8am: One noteworthy aspect of Hizb ut-Tahrir’s activities in Afghanistan is that the group focused its activities on northern Afghanistan and areas where it was believed that Taliban opponents had a stronger presence. The unconditional support of this group for the Taliban was evident, indicating that the group’s focus on anti-Taliban areas was deliberate and planned, aimed at laying the groundwork for the return of the Taliban. In the past, there have been suspicions and questions about the roots and origins of Hizb ut-Tahrir, with some commentators linking this party to intelligence agencies. Years ago, Mohammad Ramadan al-Bouti, a prominent Syrian scholar, accused the party in an article of receiving money from the British embassy and published documents in this regard. One of the intriguing aspects of Hizb ut-Tahrir’s activities is its consistent opposition and hostility towards moderate Islamic groups, often vilifying them and inciting young minds against them. This group vehemently opposes Recep Tayyip Erdoğan’s Justice and Development Party in Turkey, yet extends a friendly hand towards more fundamentalist groups like the Taliban. Another fact about this party is that it currently operates freely in Israel, and its activities in that country face no legal obstacles. Click here to read more (external link).
Afghan Special Migration to US Hits Record High
Akmal Dawi
VOA News
February 13, 2024
The number of Afghans granted Special Immigrant Visas, or SIVs, for resettlement in the United States increased by more than 100% last year, according to new U.S. government data.
In 2023, about 26,500 SIVs were granted to Afghans — more than double the previous year’s total of 11,000 and a record since the program’s inception in 2008.
A State Department spokesperson confirmed that more than 18,000 SIVs were issued by U.S. consulates worldwide, with several thousand more Afghans having their status adjusted while already in the United States.
From August 2021 to September 2022, the United States offered Temporary Protected Status to tens of thousands of Afghans evacuated by the U.S. military following the collapse of the former Afghan government.
“We have surged resources and significantly increased the number of staff dedicated to Afghan SIV application processing,” the spokesperson wrote in an email to VOA.
The unprecedented surge in SIV issuance comes amid strong demands from veteran and advocacy groups for the speedy resettlement of Afghans who worked for the U.S. military and programs in Afghanistan between 2001 and 2021.
Many activists accuse the Taliban of targeting and detaining SIV-qualified Afghans, even as the United States has continued evacuating SIV applicants under the Taliban rule over the past 2½ years.
Since 2008, nearly 120,000 SIVs have been awarded to Afghans.
As of January, 9,000 principal SIVs remained available, with more than 100,000 applications submitted. Of those, 67,000 awaited approval last year.
To address the backlog, the State Department asked Congress to approve 20,000 additional SIVs last year. The request is still pending.
“The department will not be able to issue SIVs after the numbers allocated by Congress have been exhausted,” said the spokesperson.
Refugees and asylum seekers
The United States has also increased its intake of Afghan refugees and asylum-seekers over the past year, alongside the surge in SIV issuance.
More than 4,600 Afghan refugees were admitted in 2023, marking the highest number in more than two decades, according to figures from the Department of State.
In addition to the SIV program, Afghans, particularly those who worked for civil society organizations before the Taliban’s return to power, can apply to U.S. refugee and humanitarian resettlement pathways from third countries.
“The U.S. government is prioritizing the evacuation and resettlement of SIV cases and very few cases outside of the SIV program have been resettled,” Devon Cone, an expert with Refugee International, told VOA.
Human rights groups accuse the Taliban of implementing misogynistic policies targeting educated women, even those who did not work for the U.S. mission in Afghanistan. Taliban officials have denied such criticism.
“These women almost never qualify for SIVs and very few if any have been resettled,” Cone said.
Since the Taliban’s return to power, hundreds of thousands of Afghans have fled their country fearing the Taliban’s repressive policies and worsening economic conditions.
Surge in Arrests and Ongoing Extortion: Taliban Demand Money and Arms for Prisoner Releases
Taliban fighters (file photo)
8am: Local sources from Kabul and northern provinces report a surge in Taliban detentions of both former government military personnel and civilians. Dozens of individuals have been detained in recent weeks across these provinces and taken to undisclosed locations. The Taliban allegedly detain these individuals on various pretexts and release them upon payment or the provision of weapons. Sources further claim that detainees face severe torture in Taliban prisons to compel them to pay. Meanwhile, civil activists accuse the Taliban of extortion and hostile behavior, highlighting the group’s daily disrespect toward Afghans. They suggest that Taliban pressures have prompted more citizens to flee or attempt escape. Political analysts attribute the Taliban’s actions to playing on ethnic and religious prejudices, noting similarities to their previous rule. Click here to read more (external link).
Mass Grave with 100 bodies found in Southeastern Afghanistan
Khaama: Local officials in the Southeastern Province of Khost have reported the discovery of a mass grave in the center of the province, stating that the remains of at least 100 bodies have been discovered from this mass grave. Basmillah Bilal, the mayor of the Taliban in Khost, has stated that this mass grave was discovered during the construction of a small dam in the Sarbani area of the province’s central region. According to him, the individuals buried at this discovered location were killed in 1979 and then buried in a mass grave. Click here to read more (external link).
