest in Afghanistan rapidly waning, opponents of women’s rights seized the opportunity to begin rolling back the progress made since the end of Taliban rule.” Full story ...
The Daily Beast: As America ploughs through its 13th year of war in Afghanistan and negotiates with Kabul to keeps troops there for another ten years, we must take a sober look at the military and diplomatic actions that have thus far characterized our involvement. We must ask what we have accomplished after more than a decade of fighting, whether our goals have been met and our mission has been a success. Full story ...
The Associated Press: Maps refer to it as part of the Kabul-Behsud Highway. Motorists call it Death Road. A 30-kilometer (18-mile) stretch of two paved lanes heading west from the town of Maidan Shahr in central Afghanistan has seen many beheadings, kidnappings and other Taliban attacks in recent years against members of the minority ethnic Hazara community. Nowadays, nearly all drivers avoid it. Full story ...
PAN: Residents of eastern Nangarhar province say they are worried about increasing incidents of kidnapping for ransom, as so far 20 hostage-taking events were staged this solar year. Many of those kidnapped were freed after they paid the ransom money, but some remained missing and others were found dead after being abducted, they said. Full story ...
Reuters: Thousands of homeless Afghans are huddling on the sides of freezing roads this winter with little shelter and nothing to eat, not far from warehouses stuffed with food. The government’s inability to help - through mismanagement, corruption, or factors beyond its control - threatens the future of a united Afghanistan after an April presidential election and the withdrawal of foreign combat troops by the end of this year. Full story ...
The Killid Group: The rift between Kabul and Washington has again widened with statements by Minister of Transport and Civil Aviation Daoud Ali Najafi and a former US defence secretary Robert Gates. US claims of impartiality in Afghan polls are at stake. Gates has said in a memoir that is hitting the stands that top US diplomats tried to manipulate the outcome of the 2009 presidential election, and stop President Hamid Karzai from winning a second term. Full story ...
Khaama Press: A delegation of the Afghan officials including parliament members, who were assigned by president Karzai to investigate the US airstrike in northern Parwan province of Afghanistan, has revealed at least 14 civilians were killed in the air raid. Afghan lawmaker Abdul Satar Khawasi who was heading the probe team has said, at least 14 civilians including three women and five children were killed in US airstrike in Siagh Gerd district. Full story ...
PAN: An outraged husband axed his wife to death and injured four others in northern Takhar province, officials said Thursday. Abdul Khalil Aseer, provincial police spokesman, told Pajhwok Afghan News Habibullah killed his wife Naz Bibi last evening who had an exchange marriage. He said the sister of Habibullah was killed by her husband five years ago, which prompted Habibullah to kill his own wife. Full story ...
PAN: Painting a grim picture of the Afghan economy, the World Bank (WB) on Wednesday estimated the country’s growth rate at 3.1 percent in the year 2013; which is a sharp drop from 14.4 percent in the previous year. “Growth in Afghanistan weakened sharply to an estimated 3.1 percent in 2013 from an exceptionally high 14.4 percent in 2012,” the WB said in its Global Economic Prospects (GEP) report released Wednesday. Full story ...
Counterpunch: A few years ago in Kabul, I was listening to a spokesman for an Afghan government organisation who was giving me a long, upbeat and not very convincing account of the achievements of the institution for which he worked. To relieve the tedium, and without much expectation of getting an interesting reply, I asked him – with a guarantee of non-attribution – what benefits the Afghan government had brought to its people. Full story ...
The Killid Group: Afghanistan’s big cities face a serious environmental crisis. The National Environmental Protection Agency (NEPA) has failed to spend from its development budget. A Killid investigation in Kabul. Last year in the Afghan capital city, NEPA officials held seven coordinating meetings with representatives of people, the municipality, ministries of public health (MoPH) and interior affairs (MoI), traffic department, and National Union of Industries. Decisions to counter environmental pollution were taken but they have remained on paper. Full story ...
Global Research: The horrors reported each day from Syria and Iraq are enough to make one cry; in particular, the atrocities carried out by the al-Qaeda types: floggings; beheadings; playing soccer with the heads; cutting open dead bodies to remove organs just for mockery; suicide bombers, car bombs, the ground littered with human body parts; countless young children traumatized for life; the imposition of sharia law, including bans on music … Full story ...
AFP: Afghan President Hamid Karzai on Friday condemned US troops for killing a four-year-old boy in the southern province of Helmand, in a fresh strain to troubled relations between Washington and Kabul. Helmand governor Naeem Baloch told Karzai during a meeting in Kabul about the shooting, which comes as the US and Afghanistan wrangle over a deal to allow some US troops to remain in the country after this year. Full story ...
Sott.net: As an Afghan woman, I find the propaganda line used by the Yankees and the Brits that they must stay in Afghanistan to “protect the wimmins” to be particularly breathtaking in its pathological audacity. We know they’re really there for the oil and gas pipelines, the rare-earth minerals and the opium, so please, spare us this BS! Full story ...
Antiwar.com: The U.S. is supposed to withdraw all its troops from Afghanistan by the end of this new year. But despite public opinion polls to the contrary, President Obama is seeking to leave several thousand Special Forces troops, military trainers, CIA personnel, “contractors” and surveillance listening posts for 10 more years in Afghanistan until the end of 2024. Full story ...
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