Yama Siawash
1TV: The International Criminal Court and the United Nations have been asked to investigate the killing of former Afghan television presenter Yama Siawash. Siawash, a former anchor on the private TV channel Tolo News who had been working at the country’s central bank, was killed last year by a bomb on a car that was carrying him to office. Click here to read more (external link).
Tolo News: The Ministry of Public Health on Thursday reported 1,198 new positive cases of COVID-19 out of 3,528 samples tested in the last 24 hours. Data by the Public Health Ministry shows that the total number of cases is 139,051, total deaths stand at 6,072 and total recoveries are at 80,204. Click here to read more (external link).
Frud Bezhan
Mustafa Sarwar
Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty
July 14, 2021
MAZAR-E SHARIF, Afghanistan — Women banned from going outside alone. Girls barred from attending school. Unmarried women forced to marry fighters.
This was life for many Afghans under the Taliban’s brutal regime in the 1990s when the fundamentalist Islamist group conquered much of Afghanistan.
It is also the new harsh reality for the tens of thousands of Afghan women who live in areas recently captured by the Taliban, which has seized dozens of rural districts across the country since the start of the foreign military withdrawal on May 1.
Residents of Afghanistan’s northeastern countryside — the focus of the Taliban’s blistering military offensive — say the militant group has reimposed many of the repressive laws and retrograde policies that defined its 1996-2001 rule.
When it ruled Afghanistan, the Taliban forced women to cover themselves from head to toe, banned them from working outside the home, severely limited girls’ education, and required women to be accompanied by a male relative when they left their homes.
Many of those policies have returned in areas now under Taliban control, say residents. That is despite repeated claims by the Taliban that it has changed and that it would not bring back its notorious strictures.
‘Women Are Oppressed’
“Before, I could go to the market alone to buy groceries,” says Monira, a 26-year-old woman from the Shirin Tagab district in the northwestern province of Faryab. “I could go to the hairdresser’s. I could wear my hair up.”
But that all changed when the Taliban captured her home district two weeks ago.
“Now, women are oppressed,” she adds. “The Taliban says we must be accompanied by a male escort if we leave home. We must cover ourselves.”
In parts of Faryab, the Taliban has banned shops from selling goods to unaccompanied women. Residents say those who break the rules are often punished, including public beatings, another feature of the former rule of the Taliban.
The militants have erected posters in some areas to inform residents of the new regulations. In other places, insurgents have driven around with loudspeakers and made announcements at mosques.
Sara, a 17-year-old student, says the Taliban shut down her school in the district of Aqcha, in the northern province of Jawzjan, after the militants captured it two weeks ago.
“We don’t know what will happen to us or our education,” says Sara, whose family fled to the provincial capital, Sheberghan, which is under government control.
“All those years that we studied, and all our efforts have been crushed,” she adds. “We can no longer go to Aqcha for fear of the Taliban. They say that girls should not go to school anymore.”
In other areas under Taliban control, education has been allowed for girls only until the fourth grade.
Arefa Navid, head of the Independent Human Rights Commission office in the northern province of Badakhshan, says the Taliban has warned women not to work outside their homes.
“The Taliban has told working women across Badakhshan that they cannot go to their offices under any condition,” Navid says.
Habiba Danesh, a parliamentarian from the northern province of Takhar, says the Taliban is also forcing single or widowed women there to marry its fighters. Similar unconfirmed reports have emerged from other provinces under the Islamists’ control.
‘People Are Worried’
Meanwhile, a male resident of the Balkh district of northern Balkh Province says the Taliban has banned men from trimming or shaving their beards.
Barbers have been threatened with punishment if they flaunt the new rules, he says, speaking on condition of anonymity for fear of reprisal by the Taliban.
Men, he says, have also been forced to pray five times a day.
Listening to music and watching television have also been barred in some areas, much like they were during the Taliban’s rule a quarter of a century ago.
“The Taliban has imposed many restrictions on people,” he says. “People are worried.”
Another resident says the militant group has ordered people to feed their fighters three times a day despite the desperate poverty in the area.
“They are forcing people to prepare food for them and offer them a place to sleep,” says the resident.
Human Rights Watch has also accused Taliban militants of forcibly displacing residents and burning their homes in apparent retaliation for cooperating with the Afghan government.
“The Taliban’s retaliatory attacks against civilians deemed to have supported the government are an ominous warning about the risk of future atrocities,” said Patricia Gossman, associate Asia director at Human Rights Watch.
Taliban Denials
The Taliban rejects charges that it is mistreating locals and imposing harsh new policies in the areas it recently seized.