Tolo News in Dari – February 13, 2024
Doha meeting won’t grant Legitimacy to Taliban Govt
Ryan Crocker
Khaama: Former US Ambassador Ryan Crocker asserts that the upcoming international meeting on Afghanistan in Doha won’t grant legitimacy to the Taliban’s government. Crocker told Voice of America that the United Nations, as the meeting’s host, should clarify that the Taliban regime doesn’t deserve recognition and shouldn’t be considered a legitimate government. Criticizing the Biden administration, Crocker accuses it of neglecting Afghanistan and disregarding the bans on women’s education and work. Click here to read more (external link).
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Analysts See Limits to China, Iran, Russia Collaboration With Taliban
Roshan Noorzai
Zheela Noori
VOA News
February 12, 2024
WASHINGTON — Since the Taliban seized control in August 2021, China, Iran and Russia have been steadily courting Afghanistan’s de facto government for influence. The three countries have kept their embassies open in Kabul and were among the first to hand over Afghan embassies to the Taliban at home.
Last month, Moscow, Beijing and Tehran were the most high-profile participants at the Taliban’s first conference on regional cooperation in Kabul.
But what are the real prospects of China, Russia, Iran and the Taliban cooperating in the region?
Analysts tell VOA that while Beijing, Moscow and Tehran may be united in a common goal to oppose the U.S. in the region, that is perhaps the only area where their interests align, analysts say.
“Anti-Americanism is the one idea” that brings China, Iran and Russia together, said Alex Vatanka, founding director of the Iran Program at the Middle East Institute in Washington.
He told VOA that Tehran, Moscow and Beijing “want to push the United States out of Eurasia and Central Asia … [but] how much can they on the operational level cooperate? That’s a big question.”
He added that “anti-Americanism” alone cannot keep the partnership together as there “is nothing ideological to bring them together.”
According to a newly released U.S. State Department’s strategy document, China, Iran and Russia seek “strategic and economic advantage, or at a minimum, to put the U.S. at a disadvantage.”
“China, Iran and Russia have cultivated very close ties with the Taliban,” said Nilofar Sakhi, a lecturer at the Elliott School of International Affairs at George Washington University, adding that they are trying to “have political and economic influence in the region.”
Despite close ties, none of the three countries has formally recognized the Taliban’s government and their interests in the region all differ.
Pragmatic approach
Late last month, China was the first country to formally accept the credentials of the Taliban’s ambassador.
Some former diplomats and analysts say the move was akin to formal recognition. Sun Yun, the director of the China Program at the Stimson Center in Washington does not agree.
China still has to “formally extended political recognition to the Taliban’s government,” Sun told VOA. Even so, compared to Western countries, China has established “very close” relations with the Taliban in Afghanistan.
“China adopts a pragmatic approach in Afghanistan,” said Sun, adding that early on Beijing realized that the U.S.-backed former Afghan government did not have “the popular support to continue” governing Afghanistan.
Beijing had been cultivating ties with the Taliban for years before the Taliban’s takeover of Kabul.
Sun said that “what has happened in the past two and a half years substantiated that assessment that the Taliban regime is not going anywhere.”
She added that security, economic and political factors are “all part of a broader consideration that comes to the foundation of China’s policy toward Afghanistan.”
For China, one key concern is about any breach of militancy from Afghanistan into its western region of Xinjiang.
Beijing also has economic interests in Afghanistan, including extending the China-Pakistan Economic Corridor, a flagship of the Belt and Road Initiative, to Afghanistan and investing in minerals in Afghanistan.
China has also been vocal in criticizing the U.S. and NATO for freezing Afghanistan’s assets and “leaving the Afghan people in a serious humanitarian crisis” in the country.
Complicated past
Though Iran has not formally recognized the Taliban, it handed over the Afghan embassy in Tehran to the Taliban in February 2023.
The Middle East Institute’s Vatanka said that the Iranian regime has not recognized the Taliban because of some bilateral issues, including border security and water distribution.
Last year, tensions between Iran and the Taliban over the Helmand River’s flow of water escalated to a deadly clash, which killed two Iranian security guards and one Taliban border guard.
Iran and the Taliban have had complicated relations in the past.
During the civil war in Afghanistan in the 1990s, Iran was supporting the forces fighting against the Taliban, particularly after the Taliban killed nine Iranian diplomats in the northern city of Mazar-e Sharif in 1998.
“It is still too early for the Iranians to forget what the Taliban was” when it was in power in the 1990s, said Vatanka.
Full of contradiction
Like Iran, Russia was another country that supported forces fighting the Taliban during the civil war in the 1990s.
