Ariana: Mohammad Samim Faizad, a judoka from Afghanistan at the Paris Olympics, was provisionally suspended on Friday after failing a doping test for a banned steroid. The International Testing Agency said: “The ITA reports that a sample collected from judoka Mohammad Samim Faizad from Afghanistan has returned an adverse analytical finding for the non-specified substance stanozolol metabolites.” Click here to read more (external link).
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8am: Badakhshan residents report that the shutdown of these health centers will deprive thousands of women and children in the Baharak district’s Dasht-e Farakh area, Argo district’s Dahan-e Aab area, Warduj district’s Khosrow area, Yaftal district’s Daneshabad area, and the Battash and Miyan-e Dasht areas of Fayzabad City from essential health services, leading to significant difficulties. Click here to read more (external link).
Roshan Noorzai
VOA News
August 2, 2024
Washington — Afghan diplomats and diplomatic missions in Europe, Australia and Canada say they will continue providing consular services despite the Taliban’s recent announcement disavowing them.
The Taliban’s Foreign Ministry announced in a statement Tuesday that it would not recognize the legitimacy of consular services performed at Afghan diplomatic missions in Australia, Canada and 11 European countries.
“[T]he consular services such as deeds, endorsements, NOCs, issuing passports, passport renewal stickers, visa stickers, etc., from the missions in London, Belgium, Berlin, Bonn … Austria, France, Italy, Greece, Poland, Sweden, Norway, Canada and Australia are no longer accepted by MoFA and relevant departments, and the Ministry of Foreign Affairs bears no responsibility toward these documents and no actions will be taken thereof,” read the statement.
Afghan diplomats working in the 13 missions disavowed by the Taliban are the employees of the former Afghan government, which collapsed after the Taliban seized power in August 2021. They have remained at their posts in the years since, helping Afghan citizens with a range of consular services.
Representatives of the missions said they would continue their services without interruption.
“The diplomatic and consular missions of Afghanistan in Europe, Canada, Australia, and elsewhere remain committed to continue providing consular services within the framework of national and international laws and regulations, and in understanding and collaboration with host country authorities,” said a statement issued on Tuesday by the Coordination Council of Ambassadors and General Consulates of the Islamic Republic of Afghanistan.
“I am confident that the consular services [in these countries] would continue as usual,” said Nigara Mirdad, Afghanistan’s deputy ambassador in Poland.
She added that the consular services are permitted by the host countries and provided in accordance with international conventions and laws.
In the council’s statement, the Taliban said they “repeatedly urged” the missions in these countries to “engage” with the Taliban’s Kabul-based rulers, but “unfortunately, the actions of most of the missions are carried out without coordination, arbitrary and in explicit violation of the existing accepted principles.”
Mirdad called the Taliban’s decision “unreasonable” and said that consular services are “transparent and based on Afghan laws.”
She added that the diplomats working in the missions do not recognize the Taliban’s government as it does not have “any internal and international legitimacy.”
“Instead, the Taliban should work on its government’s internal legitimacy and respect human rights and Afghanistan’s commitments to the international conventions and laws,” Mirdad said.
The Taliban’s government is not yet recognized by any country, although China has accepted the credentials of the Taliban’s ambassador to Beijing.
The international community says that to gain recognition, the Taliban must honor their commitment to respect women’s rights and form an inclusive government in Afghanistan.
While the Taliban lack formal international recognition, some countries have handed over their local Afghan diplomatic missions to the Taliban.
In March 2023, the Taliban said they sent diplomats to at least 14 countries.
Last week, the spokesperson for India’s Ministry of External Affairs, Randhir Jaiswal, said in a news conference that “visas to people in Afghanistan are being given and that to and fro movement is happening.”
In November, the Afghan Embassy in New Delhi closed as the diplomats appointed by the former government were not given visas.
Afghan diplomats in Spain and the Netherlands announced in October that they established contact with the Taliban’s Foreign Ministry.
Diplomatic missions in these two countries are not included in the list of missions that the Taliban announced cutting ties with.
Shah Sultan Akifi, former cultural attache of Afghanistan in Moscow, told VOA that the Taliban’s decision would not affect the operations of the 14 diplomatic missions listed in the announcement, but it would “create problems” for ordinary Afghans living in the host countries.
“It will be problematic for Afghans who want to travel to Afghanistan or those who want to attest their documents if the Taliban don’t accept the consular services in these countries,” Akifi said.
Farkhunda Paimani and Noshaba Ashna of VOA’s Afghan Service contributed to this report, which originated in VOA’s Afghan Service.
Khaama: According to an Iranian official in Qeshm, Iran, about 378 shops operated by “unauthorized refugees” have been closed. Omid Mahdavi-Majd, the Prosecutor of Qeshm, Iran, announced the closure of 378 shops that were operated by “unauthorized migrants.” He stated that these closures were executed in collaboration with the Islamic Republic’s security forces. Click here to read more (external link).