“Currently there is a state of war and everything will remain the same [as it was under Afghan government control],” Taliban spokesman Zabihullah Mujahid told RFE/RL. “But once the laws are made the people will have to act according to the law.”
The Taliban claims it is not the same brutal group that first ruled Afghanistan in the 1990s, when its regime was an international pariah notorious for oppressing women and massacring ethnic and religious minorities.
In recent years, the Taliban has said it is committed to granting women their rights and allowing them to work and go to school if they do not violate Islamic or Afghan values. But it also suggested it wants to curtail the recent freedoms gained by women that it said promote “immorality” and “indecency.”
The Taliban’s adherence to ultraconservative Islam and the Pashtun tribal code has struck a chord with some currently living under the group’s thumb, especially in Afghanistan’s Pashtun-dominated rural south and east, which have borne the brunt of the war and where life has improved little in the past 20 years.
But those ideas are largely alien in the north and the major urban centers in Afghanistan that have made big social, economic, and democratic gains in the past 19 years since the Taliban was ousted from power.
The Taliban’s revival of its extremist policies in rural areas has filled many women in the cities with dread.
“I’m worried that women could return to the dark days of the past when we were just housewives and banned from taking part in society, culture, politics, and even sport,” says Sanam Sadat, an activist in Faryab’s provincial capital, Maimana, which is under government control.
“What happens when the Taliban takes over the cities?” she adds. ‘What will happen to women then?”
Written by Frud Bezhan and Mustafa Sarwar in Prague based on reporting by Radio Azadi correspondents in Afghanistan whose names are being withheld for security reasons.
CNN: The victims were members of an Afghan Special Forces unit: their executioners, the Taliban. The summary killings took place on June 16 in the town of Dawlat Abad in Faryab province, close to Afghanistan’s border with Turkmenistan. Click here to read more (external link).
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Reid Standish
Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty
July 14, 2021
As the security situation in Afghanistan worsens, Chinese Foreign Minister Wang Yi has begun a high-profile tour of Central Asia that analysts say is an effort by Beijing to boost its interests in the region.
The weeklong visit to Turkmenistan, Tajikistan, and Uzbekistan comes as the Taliban continues to take territory from Afghan government forces amid the withdrawal of U.S. and NATO troops from the country, which is set to be completed by August 31.
Wang will look to shore up Beijing’s rising clout while discussing the growing security concerns in the region as the departure of foreign troops winds down and fighting between the Taliban and government forces intensifies.
The Taliban offensive has left Beijing and the Central Asian states — as well as regional players Iran, Pakistan, and Russia, all with key interests in Afghanistan — anxiously eyeing the tenuous security situation on their doorstep. Afghanistan’s neighbors have also stepped up their diplomatic efforts with the main parties in the conflict as they scramble to prevent it from spilling across their borders.
“I wouldn’t expect any surprises from this trip, but Beijing will use this as an opportunity to show its regional power ambitions,” Temur Umarov, an expert on China in Central Asia at the Carnegie Moscow Center, told RFE/RL.
The trip began with a two-day visit to Turkmenistan on July 12 followed by meetings in Uzbekistan and Tajikistan, where Wang will attend an annual gathering of the foreign ministers of the Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO) in the Tajik capital, Dushanbe, to focus on what Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesman Wang Wenbin called Afghanistan’s “post-troop withdrawal era.”
The SCO — a Eurasian political bloc focused on counterterrorism that includes China, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, India, Pakistan, Russia, Tajikistan, and Uzbekistan — has been one of the main vehicles through which Beijing has expanded its influence in Central Asia and the wider region, which could grow amid the fluid situation in Afghanistan.
China’s future role, however, is still being defined. Beijing maintains a strategic relationship with Pakistan, the Taliban’s main backer, and strong ties with Iran. China’s political and economic influence in Central Asia has also expanded dramatically in the last decade.
But while Beijing holds influential cards for Afghanistan, its “strategy is unclear and vague,” Umarov said, who adds that even though “China doesn’t want to replace the United States” in Afghanistan, it also won’t be taking a hands-off approach.
“In the future, we can likely expect more [Chinese] engagement with different parties in the Afghan conflict, but only if it fits China’s interests in the region,” said Umarov. “The most important goal for China is to seal the chaos inside Afghanistan’s borders.”
The View From Central Asia
Those spillover fears, as well as concerns over an uptick in Islamist extremist activity, are shared by Afghanistan’s northern neighbors in Central Asia. They have also been at the heart of a series of recent moves across the region and will be on the table in Dushanbe during the SCO summit.
