Tolo News: The bodies of 2 more Afghan migrants who were allegedly drowned by Iranian border police earlier this month were found in Harirod River, members of a task team investigating an alleged drowning by the Iranian border police said on Thursday. Iran has previously agreed to cooperate with a probe of the allegation. According to the task team, findings show that the Afghan migrants were allegedly drowned by the Iranian border police. Click here to read more (external link).
Ayesha Tanzeem
VOA News | May 14, 2020
ISLAMABAD, PAKISTAN – A Taliban attack on an Afghan army compound in Gardez city of Paktia province Thursday morning killed at least five civilians and wounded dozens more, including five people from the military.
A spokesman for the army’s 203 Thunder Corps, Aimal Khan Mohmand, told VOA the suicide attacker in an explosives laden Mazda truck managed to damage the walls of the compound.
Afghanistan’s Tolo news has reported that based on social media pictures, the building was “destroyed.”
Taliban spokesman Zabiullah Mujahid claimed responsibility and said the attack was a response to Afghan President Ashraf Ghani’s order to resume offensive operations against the insurgent group. The operations were suspended since the insurgent group signed a landmark deal with the United States in Doha in February to try to end the war.
The attack also comes days after multiple attacks in other parts of the country, including on a hospital in Kabul, killed more than 50 people including newborn babies.
While Taliban denied those attacks, senior Afghan officials, including first vice president Amrullah Saleh, blamed the group for those attacks.
The acting interior minister Massoud Andarabi accused a deadly Taliban faction, the Haqqani network, of having close ties with the local chapter of Islamic State which claimed some of the attacks.
The recent developments may have serious repercussions for the deal signed in Doha.
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Tolo News: The Afghan Ministry of Public Health announced on Thursday that 413 new coronavirus cases were reported in Afghanistan in the past 24 hours, bringing the total to 5,639. Four people have died in the past 24 hours, bringing the known national death toll to 136. The total number of recoveries is 691. So far 19,732 people have been tested in the country. Click here to read more (external link).
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By Ayesha Tanzeem
VOA News | May 13, 2020
ISLAMABAD – Nearly 2.5 million Afghans live in Pakistan as either registered or undocumented refugees. Their lives have been upended by the coronavirus lockdown, but they seem to be getting little attention.
This Afghan refugee settlement in Islamabad doesn’t have electricity or other basic facilities.
Most people here depend on day work for their living. As the novel coronavirus spread and the country went into a partial lockdown, their livelihoods were nearly destroyed.
“These people hardly made $3-4 per day. Some of them picked up paper from the streets or trash for recycling, some worked as motorcycle mechanics. All of them are now sitting at home,” said Abdul Hameed, Afghan Refugee Representative.
An estimated 800 families, or around 5,000 individuals, live in this settlement. Many of them work at the nearby vegetable market.
“Ever since the coronavirus has spread, the authorities don’t allow us to gather inside the market. We wait along the roadside all day long, but no one gives us work,” said Abdul Khaliq, a day worker.
Refugees living in other cities tell similar stories.
On Tuesday, the U.N. High Commissioner for Refugees announced a cash assistance program for some of them. A two-month delay in making the aid available was blamed on a lack of resources.
“We realized that we would need money that we did not have. We had to go very quickly to donors to explain the level of intervention that we wanted to do. We needed to get confident that the donors were going to support that,” said Iain Hall, Deputy Representative of UNHCR Pakistan.
The U.N. agency acknowledges that the money, while helpful, is not enough to help everyone in need. In addition, half of the nearly three million Afghans living in Pakistan don’t have official refugee status and do not fall under the agency’s mandate.
Meanwhile, in this Islamabad settlement, people have no option but to wait.
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Ghani
Press TV
May 13, 2020
Afghanistan’s President Ashraf Ghani has ordered the country’s military to switch to offensive mode from a defensive one in the wake of the latest bout of bloodshed in the war-ravaged country.
“In order to provide security for public places and to thwart attacks and threats from the Taliban and other terrorist groups, I am ordering Afghan security forces to switch from an active defense mode to an offensive one and to start their operations against the enemies,” Ghani said in a televised speech on Tuesday.
The comments came after three militants attacked a maternity hospital in the Afghan capital, Kabul, on Tuesday, killing at least 16 individuals, including two newborn babies and their mothers. There was no immediate claim of responsibility for the attack, but in a statement, the Taliban said they had nothing to do with it.
In a separate attack on the same day, a terrorist detonated an explosive vest at a funeral ceremony in the eastern Nangarhar Province, killing at least 24 people and injuring 68 others.
Daesh terrorist group took responsibility for the funeral bloodshed.
President Ghani pointed the finger at both the Taliban and Daesh.
“Today, we witnessed terrorist attacks by the Taliban and Daesh groups on a hospital in Kabul and a funeral in Nangarhar, as well as other attacks in the country,” Ghani said.
Daesh has been securing a foothold in Afghanistan ever since it was flushed out of its former Middle East bastions. The US has been largely blamed for relocating remnants of the terrorist group to the Central Asian country following their defeat in Iraq and Syria.
On Monday, Afghan forces managed to arrest three senior members of the Takfiri terrorist outfit.
The presidential order to the Afghan military to change posture came months after the Afghan government adopted a defensive stance as part of efforts to save a so-called peace deal between the Taliban and the United States.
The move was meant to show good faith ahead of intra-Afghan peace talks, which to this day have not begun. The Taliban militant group, while involved in a piecemeal prisoner exchange with the Afghan government, has rejected an offer of truce for the Islamic month of Ramadan and has continued attacking government forces.
Meanwhile, US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo condemned the Tuesday terrorist attacks in Afghanistan, saying that the lack of a peace deal had left the country vulnerable to such “appalling” violence.
“The Taliban and the Afghan government should cooperate to bring the perpetrators to justice,” Pompeo said in a statement on Tuesday.
“As long as there is no sustained reduction in violence and insufficient progress towards a negotiated political settlement, Afghanistan will remain vulnerable to terrorism,” he said.
The US signed the deal with the Taliban on February 29. Under the agreement, the militant group agreed to halt attacks on foreign forces in return for the US’s phased withdrawal from Afghanistan.
The militants made no pledge to refrain from attacking Afghan forces.
About 14,000 US troops and approximately 17,000 troops from NATO allies and partner countries remain stationed in Afghanistan years after the US-led invasion of the country that toppled a Taliban regime in 2001.
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Tolo News: The Ministry of Public Health announced on Tuesday that in the past 24 hours 281 positive cases of COVID-19 have been reported in Afghanistan, bringing the total to 4,963. Five people have died in the past 24 hours, bringing total deaths to 127. The total number of recoveries is 610. Kabul is still one of the worst hotspots for COVID-19… Click here to read more (external link).
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The American Conservative: Reports surfaced recently that Trump has been privately pushing his senior military advisors to present a plan to end the war in Afghanistan and bring the troops home. The ostensible causal event is the risk to the troops of an expanding COVID-19 outbreak in the country, but there is a far more fundamental reason why this move should be encouraged: U.S. interests are best served by a military withdrawal from Afghanistan. Click here to read more (external link).