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Al Qaeda leader, Ayman al-Zawahri
Afghanistan International: Afghanistan International has obtained the names of Taliban officials involved in transporting and sheltering Ayman al-Zawahiri, the former leader of al-Qaeda, in Kabul. According to the information, Ayman al-Zawahiri was brought to Kabul by Qari Khalid Hikmat, a native of Kandahar and the head of the 08 department of the Directorate General of Intelligence (GDI), the main Taliban intelligence agency Following the publication of a report by the Emirati news outlet Al Akhbar, Afghanistan International continued investigating the case of the al-Qaeda leader’s death. Sources told Afghanistan International that Khalid had travelled from Kabul to Quetta city in Baluchistan province of Pakistan to relocate his family to Afghanistan. In Quetta, he was informed that al-Zawahiri was ill and required urgent medical attention. Khalid left Quetta without his family and went to the remote district of Baghran in Helmand province. Click here to read more (external link).
Ariana: The National Olympic Committee said Friday a team of 11 hikers from Afghanistan and Iran successfully climbed up Shah Foladi, a peak in the Koh-e-Baba Mountain, which stands at 5,140 meters high. The committee stated that the hikers included seven athletes from Herat, three from Bamiyan and one from Iran. Click here to read more (external link).
Other Sports News
By Abubakar Siddique
Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty
August 1, 2024
The killing of Ismail Haniyeh, the political leader of the EU- and U.S.-designated Palestinian terrorist group Hamas, has thrown the Middle East into crisis.
But his assassination in a suspected Israeli strike in Iran on July 31 and the heightened risk of a broader war also have implications in the wider region, including for Iran’s eastern neighbors, Afghanistan and Pakistan.
Experts say Kabul and Islamabad will likely struggle with the security, economic, and political fallout from a major escalation in the Middle East.
But a potential regional war involving Iran is unlikely to directly drag in Taliban-ruled Afghanistan and Pakistan, both of which have cordial relations with Tehran, experts say.
“The attacks will not draw either country into direct participation in the conflicts such as by offering to send fighters,” said Marvin Weinbaum, director of Afghanistan and Pakistan studies at the Middle East Institute think tank in Washington.
Pakistan and the Taliban both directly blamed Israel for Haniyeh’s assassination, which Tehran has also blamed on its archenemy.
Islamabad denounced the killing as an act of “terrorism,” and hundreds of supporters of a Pakistan Islamist party held a symbolic funeral for Haniyeh near Islamabad on July 31.
‘Making Life Harder For Afghans’
Iran is on friendly terms with the Taliban. Tehran is also the biggest trading partner of the cash-strapped and internationally unrecognized Taliban-led government. Kabul is dependent on Iranian ports for most of its imports and exports amid tensions with neighboring Pakistan.
The Islamic republic is also home to around 4 million Afghan migrants and refugees. The remittances they send back home keep many impoverished families afloat in Afghanistan, which has grappled with an economic crisis since the Taliban takeover in 2021.
Graeme Smith, a senior Afghanistan analyst at the Brussels-based International Crisis Group, said rising tensions in the Middle East “could have destabilizing consequences for the fragile situation in Afghanistan.”
Smith said the risk is that a conflict involving Iran will harden the country’s borders with Afghanistan, “making life harder for Afghans.”
He said Afghanistan’s humanitarian crisis, the largest in the world, could worsen if its borders with Iran are closed.
“The exit route from that crisis depends on renewed trade across the region,” he said. “[But it] requires borders opening to the flow of goods and labor.”
Pakistan Not To Become ‘Directly Involved’
Hundreds of thousands of Afghans and millions of Pakistanis work as laborers and traders in the oil-rich Arab Gulf countries.
A potential regional war could disrupt the flow of Afghan and Pakistani migrant workers heading to the Gulf. That would deal a major blow to Afghanistan and Pakistan, both of which are both heavily dependent on remittances sent from abroad.
In Pakistan, some political parties and the media have called for Islamabad to take a more hard-line approach to Israel, which is not formally recognized by the South Asian country.
But Weinbaum said the “general feeling among [Pakistani] policymakers is that the country has enough security concerns of its own not to become directly involved.
Faced with rising militant attacks in the northwestern province of Khyber Pakhtunkhwa and the southwestern province of Balochistan, which borders Iran and Afghanistan, Islamabad’s choices are limited.
“There are also worries about an American reaction if Pakistan makes any military commitments [to Iran],” Weinbaum said.
Afghanistan and Pakistan are home to millions of Shi’ite Muslims. And Iran, a Shi’a-majority country, could look to Shi’ite communities living in its eastern neighbors for recruits in the event of a war.
During the Syrian civil war, Iran recruited, trained, and armed thousands of Shi’ite fighters from Afghanistan and Pakistan to fight. Many of those fighters who survived have returned home as the war has died down.
Torkham border area between Afghanistan and Pakistan
By RFE/RL’s Radio Mashaal
August 1, 2024
Pakistani authorities have banned the entry of Afghan drivers through the Torkham border crossing as of August 1 unless they have passports and visas. Torkham, a critical trade route between Pakistan and Taliban-ruled Afghanistan, had been reopened by Pakistan in January after a 10-day closure prompted by Islamabad’s imposing passport and visa requirements on Afghan drivers. Pakistan initially set an April 1 deadline for compliance, but then extended it until August 1. lslamabad’s move to require visas and passports — documents many Afghans do not have — came as Pakistan accused the Taliban of allowing militants to stage attacks across the border from Afghanistan’s territory.