Turkmenistan moved heavy weaponry closer to its border with Afghanistan on July 11 and put reservists on alert in Ashgabat, the capital. The reclusive Central Asian country, which shares an 804-kilometer border with Afghanistan, also hosted a Taliban delegation for talks on July 10, RFE/RL’s Turkmen Service reported.
Taliban representatives have also visited Islamabad, Moscow, and Tehran in recent weeks as the group has looked to reach out to Afghanistan’s anxious neighbors and calm fears over a security vacuum emerging in the country following the U.S. withdrawal.
On July 5, Tajikistan — where two-thirds of the country’s 1,357-kilometer-long border with Afghanistan is now under Taliban control — sent 20,000 army reservists to guard the border and called for assistance from the Collective Security Treaty Organization (CSTO), a Moscow-led military bloc of which Tajikistan is a member.
Similarly, both Uzbekistan and Tajikistan have seen refugees and defeated Afghan forces flee across their borders amid intensified fighting in recent weeks.
Tajikistan in particular remains a crucial focal point for wider security issues in the region. The country hosts approximately 7,000 Russian troops at a major military base and is also home to a Chinese military outpost along the Afghan-Tajik border, which is Beijing’s only military facility in the region.
The collection of military compounds is reportedly used by Chinese personnel for intelligence gathering focused on counterterrorism, specifically on Uyghur militant groups based in Afghanistan whom Beijing wants to monitor and prevent from crossing into its western Xinjiang Province.
Moscow remains a regional military leader and views Central Asia as within its “sphere of influence.” While China and Russia share similar concerns over regional stability, the Kremlin remains apprehensive about an expanded Chinese military footprint in the area, a factor that analysts note Beijing will need to be mindful of amid the evolving situation in Afghanistan.
“I think it would be difficult for Moscow to accept Beijing playing the first violin in the region,” Nargis Kassenova, a senior fellow at Harvard who focuses on China’s role in the region, told RFE/RL.
China And The Taliban
While China holds broader regional ambitions, its most pressing concerns for Afghanistan remain narrowly focused on Uyghur militants and its own security.
The Taliban’s historical connections to Uyghur extremist groups affiliated with Al-Qaeda go back decades and have been a source of alarm for Beijing in the past, particularly the East Turkestan Islamic Movement.
The United States and other countries previously branded the group a terrorist organization, but the Trump administration removed that designation in 2020, sparking a backlash from Beijing.
China has, in part, used the existence of such extremist groups to justify its crackdown in Xinjiang, where it has interned more than 1 million Uyghurs, Kazakhs, Kyrgyz, and other Muslim minorities in a vast camp system, according to United Nations human rights officials.
Many Uyghur militants previously based in Afghanistan moved to Syria in recent years, but a 2020 United Nations Security Council report estimated that several hundred militants remained in the country.
Despite this tense history, the Taliban has refused to condemn China’s treatment of Muslims in Xinjiang and has begun courting Beijing’s favor by saying it will not harbor Uyghur militants in the territory it controls.
“We are seeing some sophisticated statements from the Taliban about working with China,” Niva Yau, a researcher at the OSCE Academy in Bishkek, Kyrgyzstan, told RFE/RL. “It shows that there is interest from the Taliban in gaining legitimacy and recognition from China.”
In an attempt to assuage Beijing’s concerns, Taliban representatives have engaged in public outreach, giving statements to Chinese media and to the foreign press that China is a “welcome friend” in Afghanistan.
Taliban spokesman Suhail Shaheen told reporters in Qatar on July 8 that Afghan territory under the groups’ control would not be used against other countries and that the Taliban would not interfere in China’s internal affairs.
While Beijing officially supports the government of President Ashraf Ghani in Kabul, China is reportedly pressing the Taliban to limit its ties to Uyghur militant groups in return for financial investment in Afghan infrastructure should the hard-line Islamist group gain control over the country.
“The Taliban know that if they get control [of Afghanistan] they will need recognition of statehood and legitimacy from its neighbors. That includes Central Asia [and] China,” Yau said.
Bush
Ken Bredemeier
VOA News
July 14, 2021
WASHINGTON – Former U.S. President George W. Bush, who sent U.S. troops to Afghanistan in 2001 to wipe out training grounds for al-Qaida terrorists after the September 11th attacks, says he thinks it is a mistake for U.S. troops to be pulled out now as Taliban insurgents take control of more and more territory in the country.
Bush, since leaving office in 2009, has rarely commented on the actions of three subsequent U.S. presidents — Barack Obama, Donald Trump and now Joe Biden.
But with Biden rapidly pulling American forces out of Afghanistan and saying they all will return home by the end of August, Bush says he is worried how the Taliban, if they take power again after American forces ousted them two decades ago, will treat women and children, along with others who have supported U.S. and NATO forces.
