The Killid Group: On Sep 16, the three-week period for filing nominations for the April 2014 presidential and provincial elections started. Afghan voters will be going to the polls to decide their leaders. But there exists an underlying fear that like in previous elections the warlords, former leaders of jehadist parties, immeasurably wealthy and powerful, will deal with the destiny of people. Full story ...
PAN: Two leading civil society groups on Monday said their concerns about upcoming elections had increased due to lack of transparent and effective guidelines and the presence of biased commission members. In a joint statement, Afghan Anti-Corruption Network (AACN) and Anti-Corruption Watch Organization said the nation was witness to fraudulent presidential and provincial council elections last time. Full story ...
Deutsche Welle: Pimps and customers call her Diljan. “I serve the rich and the executive class,” said the round-faced blonde with green eyes. “If the guys have money, they can have me for a night.” Depending on the nature of the service, her rates range from 20,000 to 90,000 Indian rupees (230 to 1,030 euros) for a night. Full story ...
Global Research News: Remember, when President George Bush’s National Economic Council Director, Lawrence Lindsey, had told the country’s largest newspaper “The Wall Street Journal” that the war would cost between 100 billion USD and 200 billion USD, he had found himself under intense fire from his colleagues in the administration who claimed that this was a gross overestimation. Full story ...
Global Research News: Somewhere in the Lester B. Pearson Building, Canada’s foreign affairs headquarters, must be a meeting room with the inscription “The World Should Do as We Say, Not As We Do” or perhaps “Hypocrites ‘R Us.” With the Obama administration beating the war drums, Canadian officials are demanding a response to the Syrian regime’s alleged use of the chemical weapon sarin. Full story ...
Openbaar Ministerie: In the course of a War Crimes investigation concerning Torture and Killings, the International Crimes Unit of the Netherlands National Police has obtained Death Lists from Afghanistan, dating from the 1970s. Almost 5000 names are listed in these documents, in which the authorities meticulously recorded the regime’s killings. Full story ...
IRIN: Sexual exploitation of boys, in particular the practice of “bacha bazi” (literally boy play) in which boys are “owned” for dancing and sex, remains one of the least talked about abuses in Afghanistan. It is an age-old custom, banned by the Taliban when they were in power, but now undergoing a resurgence. Full story ...
Khaama Press: The United Nations in it’s latest report has revealed that female police officers are facing pervasive sexual violence and harassment by their male colleagues. The unpublished UN report was circulated among the senior interior ministry officials only, The New York Times reported. Full story ...
The Killid Group: Afghan exporters have defrauded the government of millions of dollars in income tax over the last four years. An investigation by the Independent Media Consortium Productions (IMCP) reveals a massive undervaluing of export figures by the private sector.* The investigation was conducted on the basis of information provided by the Chamber of Commerce & Industry (CCI), traders, and exporters. Full story ...
Reuters: At least 27 miners in Afghanistan were killed in a coal-mine collapse, officials said Sunday, in an accident likely to reinforce worries about a sector that many Afghans hope can underpin the country’s development. The collapse occurred on Saturday evening in the northern province of Samangan, said provincial governor’s spokesman Sediq Azizi. Full story ...
PAN: Truck drivers from the Bala Murghab district of western Badghis province on Sunday accused highway police of seeking bribes from them. They complained highway police took 2,500 afghanis (45 USD) in bribe from the driver of each truck plying the road and 20 afghanis from each of bus passengers. Full story ...
The Guardian: The amount of Afghan farmland planted with cannabis fell by nearly a fifth last year after one province launched a fierce eradication campaign, but a bumper crop meant that actual production rose compared with 2011, according to the UN. Officials in southern Uruzgan province, which borders Kandahar and Helmand, largely stamped out farming of the drug because of worries it was financing the Taliban. Full story ...
PAN: Deeply concerned about increasing kidnappings for ransom in southern Kandahar province, the human rights office on Thursday said two minor boys were brutally murdered in captivity after their families failed to meet the kidnappers’ demand. Full story ...
The Washington Times: After spending 12 years and nearly 100 billion USD in rebuilding Afghanistan, the U.S. still lacks a “comprehensive anti-corruption strategy” for its reconstruction activities there, according to a report by the U.S. government watchdog in the country. Full story ...
The Killid Group: Farzana has been living with her son in a refuge for women in Sangcharak district, Sar-e-Pol province, ever since her release from jail. Her husband was killed four years after her marriage, and she spent eight years in jail for the crime. Her parents have not seen her since the night of her wedding. They believe she has sullied the family honour but Farzana insists she did not kill her husband. Full story ...
