PAN: Three protestors were killed and another 33, including eight policemen injured, during a clash in northern Faryab province, officials said on Friday. More than 1,000 people took to the streets on Thursday in Maimana, the provincial capital, against the operation that resulted in the death of madraasa teacher Qayamuddin in Arab Khan area. Full story ...
RFE/RL: It’s the type of punishment that many thought would vanish with the fall of the Taliban, but Shari'a law is alive and well in Afghanistan. One unidentified 20-year-old man has felt the full force of the Islamic legal code in the northern Afghan province of Baghan. Full story ...
Khaama Press: Officials in the Afghan Intelligence Department (National Directorate for Security) announced a number of the local TV channels and a News Agency was financially supported by neighboring Pakistan and Iran. A spokesman for the Afghan National Directorate for Security Lotfullah Mashal said, a number of the programs broadcasted by these TV channels and News Agency are displayed with a motive to disrupt the thinking of the Afghan people. Full story ...
Stars and Stripes: The U.S. war and occupation of Afghanistan was supposed to bring stability and democracy. Instead, Afghanistan remains a country on the brink of disaster – one that has clearly been exacerbated by the U.S. presence. More than 10 years after the U.S. war began, in spite of the presence of about 2,000 international aid groups, at least $3.5 billion in humanitarian funds and 58 billion USD in development assistance... Full story ...
NNI: A senior advisor to President Hamid Karzai blamed foreigner contractors for rampant corruption in reconstruction projects, which had also led to inferior quality infrastructure jobs. “For example, when there is embezzlement of 100 USD in a development project, 80 percent of it will go to foreigners,” Mohammad Yousuf Pashtun, told a press conference in Kabul. Full story ...
Reuters: Suicide bombers killed at least nineteen people in attacks across Afghanistan on Tuesday, including 11 Afghan police, as insurgents ramped up violence ahead of the traditional summer fighting months. Two bombers, including one wearing a head-to-toe covering burqa, blew up a car laden with explosives on the airport road outside the western city of Herat... Full story ...
PAN: A 40-year-old woman was beheaded in the Alisher district of southeastern Khost province, officials said on Monday. The incident took place in Parokhil area on Sunday night and the woman’s dead body was found outside her house early in the morning, the district police chief said. Full story ...
The Friday Times: Pakistan has been actively pursuing a foreign policy rooted in religious discourse vis-a-vis Afghanistan. This is also because Kabul was pursuing a foreign policy rooted in secular Pashtun ethno-nationalism, including its claims over the Pashtun territory of Pakistan. Secondly, Pakistani army, deeply concerned about its military imbalance vis-a-vis India... Full story ...
The Washington Post: The 9-year-old boy with pale skin and big, piercing eyes captivated Mirzahan at first sight. “He is more handsome than anyone in the village,” the 22-year-old farmer said, explaining why he is grooming the boy as a sexual partner and companion. There was another important factor that made Waheed easy to take on as a bacha bazi, or a boy for pleasure: “He does Full story ...
PAN: A number of Momand tribal elders from eastern nangarhar province on Monday blamed the governor and several traders for grabbing state land, but the provincial administration rejected the claim as baseless. Tribal elders and district council head Haji Jehanzeb told a news conference in Kabul Governor Gul Agha Sherzai and traders Haji Ghaljai, Haji Maluk and Mullah Jan had grabbed 10,000 acres Full story ...
Reuters: Anita lifted the sky-blue burqa from her face, revealing glazed eyes and cracked lips from years of smoking opium, and touched her saggy belly, still round from giving birth to her seventh child a month ago. “I can’t give breast milk to my baby,” said the 32-year-old Anita, who like other women interviewed for this story, declined to give her full name. “I’m scared he’ll get addicted.” Full story ...
CNN: Two children have been killed in an acid attack in Afghanistan’s eastern Ghazni province, the provincial police chief said Saturday. The children died after acid was thrown on their faces and into their mouths, police chief Zrawar Zahid said. Full story ...
IWPR: Hayatollah is supposed to be teaching history and geography for grades six to nine at the Kahrezak Secondary School, located 60 kilometres from Chaghcharan, the provincial centre of Ghor province in central Afghanistan. But when asked to identify Ahmad Shah Durrani, the first king of Afghanistan, the 22-year-old teacher replied with a smile that he did not know who he was. Full story ...
MSNBC.com: Here are two versions of what happened the night of March 11, when 17 Afghan villagers were shot to death. First, the Army version: Staff Sgt. Robert Bales, troubled by marriage woes, drunkenly left Camp Belambai, 12 miles from Kandahar, with a pistol and an automatic rifle and killed six people as they slept. Bales then returned to the base and left again for another village, this time killing 11. Full story ...
PAN: Over the past year, 94 cases of self-immolation were registered in western Afghanistan, where 88 of the incidents involved women, an official said on Wednesday. A year before, when 95 cases of self-immolation were recorded, 54 people, including seven men, had died of burns, according to Dr. Mohammad Arif Jalali, based in Herat City, the provincial capital. Full story ...
