G20 leaders and ministers have agreed they will have no option but to involve the Taliban in sending humanitarian aid to Afghanistan, but say that this stops short of political recognition of the Taliban as a government.
The consensus view came at a video conference on the Afghan crisis at which the EU stepped up its aid to a total of €1bn (£850m), and it was agreed in principle that the IMF and World Bank could provide aid. Nearly $9bn of Afghan assets in overseas banks have been frozen by the US.
A woman airlifted out of Afghanistan with her family said the government has abandoned its responsibility to those left behind and must urgently step up efforts to get more people to the UK.
Peymana Assad, who is a Labour councillor in Harrow and the first elected official of Afghan origin in the UK, was evacuated with a family member in August after she visited the country to see relatives.
Seventeen-year-old Israr was fast asleep when his phone rang.
It was 2am and the teenager was exhausted. He’d been working all day as a guard. On the other end of the line was his brother, who told Israr that men had barged into their family house, dragged their father outside, and shot him dead.
“He asked me to rush back home,” recalled Israr, whose name has been changed for his safety.
Sporting a black turban, thick beard, kohl eyeliner and long hair, Noor Ahmad no longer needs to disguise his loyalties.
Before the Taliban conquest of Kabul, the 27-year-old intelligence officer in the Islamist movement went about his duties in the Afghan capital covertly, clean-shaven and clad in jeans and T-shirt or a jacket and tie. His mission — to conduct undercover surveillance operations against assassination targets.
Twelve major art trade associations have launched a co-ordinated effort to stop looted Afghan cultural material controlled by the Taliban from becoming available on the Western art market.
Ghazni, Afghanistan (CNN) – The blood-stained bodies of the four accused kidnappers were hung off construction cranes with heavy chains, one with a warning sign strung around his neck, “Abductors will be punished like this.”
The United States and Britain have warned their citizens to avoid hotels in Afghanistan, days after dozens of people were killed at a mosque in an attack claimed by the Islamic State in Khorasan Province, ISKP (ISIS-K).
MADRID (AP) — Spain has started a new evacuation operation to extract more Afghans and their families left behind following the Taliban takeover of Afghanistan.
Spain’s Defense Ministry said Sunday that it is working with the foreign ministry on a new evacuation mission.
Afghanistan’s junior female football team and their immediate families are to relocate to Britain from Pakistan after recently escaping their homeland, the government has said.
The United States has agreed to provide humanitarian aid to a desperately poor Afghanistan on the brink of an economic disaster, but refused to give political recognition to the country’s new rulers, the Taliban said on Sunday.