Ghaus Janbaz, a former Afghan diplomat to Moscow, told VOA that Moscow’s policy toward Afghanistan has been “full of contradictions” in recent years.
Janbaz added that Russia is politically supporting the Taliban, but at the same time, its “military and security officials criticize the Taliban and cite an uptick in terrorist activities in Afghanistan.”
He said that before the Taliban’s takeover, Moscow had diplomatic relations with the former Afghan government, but it also supported “the Taliban at all the levels.”
“It is similar now. Russia has ties with the Taliban, but an anti-Taliban leader was invited to Moscow,” Janbaz said. “They say it was not an invitation by the government, but nothing happens without the approval of the government in Russia.”
An Afghan anti-Taliban leader, Ahmad Masoud, participated in a conference on Afghanistan in Russia in November 2023.
Janbaz says that despite Moscow’s close ties with the Taliban, “I do not think that in the near future, Moscow will extend recognition to the Taliban’s regime.”
He said that similar to China and Iran, Russia’s policy toward the Taliban is driven by regional geopolitics.
“Tactically they might have an alliance against the West, but there are strategic differences” between these countries, Janbaz said.
This story originated in VOA’s Afghan Service.
Afghan Health Care Hit By Drop In Foreign Aid, Taliban Rule, Says Rights Watchdog
Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty
February 12, 2024
A sharp drop in foreign aid to Afghanistan has heavily impacted that country’s public health-care system, exacerbating “malnutrition and illnesses resulting from inadequate medical care,” Human Rights Watch said in a new report published on February 12. HRW also said Taliban restrictions on women and girls have impeded access to health care, jeopardizing the right of millions of Afghans to medical services. The Taliban takeover of Afghanistan in August 2021 drove millions into poverty and hunger after foreign aid stopped almost overnight. Sanctions against the Taliban rulers, a halt on bank transfers, and frozen billions in Afghanistan’s currency reserves have cut off access to global institutions and the outside money that supported the aid-dependent economy before the withdrawal of U.S. and NATO forces.
Copyright (c) 2024. RFE/RL, Inc. Reprinted with the permission of Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty, 1201 Connecticut Ave NW, Ste 400, Washington DC 20036.
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Tolo News in Dari – February 12, 2024
After Years of Captivity, Two Ex-Guantanamo Inmates Return Home
Ayaz Gul
VOA News
February 12, 2024
ISLAMABAD — Taliban authorities in Afghanistan said Monday that two of its nationals who were detained and rendered to the United States-run prison in Guantanamo Bay more than 20 years ago had returned home.
An Interior Ministry spokesman said on his X social media account that Abdul Karim and Abdul Zahir landed in Kabul early morning from Oman, where they had been transferred in 2017 and held under house arrest until now.
Abdul Mateen Qani said that senior Taliban officials were among those “who greeted and welcomed” the two men at the international airport in the Afghan capital.
“They both spent more than 20 years in trouble, and the Islamic Emirate facilitated their return,” Qani added. Both Zahir and Karim had been under surveillance without the right to travel for seven years in the Gulf kingdom, he said.
Zahir, a resident of the Afghan province of Logar, was arrested by American forces just outside Kabul in May of 2002 before being transferred to Guantanamo.
Karim, a resident of the southeastern Afghan province of Khost, was moved to the prison in 2003 after having been arrested in neighboring Pakistan by local authorities before being handed over to U.S. custody.
President George Bush’s administration opened the controversial Guantanamo detention center just months after the U.S.-led coalition forces invaded then-Taliban-ruled Afghanistan to punish them for sheltering al-Qaida planners of the September 2001 terrorist strikes on America.
The detention center located in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, was originally designed to detain and interrogate individuals who were suspected of having links to al-Qaida operatives and their Taliban hosts and who were captured by U.S. forces during their two-decade-long “war on terror” operations in Afghanistan.
However, the prison received many suspects from several other countries over time.
Human rights groups have, from the outset, criticized the U.S. military prison and demanded its closure, citing reported abuses, torture, and prolonged detentions of inmates, many without charges or trial.
Guantanamo Bay has been the subject of extensive litigation. In 2006, the U.S. Supreme Court found that detainees were entitled to minimal protections under the Geneva Conventions, despite the assertions of the George W. Bush administration. The United Nations has demanded the closure of Guantanamo Bay, as has Amnesty International, which found in 2005 that the facility “has become the gulag of our times, entrenching the notion that people can be detained without any recourse to the law.”
Most of the inmates, including senior Taliban leaders, have been released over the years. One Afghan prisoner, Muhammad Rahim, remains in detention at Guantanamo.
The Taliban reclaimed power in Kabul in August 2021 when all U.S.-led coalition forces withdrew from the country after battling Taliban insurgents in the years that followed the invasion of Afghanistan.
The Islamist rulers have reimposed their harsh interpretation of Islamic law, barring women and girls from work and receiving an education beyond the sixth grade, deterring the global community from recognizing the de facto government in Afghanistan.