Ariana: Taliban militants have captured the Charkh district of Logar province, an area about 130 km south of Kabul city, sources confirmed Monday. Local officials said government compounds and the military base in the district have been abandoned. According to the officials both the Taliban and Afghan forces suffered casualties in the clashes. Click here
Tahir Khan VOA News March 21, 2021 ISLAMABAD – The Taliban claim they, not the U.S., originated the pending proposal for a three-month reduction in violence, or RIV, to “create a conducive atmosphere” for intra-Afghan peace negotiations, two Taliban officials told VOA Saturday. “We have floated a plan under which all related sides will reduce
Radio Free Afghanistan March 21, 2021 U.S. Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin made an unannounced visit to Afghanistan on March 21 just weeks before Washington is due to withdraw the last of its troops under a deal struck with the Taliban last year. President Joe Biden said last week in a television interview that it would
Tolo News: Fazil was the Taliban’s designated chief of army staff during their regime in Kabul and the two know each other from the mid-1990s. According to reports, the verbal clash broke out when Dostum put his hand on Mullah Fazil’s shoulder to inquire about his health, but Fazil removed Dostum’s hand from his shoulder
Yahoo News: U.S. government agencies are again looking at a long-standing proposal to release an Afghan drug kingpin [Bashir Noorzai] in exchange for concessions in peace talks, which would include the release of an American held [by the Taliban-aligned Haqqani network] in Afghanistan, according to multiple sources familiar with the matter. Click here to read
Frud Bezhan March 19, 2021 Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty Afghan special forces stormed an isolated mudbrick house in a Taliban-controlled district of Ghazni Province in October, killing six suspected militants — including Husam Abd-al-Ra’uf, the No. 2 figure in the Al-Qaeda terrorist network. The Egyptian national, also known as Abu Muhsin al-Masri, was on the FBI’s Most Wanted
Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty March 19, 2021 A senior Afghan official says the government and the Taliban have agreed at a meeting in Moscow to try to accelerate talks aimed at ending decades of war in the country. The March 19 meeting followed an international conference in the Russian capital on the intra-Afghan peace process,
In March 2001, Taliban extremists used dynamite and artillery to demolish two towering Buddha statues that had stood in Afghanistan’s Bamiyan Province for nearly 1,500 years. Today, the country is still not at peace, and hopes of rebuilding the statues are stymied by prohibitive costs.
Radio Free Afghanistan March 18, 2021 KABUL — Afghan officials say at least three people were killed and 11 wounded when a roadside bomb hit a vehicle carrying government employees in Kabul on March 18, as representatives of the Afghan government, the Taliban, and key countries gather in Moscow to push for a reduction in
RFE/RL Gandhara March 17, 2021 U.S. President Joe Biden has warned that a deadline set out in a deal made by his predecessor, Donald Trump, with the Taliban to withdraw all U.S. troops from Afghanistan by May 1 “could happen, but it is tough.” He made the comments in a wide-ranging interview with ABC News