Tolo News: A number of Herat residents on Thursday held their own celebration to inaugurate Salam dam and called it an historical event. The participants praised security forces for securing Salam dam and called the forces “constructive and peace champions”. The residents said that the utilization of the dam will bring effective changes to the agriculture and industry
Global Voices: Last week thousands of ethnic Hazaras held demonstrations in various parts of the world to protest against a proposal to change the planned route for a new electricity transmission line Turkmenistan-Uzbekistan-Tajikistan-Afghanistan-Pakistan (TUTAP). Hazaras, who may number anywhere between 10 and 20% of Afghanistan’s total population (no official census has ever been conducted) endured more persecution
PTI: Designing and selling handmade jewellery fashioned from tiny beads of the semi precious lapis lazuli stone has helped Khala Zada, a widow from Afghanistan, support her family of eight for the last 17 years. In her fifties, Khala Zada, who first learnt the art of bead making from a neighbour and now runs a small-scale
Press TV May 23, 2016 Iran, India and Afghanistan sign a key trilateral agreement to develop the southern Iranian port of Chabahar in the Gulf of Oman. The agreement was signed in the presence of Iranian President Hassan Rouhani, Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi and Afghan President Ashraf Ghani in the Iranian capital of Tehran
Prospect: The 500 kv pipeline is being routed away from the Hazara-majority Bamiyan Province in central Afghanistan over the Salang Pass (a mountain pass connecting northern Afghanistan with Parwan Province, which lies next door to Kabul on its North Eastern border with connections to Kabul Province and southern Afghanistan). Over the past few weeks, demonstrations have
Natural Gas Europe: Afghanistan plays a key role In the Turkmenistan–Afghanistan–Pakistan–India Pipeline project. Turkmenistan has the world’s fifth largest reserves, as ranked in 2015. This strong position offers considerable advantages with respect to defining the strategy of natural gas export policy. Turkmenistan, on the other hand, shows that there are no benefits in having such rich
TEHRAN, May 18 (Xinhua) — The Afghan president will arrive in Tehran to sign a trilateral deal regarding Iran’s Chabahar Port, semi-official Mehr news agency reported on Wednesday. Afghan President Ashraf Ghani made his first visit to Iran in March, 2015, when the two countries stressed cooperation in executing bilateral and multilateral projects with regional
Michael Hughes: Instability in Afghanistan continues to hinder private investment and complicates the implementation of financial reforms, the International Monetary Fund (IMF) said in a report on Friday. In other words, Afghan policies have failed to adhere to the West’s neoliberal orthodoxy. As the war-torn poverty-stricken country operates in survival mode, free market ideologues want to
VOA News May 16, 2016 KABUL—Tens of thousands of ethnic minority Hazaras, protesting the rerouting of a power line, were blocked in their attempt to march to the presidential palace in Kabul Monday. Authorities, fearing violence, set up shipping containers overnight, effectively closing off Kabul’s commercial center to foot and motor traffic. Leaders of Monday’s
Tolo News: President Ashraf Ghani, in a decree, on Sunday suspended work on the 500 Kilovolt electricity project from Turkmenistan and assigned a 12-member commission to assess the situation. According to the decree obtained by TOLOnews, the commission has been tasked with the job of assessing the project within 10 days. The third article of the six-article decree states