In an interview released Wednesday, Bush, from his summer estate in the northeastern U.S., told German state broadcaster Deutsche Welle, “I’m afraid Afghan women and girls are going to suffer unspeakable harm.”
Asked if it is a mistake for Biden to pull troops out of Afghanistan, Bush said, “I think it is, yeah, because I think the consequences are going to be unbelievably bad, and I’m sad.”
The Taliban claims it already controls 85% of the country, a figure which the U.S. disputes even as Pentagon officials express concern about militant group’s rapid takeover of territory and its advance toward the capital, Kabul. Already, more Afghans are said to live in territory controlled by the Taliban than that overseen by the Afghan government.
Bush launched the U.S. war in Afghanistan in his first year in office in the aftermath of the September 11, 2001, attacks that killed nearly 3,000 people in the U.S. American forces helped Afghan resistance units to overthrow the Taliban-run government and targeted al-Qaida. It became America’s longest war.
Bush said Afghan women, who have been terrorized by the Taliban, are “scared” by the prospect of living under Taliban rule again. Bush said he is also worried about the fate of thousands of Afghans who acted as interpreters for U.S. and NATO troops over the last 20 years.
“I think about all the interpreters and people that helped not only U.S. troops, but NATO troops and they’re just, it seems like they’re just going to be left behind to be slaughtered by these very brutal people, and it breaks my heart,” Bush said.
Biden has vowed to grant the interpreters and their families visas to move to the United States and says the processing of their visas has been “dramatically accelerated,” but it is far from complete.
Trump, while he was in office, also committed to ending the U.S. presence in Afghanistan and Biden followed suit, although with a longer troop withdrawal period than Trump envisioned.
Although some opposition Republicans have criticized Biden’s troop withdrawal, polls show the American public supports it.
Biden staunchly defended bringing the troops home last week, saying the U.S. did not go to Afghanistan to “nation build.”
“It’s the right and the responsibility of the Afghan people alone to decide their future and how they want to run their country,” Biden said.
He described the troop drawdown as proceeding in a “secure and orderly way.” Days ago, U.S. forces withdrew from the mammoth Bagram Airfield, the central point of U.S. military operations.
“Nearly 20 years of experience has shown us — and the current security situation only confirms — that just one more year of fighting in Afghanistan is not a solution, but a recipe for being there indefinitely,” he said.
A reporter questioning the troop withdrawal drew a sharp response from Biden. Asked whether he trusted the Taliban, Biden responded: “Is that a serious question?”
“It’s a silly question. Do I trust the Taliban? No. But I trust the capacity of the Afghan military, who is better trained, better equipped and more competent in terms of conducting war,” Biden said.
Trump, defeated by Biden in last November’s election, has said he would have withdrawn all troops by May 1, which Biden decided was too hasty.
But Biden said he was the fourth U.S. president to preside over American forces in Afghanistan and that he would not hand the responsibility to a fifth.
As he first announced plans in April to end the U.S. presence in the country, he said the U.S. “cannot continue the cycle of extending or expanding our military presence in Afghanistan hoping to create the ideal conditions for our withdrawal and expecting a different result.”
The foreign troop exit is the outcome of an agreement negotiated by Washington with the Taliban in February 2020 under then-President Trump. It requires the insurgents to fight terrorism on Afghan soil and negotiate a political peace deal with the Kabul government.
However, the U.S.-brokered intra-Afghan peace negotiations have moved slowly since they started last September in Qatar and have met with little success.
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Murad
Tolo News: A plane carrying Murad Ali Murad, the newly appointed governor of Daikundi province, and members of Afghanistan’s Wolesi Jirga—the lower house of Parliament–were diverted to Bamiyan while en route to Daikundi on Thursday. Click here to read more (external link).
Tolo News: The Ministry of Public Health on Wednesday reported 1,210 new positive cases of COVID-19 out of 3,866 samples tested in the last 24 hours. The ministry also reported 60 deaths and 757 recoveries from COVID-19 in the same period. Data by the Public Health Ministry indicates that the total reported number of cases is 137,853, and total death count is 5,983. Click here to read more (external link).
Navbahor Imamova
VOA News
July 13, 2021
WASHINGTON – Uzbekistan’s goal of securing new trade routes to the Indian Ocean — the focus of a conference this week featuring many of the region’s top diplomats — has been complicated by rising uncertainty about the future of a major country along the way: Afghanistan.
The goal of enhancing regional connectivity between Central and South Asia is a long-standing one; landlocked Central Asia would gain access to markets and trade routes to the south while South Asia would acquire access to resources and opportunities to the north.
