KABUL, Oct 20 (Reuters) – Former Taliban fighter Mohammad Ishaq, who spent years battling Western troops and local forces in Afghanistan, lost his leg in combat and is now learning to walk with a new limb. Standing near him at a Kabul clinic is one of the soldiers he defeated.
In the Red Cross Hospital in Kabul, Ishaq spoke simply of the eight years he spent in Helmand, the southern province where some of the fiercest fighting of the war took place and where thousands of civilians and combatants were killed and maimed.
Shayasta Wardak, a graduate of Kabul University’s sharia law faculty, spent years working as a judge in a Kabul district court, adjudicating disputes over marital splits, property and child custody.
But after the Taliban took over the Afghan capital in August, Wardak and her female colleagues were told their services were not required. When the women — who had tried to return to work in a group a few days after the takeover — demanded to know why, the young Taliban blocking their entry to the courthouse scoffed.
Russia has hosted the most high-profile international talks on Afghanistan since the Taliban took power, calling for an injection of aid to help the crippled economy but also demanding a more inclusive government.
Senior Russian diplomats made clear that formal recognition of the Taliban regime was not on the table until it does more to improve human rights and broadens an all-male cabinet, most of them clerics from the Pashtun ethnic group.
The withdrawal of US and NATO forces from Afghanistan is inevitably leaving a political vacuum in South and Central Asia. The question that many are asking is who will step in to fill it. Afghanistan’s immediate neighbours – Pakistan, Iran and China – all have special interests in the country that they are likely to pursue with renewed vigour.
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.
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 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.
WASHINGTON, Oct 10 (Reuters) – The United States said on Sunday the first face-to-face meeting between senior U.S. and Taliban officials since the hardline group retook power in Afghanistan was “candid and professional” and that the U.S. side reiterated that the Taliban would be judged on their actions, not just their words.