IRIN: Fifty years ago, Dost Mohammad’s grandfather had 1,000 sheep grazing on the family’s plot of land on the outskirts of Kunduz City, Afghanistan. The family’s livestock numbers have since decreased significantly, but then, so has the size of their land. “We keep getting pushed further and further back,” said Mohammad. “We’re also having problems bringing our sheep to Badakshan. We will be killed today if we bring our sheep there.” Full story ...
Al Jazeera America: A grainy photograph of a group prayer session wouldn’t normally trigger much attention in Afghanistan’s capital. But with speculation rife about who might run for the country’s presidency, the picture of former firebrand Jihadi leader Abdul Rab Rasoul Sayaf leading an evening prayer on the Afghan vice president’s porch stirred rumors about Sayaf’s political aspirations after it appeared on Facebook. Full story ...
Xinhua: Ten people, including six suicide attackers, were killed and 120 civilians injured as a group of suicide bombers stormed a compound of National Directorate for Security (NDS), the country’s intelligence agency in Wardak's provincial capital Maidan Shahr 35 km west of Kabul on Sunday, the provincial government said in a statement released here. Full story ...
The Associated Press: Separately Sunday, Afghan officials said that an apparent NATO airstrike had killed 15 people – nine of them civilians, including women and children – in a remote eastern province where the Taliban are strong. NATO said 10 militants died in the strike, but that it had no reports of any civilian deaths. Full story ...
The Daily Beast: At first Mahkdoom Raheen seemed refreshingly different from the other ministers and advisers who were chosen by newly-appointed Afghan President Hamid Karzai for his first cabinet in 2002. It was soon after the overthrow of the Taliban, and Raheen was not a powerful warlord with a chilling history of human rights abuses, land-grabbing, and blatant corruption. Full story ...
PAN: Police guards at the Iranian consulate on Saturday opened fire at protestors in western Herat province, killing one and injuring four others, an official said. The protest involving dozens of residents, mostly labourers, was staged in front of the Iranian consulate in Herat City, the provincial capital. Full story ...
AFP: The British military fired nearly seven times as many missiles from unmanned drones in Afghanistan last year as it did five years earlier, according to official data released on Friday. In 2012 British drones flew 892 missions over Afghanistan -- firing missiles on 92 occasions -- more than 10 percent of all sorties, junior defence minister Andrew Robathan said in a written statement to parliament. Full story ...
The Huffington Post: Afghan President Hamid Karzai should take urgent action to fight child marriage and domestic violence or risk further harm to development and public health in Afghanistan, Human Rights Watch said today in a letter to the president. In the 15-page briefing paper, “Afghanistan: Ending Child Marriage and Domestic Violence,” Human Rights Watch highlights the health and economic consequences of marriage under age 18 and violence against women and girls. Full story ...
VICE: On a cold January afternoon last year, Qurban the bodyguard left his boss’s house in Bamyan province, Afghanistan to buy some coal at the bazar. Qurban's boss was Wahidi Beheshti – governor of a remote district in Bamyan province – who had been allowing Qurban, his wife Soraya and her 16-year-old sister Shakila to stay at his home. Full story ...
The Killid Group: It has become socially acceptable for pregnant women to undergo sex determination tests across the country. Female Afghans are not safe even inside their mother’s womb, say activists and human rights defenders. The ultrasound sonography machine is being widely misused for pre-natal sex determination not only in Kabul but also in many cities and provinces. Full story ...
Xinhua: At least 203 people, most of them civilians, were killed and hundreds wounded in bombings and attacks across Afghanistan last month, according to official figures. Among a total of 50 major bomb attacks launched by the Taliban and other militant groups, around 20 were of the suicide nature. Full story ...
Al Jazeera: At least six people have been killed and 30 others wounded in two attacks in southern Afghanistan, according to local authorities. An explosion took place on Saturday morning at a checkpoint near a branch of the New Kabul Bank in Kandahar, Javed Faisal, a provincial spokesman, said. Full story ...
The Guardian: The Australian Defence Force is investigating allegations of misconduct directed at an elite Australian special forces unit on a combined operation in Afghanistan earlier in the year. The ABC reports that the Australian troops on operation with Afghan forces in the southern province of Zabul removed the hands of at least one insurgent's corpse to take back to an Australian base in Tarin Kot, the capital of the neighbouring Uruzgan province. Full story ...
PAN: Incidents of rape and self-immolation among women have been on the increase in northern Sar-i-Pul province, an official said on Thursday. So far 125 cases of violence against women have been registered in the province since the start of this solar year, the women’s affairs director, Nasima Arzo, told Pajhwok Afghan News. Full story ...
Reuters: Six people were killed in a bomb attack on a base operated by Polish and Afghan forces in the eastern Afghan province of Ghazni on Wednesday, local officials and a Reuters witness said. Another 20 people - including at least nine soldiers - died in a spate of bombings elsewhere in the country. Full story ...
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