The Daily Beast: When Heather Barr began interviewing female Afghan prisoners and detainees for a new Human Rights Watch report released Wednesday, one phrase stood out. “So many of them started out saying, ‘I fell in love with a boy,’” Barr told The Daily Beast from her home in Kabul. “They’re like teenage girls anywhere. But in Afghanistan, you end up in prison.” Full story ...
Time (Blog): When Zikariya Nazar Muhammad, 60, embarked on his journey from Karachi in Pakistan to his ancestral home in Afghanistan’s rural interior, he carried a silent hope: that life in his own country would be better than a life of exile in a foreign land growing increasingly intolerant of refugees like himself. Full story ...
IWPR: Residents of parts of Helmand province in southern Afghanistan have accused both government and NATO forces of taking over and occupying private houses without paying compensation to the owners. A resident of Musa Qala district, Shawali, said foreign troops had been using a property belonging to him for several years without any kind of reimbursement. Full story ...
CBS News: Two weeks after an American soldier in Afghanistan allegedly went on a rampage killing 17 Afghan civilians, American confidence in the war is at an all-time low, a new CBS News/New York Times poll suggests. According to the survey, conducted among 986 adults from March 21-25, just 23 percent of Americans believe the U.S. is doing the right thing by fighting in Afghanistan. Full story ...
PAN: Additional local militia personnel would be recruited and deployed to western Ghor province to strengthen security there, officials say. But locals and provincial council members regard local militias a source of insecurity. Governor Abdullah Hiwad recently told media that President Hamid Karzai had agreed to raising and deploying an additional 1000-member militia to the province. Full story ...
IWPR: Corruption is undermining infrastructure projects in Afghanistan’s Helmand province, as new roads rapidly deteriorate and officials calling a halt to further construction because of concerns about workmanship. Helmand became one of Afghanistan’s most violent provinces after the fall of the Taleban in 2001, but has moved slowly towards greater stability in the last three years, enabling much-needed construction projects to go ahead. Full story ...
BBC News: At least 22 people from one extended family have been killed in an avalanche in Afghanistan’s north-eastern badakhshan province, officials say. They say that the avalanche took place in the Wakhan Corridor, a small, mountainous and remote finger of land which pokes into China. Full story ...
The Guardian: US army staff sergeant Robert Bales is accused of slaughtering 16 Afghan villagers, including nine children, and then burning some of the bodies. The massacre took place in two villages in the southern rural district of Panjwai. Though this horrific crime targeted Afghans on Afghan soil, Afghanistan will play no role in investigating the crime or bringing the perpetrator (or perpetrators) to justice. Full story ...
ABC News: Lately, we have been asked to believe that quite a few events in Afghanistan are anomalies, and should not be taken as more broadly representative of anything. Accidents happen, and sometimes really bad things happen, but they don’t reflect anything deeper about our war that should trouble us. Full story ...
PAN: Incidents of violence against journalists showed a 38 percent increase in 2011, rising concerns among the community that the hostility could continue to rise this year, a media support organisation said on Monday. “On average, three journalists have been killed in Afghanistan every year. In the most recent case, the manager of Melma radio station was murdered in (southeastern) Paktika province,” the group said. Full story ...
Globalist.it: We cringe when we read of medieval codes passed by the Afghan government against women. But soon we focus on political figures who are the authors and are taking that country back in history, who are replacements of the Taliban, who had been temporarily removed from power by the military intervention of 2001. Full story ...
PAN: US soldiers were alleged to have sexually assaulted two female victims before they were killed in the Panjwai massacre in southern Kandahar last Sunday, a high-level Afghan probe team revealed. The Wolesi Jirga’s, or lower house of Parliament, delegation investigating the Kandahar shootings by US troops said besides killing 16 civilians, the soldiers sexually assaulted them. Full story ...
Digital Journal: Up to 20 U.S. troops have been implicated in the massacre of 16 civilians in Kandahar on Sunday morning, the Afghan parliamentary investigation team reports. An Afghan parliamentary investigation team has spent 2 days collating reports from survivors, witnesses and other inhabitants in the villages where the massacre took place. 16 civilians were killed including 9 children. Full story ...
RealNewsNetwork.com: Sonali Kolhatkar is a founding Director of the US-based solidarity organization, Afghan Women’s Mission, which raises funds for social and political women-led projects in Afghanistan. She is co-author of the book, "Bleeding Afghanistan: Washington, Warlords, and the Propaganda of Silence". She is also the host and Executive Producer of Uprising, heard on KPFK Pacifica Radio. Full story ...
Reuters: In Afghanistan, if NATO forces kill a member of your family, it is better in terms of money if they come from Germany or Italy than the United States or Britain. In the cold calculation of how much to pay for victims of the decade-old war, British forces have doled out as little as 210 USD, while German forces have paid as much as 25,000 USD, according to a study by the human rights NGO CIVIC. Full story ...
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