Rashid Khan
Tolo News: Afghanistan Cricket Board (ACB) at an event on Thursday appreciated cricket star Rashid Khan for his recent achievements, especially his selection as the Men’s T20l Cricketer of the Decade by the International Cricket Council. Afghan sports officials said the achievement by Rashid Khan is a big pride for the country and that Rashid can be a role model for other youth in Afghanistan. Click here to read more (external link).
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Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty
December 31, 2020
British-based charity Save the Children says more than 300,000 Afghan children are struggling to survive in freezing winter conditions without proper clothing and heating.
The ongoing 19-year conflict there has forces thousands of children to flee their homes and seek shelter in camps for internally displaced people (IDPs), the charity said in a statement on December 31.
“There they risk hunger, disease, including COVID-19, even death from freezing temperatures,” the statement said.
Chris Nyamandi, Save the Children’s country director in Afghanistan, said that early snowfall in northern Afghanistan has “impacted children particularly badly.”
“The most vulnerable children are those whose schools have shut because of the worsening winter conditions,” he said. “Their families don’t have the money to buy winter clothing. Instead, children are forced to huddle at home to escape the bitter cold.”
Every year, schools are closed until March in the coldest areas of Afghanistan, a mountainous country where many areas are hit by heavy snow and temperatures drop as low as minus-30 degrees Celsius.
Save The Children has said it will provide “winter kits” to more than 100,000 families in 12 of Afghanistan’s 34 province before March.
The kits should include fuel and a heater, blankets, and winter clothes for children, including coats, socks, shoes, hats, and Vaseline.
The charity said it will also provide shelter-repair kits for families displaced by the war and 12 weeks’ rent for families at risk of homelessness.
In November, the charity said the war in Afghanistan had killed and wounded more than 26,000 children from 2005-19.
Those figures, it said, made Afghanistan the world’s deadliest country for children.
Radio Free Afghanistan
December 31, 2020
KABUL — An Afghan official says an explosion has struck a car carrying an employee from the Afghan president’s office in Kabul, critically wounding the official and killing his driver.
Police said on December 31 that a magnetic bomb was attached to the car carrying Jawid Wali, deputy director of the advisory affairs department.
Wali was “critically wounded” and his driver died, according to the head of the administrative office of the president, Fazel Fazly.
Kabul police spokesman Ferdaws Faramarz initially said three people had been wounded in the blast.
No group has immediately claimed responsibility for the attack, which comes as targeted killings of government employees, journalists, clerics, politicians, and rights activists have become more common in recent months.
There has been rising violence and chaos across Afghanistan despite ongoing talks between government negotiators and the Taliban in Qatar to try put an end to decades of war.
With reporting by dpa and TOLOnews
Tolo News: The US President Donald Trump received information earlier this month that China sought to pay non-state actors to attack American forces in Afghanistan, a senior administration official told CNN. The intelligence, which will be declassified by the Trump administration, was provided to the President in his daily brief on December 17, the official said. NSA Robert O’Brien discussed the information with the President that same day, the official told CNN. Click here to read more (external link).
Ariana: Minister of Public Health Ahmad Jawad Osmani said on Thursday that cases of the new strain of Coronavirus had been detected in Pakistan and India and urged Afghans not to travel to either country for at least four weeks. He said Afghanistan’s public health ministry was working on ways to detect this variant. Click here to read more (external link).
Osmani
Tolo News: The Afghan Minister of Public Health Ahmad Jawad Osmani on Thursday said that President Ashraf Ghani has asked him to step down from his post. “Yesterday the honorable president asked me to resign from my post, but I reasoned with him that there are no legal obstacles in my way to continue my job,” he said. Click here to read more (external link).
Amrullah Saleh
1TV: Fuel tanks of motorcycles with two people on them will be filled with sugar or their catalytic converters will be filled with pellets for their engines to get disabled, officials warned on Wednesday. First Vice President Amrullah Saleh, who is in-charge of Kabul security, said that videos captured by security cameras show that most of targeted killings involve use of motorcycles with two people on them. Click here to read more (external link).
Other Security News
Ayesha Tanzeem
VOA News
December 30, 2020
ISLAMABAD – An Afghan air force pilot was gunned down Wednesday in the southern Afghan province of Kandahar.
Police confirmed to VOA the killing of a member of the military but did not share any other details.
A security source, who did not want to be named, said Massoud Atal, a military helicopter pilot, was shot and killed by unidentified gunmen roughly a kilometer away from the governor’s house on Wednesday.
Atal was a resident of Kandahar and was trained in the Czech Republic and the United Arab Emirates.
No group has claimed responsibility for the pilot’s death.
Targeted killings, especially of journalists and activists, have been on the rise in Afghanistan recently. At least five journalists have been killed in the country in the last two months.
On Tuesday, Afghan Interior Minister Massoud Andarabi blamed the increase in attacks on the Taliban.
Briefing the Afghan Senate, Andarabi said suspects arrested in relation to the recent killings have revealed that the Taliban has created a cell to target people such as journalists, government employees, and civil society activists.
The killings are taking place just as the Taliban is set to begin a second round of peace talks with an Afghan government-sanctioned negotiating team in Doha on January 5, 2021.
The two teams agreed upon the code of conduct in the first round and will start negotiating the agenda of the talks. The government side is expected to demand that a cease-fire, or a significant reduction in violence, be the top agenda item.
The Taliban have resisted announcing a cease-fire.