Until now, however, such schemes have mostly proven to be pipe dreams. And Uzbekistan bears part of the blame.
For decades, Tashkent’s late leader, Islam Karimov, resisted many connectivity ideas, getting into spats with neighboring countries and battling over how to share water and electricity. But his successor, Shavkat Mirziyoyev, has improved relations with those neighbors, dropped resistance to some of these connectivity schemes, and positioned Uzbekistan as a potential leader.
The July 15-16 gathering will cement this shift through an Uzbek-hosted interregional dialogue to foster commerce, transportation and communications links.
But Tashkent’s plans relied heavily on a more peaceful Afghanistan, which straddles the most practical route into South Asia with the only alternative running through Iran. Now, with the Taliban rapidly seizing more and more Afghan territory, it has to hope the extremist group will cooperate.
Attendees at this week’s conference will undoubtedly urge peace talks and negotiations among the warring Afghan parties. But the Taliban may not attend and Afghan President Ashraf Ghani, who will, has an increasingly precarious hold on power.
The delegations will be led by prominent figures including Pakistani Prime Minister Imran Khan, Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov, U.S. Special Representative on Afghanistan Zalmay Khalilzad, White House Homeland Security Advisor Elisabeth Sherwood-Randall and Josep Borrell, the European Union’s high representative for foreign affairs and security policy.
The Chinese, Indian, Saudi, Turkish, and Bangladeshi foreign ministers as well as the top diplomats from the Central Asian states are also expected in the Uzbek capital.
According to the Uzbek Foreign Ministry, at least 160 guests, including experts, diplomats, policy makers, investors, and entrepreneurs, have confirmed plans to attend the conference, which will feature discussion sessions on economic cooperation, cultural ties and security relationships.
Tashkent aims at concrete proposals to unlock the potential of both regions. “South Asia has historically been tightly connected to Central Asia economically, socially, culturally,” states the ministry in the conference agenda.
Farkhad Tolipov, director of Knowledge Caravan center in Tashkent, says “the Uzbek government is determined to demonstrate that it has an active regional policy. If connectivity becomes real, Uzbekistan will have shorter transportation corridors to the sea.”
Tolipov expects no agreements, only joint statements. “Let’s wait and see but I doubt that there will be any practical results,” he says.
Washington has long promoted regional connectivity and economic integration and even reorganized the State Department in 2005 to promote it, creating a new Bureau of South and Central Asian Affairs. But its initiatives and rhetoric have not been matched by money. And so they have met skepticism at a time when China is pouring billions into the region via its Belt and Road infrastructure initiative.
Tolipov notes that U.S.-promoted energy projects such as a pipeline to deliver Turkmen gas to India via Afghanistan and Pakistan, and a scheme to supply Central Asian electricity to South Asia, “have mostly just been aspirations.”
Still, Jennifer Murtazashvili, director of the Center for Governance and Markets at the University of Pittsburgh, sees the Tashkent conference as an opportunity to generate enthusiasm and ultimately investment for double-landlocked Uzbekistan, which is dependent on trade routes through Kazakhstan and either Russia or China to reach seaports.
“Given the difficult relations between the U.S. and Iran, it would be difficult to secure funding for that southward route, so it is more politically feasible to connect Uzbekistan through Afghanistan and Pakistan than to go through Iran right now.”
Murtazashvili says fragmented markets separating Central and South Asia are costly to entrepreneurs, governments, and citizens. “Improved connectivity from agreements at this conference can facilitate economic prosperity in the region.”
U.S. partners in the region want technical assistance from America’s government and ramped up investment from its private sector. But Murtazashvili thinks that uncertainties in Afghanistan and conflict fatigue will make Americans unlikely to invest in ambitious projects.
“The U.S. has talked quite a lot about this but has not offered a concrete alternative.”
The Bush administration promoted economic connectivity and the Obama administration’s Northern Distribution Network carried non-military goods in and out of Afghanistan. But, says Murtazashvili, there was never much serious commercial investment or project finance from the U.S.
“The economic orientation of the Mirziyoyev government relies on international trade and investment for survival, where Karimov’s was inward-looking, autarkic, and eschewed trade.”
Uzbekistan seems to be hoping that these projects can move forward regardless of who is in power in Kabul, adds Murtazashvili. “Tashkent has maintained close relations with the Taliban and the government of Afghanistan’s ‘Heart of Asia’ [policy] aims to benefit from trade and connectivity.”
But, as experts point out, the real story of the conference is not Afghanistan but Uzbekistan. By stepping up on both Afghan peace and regional connectivity, Tashkent has made these the twin pillars of an activist foreign policy, giving Mirziyoyev’s government enhanced stature and newfound influence.