IRIN: Some 2.5 million drought-stricken Afghans across much of the country have lost their crops and are facing acute food shortages, international aid group Christian Aid warned on Wednesday in the capital, Kabul. Full story ...
Pajhwok Afghan News: Thousands of people on Monday staged a protest demonstration against the presence of armed commanders in the northern Takhar province. Full story ...
Human Rights Watch: Presidents Bush, Karzai, and Musharraf should act immediately to stop the increasing insecurity and attendant human rights abuses gripping southern Afghanistan and Pakistan's border areas, Human Rights Watch said today. The three leaders are meeting tonight in Washington. Full story ...
BBC NEWS: Unidentified gunmen have killed a top women's affairs official in the southern Afghan province of Kandahar, security officials say. Full story ...
RADIO FREE EUROPE/ RADIO LIBERTY: A UN-backed rights watchdog has expressed continuing concern over violence against women in Afghanistan. Full story ...
Cursor.org: For every American who dies in either Afghanistan or Iraq, about 17 innocent Afghan or Iraqi civilians perish. The overall cumulative death count for both Americans and civilians in Iraqi is approximately ten times greater than in Afghanistan (data accessed on September 17, 2006). Full story ...
San Francisco Chronicle: Remember when peaceful, democratic, reconstructed Afghanistan was advertised as the exemplar for the extreme makeover of Iraq? In August 2002, Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld was already proclaiming the new Afghanistan "a breathtaking accomplishment" and "a successful model of what could happen to Iraq." As everybody now knows, the model isn't working in Iraq. So we shouldn't be surprised to learn that it's not working in Afghanistan either. Full story ...
The Financial Times: Afghanistan’s opium cultivation surged by 59 per cent this year largely as a result of a Taliban-led insurgency that is pushing the southern part of the country to the verge of collapse, the United Nations drugs agency chief said at the weekend. Full story ...
Pajhwok Afghan News: Taliban have publicly executed a man for his alleged involvement in a murder case in the Garmsir district of the southern Helmand province on Saturday. Full story ...
Indo Asian News Service: Poverty, hardship and unemployment are driving women in Afghanistan to prostitution, with suicide the only option to escape their miseries, says a UN study. Full story ...
New York Times: Taliban militants killed a woman and her 13-year-old son after accusing them of spying for the government and for foreign troops in southern Afghanistan, the Afghan government said Wednesday. Full story ...
IRIN:An interesting result of the labour-intensive nature of opium production is its effect on the rural household economy, the division of labour and opportunities for Afghan women. In an otherwise ultra-traditional Islamic society opium offers women some degree of independence, through access to cash and status through their labours. Full story ...
Pajhwok Afghan News: Three staffers working with a private television channel were beaten by armed men while covering a demonstration against former Mujahideen leader and current Member of Parliament Abdul Rab Rasul Sayyaf in Paghman district of Kabul on Saturday. Full story ...
Human Rights Watch: A proposal to reestablish the Department for the Promotion of Virtue and Prevention of Vice in Afghanistan raises serious concerns about potential abuse of the rights of women and vulnerable groups, Human Rights Watch said today. Full story ...
RAWA: On 1st July 2006, hundreds of people from the Paghman district of Kabul demonstrated against Rasul Sayyaf, a fundamentalist leader of the Itehad-e-Islami party and a current member of the Afghan parliament. The protesters accused Sayyaf and his armed militia of extorting their lands and imposing crimes against them. Full story ...
The Guardian: A controversial UN report that has been shelved for 18 months names and shames leading Afghan politicians and officials accused of orchestrating massacres, torture, mass rape and other war crimes. Full story ...
Globe and Mail: As a cameraman in the Afghan parliament, Omid Yakmanish thought he had a routine job, until he was attacked and threatened with death. Full story ...
Institute for War & Peace Reporting: Corruption is a growth industry for Afghanistan's police. They stand accused of extorting money from drug smugglers, gun runners, brothel owners and gamblers, in return for looking the other way. Those who refuse to pay can be arrested as part of an apparently virtuous clean-up campaign, and then released once they hand over the cash. Full story ...
BBC Persian (Translated by RAWA): Tens of female students of Balk University have strike and closed the entry gate of dormitory to the faces of supervisors for their objection as what they have called the 'attack of policemen to girl's dormitory'. Full story ...
IRIN: Seven aid workers lost their lives in Afghanistan on Tuesday in two separate incidents. At least four were killed in the northern Afghan province of Jawzjan when unidentified gunmen ambushed their vehicle, a government spokesman said in the capital Kabul. Full story ...
AP via Toronto Sun: Violent anti-foreigner protests raged across Afghanistan's capital yesterday after a U.S. military truck crashed into traffic, touching off the worst rioting since the Taliban's ouster. Full story ...
CTV.ca News: Up to 80 suspected Taliban militants and an unknown number of civilians died after U.S.-led coalition forces bombed a village in southern Afghanistan. Full story ...
AP: One man lives penniless in a field under a patchwork tent with baying dogs roaming outside. Another, wearing a suit jacket and tie, glides past his silver Mercedes as he welcomes guests into his plush Kabul villa. Full story ...
RAWA: On April 18th 2006, hundreds of people in the Takhar province of northern Afghanistan staged a demonstration to raise their voices against the brutalities of the war- and drug-lords whose presence has become a dominating factor in their homeland. Full story ...
The Times: BOTTLES were thrown, insults traded and chairs knocked over in the bedlam. This was no bar-room brawl, however. It was the scene in the Afghan parliament on Sunday when a woman MP dared to stand up to a male colleague. Full story ...
SEATTLE POST-INTELLIGENCER: Promises of work and security made Ghulam Hazara return to this western Afghan city from Iran two years ago. Now a lack of both is driving him back. Full story ...
Daily Times: The United States and its western allies have no interest in a stable and peaceful Afghanistan as the ravaged country continues to worsen under the Northern Alliance rule, who have big stakes in drug businesses and civil strife, says Kathy Gannon, a veteran journalist and Afghanistan expert. Full story ...
Human Rights Watch: President Hamid Karzai should not appoint known human rights abusers and warlords as provincial police chiefs, Human Rights Watch said today. Full story ...
Chicago Tribune: The strangers came in the middle of the night. They tied up the school caretakers with turbans and shoved them into a classroom. Then they broke the school windows, poured fuel everywhere and set the principal's office on fire. Full story ...
IRIN, a UN humanitarian news and information service: Sitting in a small restaurant in a busy bazaar in Maimana, capital of Afghanistan’s northern faryab province, Abdul Hadi, 36, worries out loud over the fate of his family in Kata Kala village, some 80 km away. Full story ...