Abbas Karimi
Ariana: Abbas Karami who was recently granted US citizenship after leaving Afghanistan in 2016, scooped his first gold as an American citizen in the men’s 50-meter butterfly S1-S7 in the Indianapolis 2022 Para Swimming World Series on Friday. Click here to read more (external link).
Other Sports News
8am: Local sources in Bamiyan province have confirmed that the Taliban insurgents have arrested 11 women accused of disrupting the support program arranged by the Taliban in the center of the province. The women were arrested on Saturday, April 2. The sources told Hasht-e Subh that three of the arrested women are charged with taking down the banners and eight others are arrested on charges of disrupting the program. Click here to read more (external link).
Detroit Free Press: A story by ProPublica last month first reported on the investigation, saying there are reports of Afghan minors being mistreated in facilities in Michigan operated or housed by nonprofits Samaritas and Starr Commonwealth. The report said some of the allegations include employees hurting the Afghan boys, including striking one while he was praying, and sexual abuse among the minors.
By Abubakar Siddique
April 8, 2022
Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty
A grainy video shows several police officers standing idly as an angry mob beats a young man.
The 30-second video, shared widely this week on social media, purportedly shows a group of Iranian men assaulting a young Afghan migrant.
The video is among several that have been uploaded on social media in recent days. While the authenticity of the viral videos has not been independently verified, the footage has sparked anger among Afghans and prompted a reaction from the Taliban-led government in Afghanistan.
The videos have put the spotlight on the mistreatment of Iran’s sizeable Afghan community. An estimated 3 million Afghans, mostly of them undocumented refugees, live in Iran.
That figure is swelling further as the Taliban’s repressive rule and the worsening economic and humanitarian crisis in Afghanistan drive thousands of people to flee the country every week. Iranian authorities have responded by tightening border controls and deporting scores of Afghans, often violently, every day.
“It is horrible, disgusting, and heartbreaking to see videos of how inhumanly Afghan migrants and refugees are being treated in Iran,” said Zaman Sultani, a South Asia researcher at Amnesty International. “All uses of violence against Afghans in Iran must be thoroughly investigated and perpetrators brought to justice.”
Humiliation And Violence
The videos include footage purportedly showing an unidentified Iranian man humiliating a distraught Afghan teenager.
“Say that you eat shit,” shouts the man in the grainy video. He then orders the Afghan teenager to repeatedly stand and sit.
Another viral video appears to show an Iranian driver grabbing an Afghan man by the arm and brandishing a box cutter. The driver forces the man to utter profanities against Afghans.
Meanwhile, another video appears to show the aftermath of an alleged mob attack on a car carrying Afghan migrants in the Iran’s central city of Yazd. The footage shows the smashed windows of the vehicle.
The emergence of the videos prompted a statement from the Taliban, the militant Islamist group that seized power in August.
“We urge the Islamic Republic of Iran not to harass Afghan refugees,” Taliban spokesman Zabihullah Mujahid told BBC Persian on April 5.
Mujahid also called on Tehran to stop forcibly deporting Afghan refugees and criticized the heavy-handed tactics of Iranian border guards, who have been accused of beating and harassing Afghan nationals.
Faizanullah Nasiri, a senior Taliban Foreign Ministry official, met with Iranian diplomats in Kabul on April 6 to discuss “the treatment of Afghans by [Iran’s] border forces and administrative officials,” according to a ministry spokesman.
Sultani said Amnesty International has documented cases of Iranian security forces beating Afghans trying to enter Iran. “It has resulted in pushbacks and injuries and sometimes death of Afghan people, which violates international law,” he said.
He said the deportations violate the international ban on returning people to countries where they are likely to be abused known as non-refoulement.
Sayed Abbas Badrifar, a media officer at the Iranian Embassy in Kabul, claimed the videos circulating on social media did not reflect reality and were aimed at undermining ties between the two neighboring countries.
“These videos cannot be used to judge the treatment of Afghan refugees in Iran,” he was quoted as saying by Afghanistan’s independent Tolo News channel.
Since seizing power, the Taliban has attempted to curry favor with Iran, a major trade partner and regional power.
Iranian Foreign Minister Hossein Amir-Abdollahian, speaking in China last week, said 5 million Afghans currently reside in Iran. He called on foreign donors and international organizations to “allocate new resources” for Afghan refugees in the country.
History Of Abuse
This is not the first time videos have emerged that appear to show the mistreatment of Afghan migrants in Iran.
In June 2020, Iranian police opened fire on a car carrying Afghan migrants, causing it to explode in flames. Three Afghans were killed and five wounded. Iranian authorities said police fired on the vehicle because they suspected it was carrying drugs and undocumented migrants.
A month earlier, dozens of Afghans illegally crossed into Iran and were detained by Iranian border guards who allegedly beat, tortured, and then forced them to jump into the Harirud, a 1,100-kilometer river shared by Afghanistan, Iran, and Turkmenistan. Many of them drowned.
The two events led Afghans to protest in the streets and on social media to denounce Iranian authorities.
International human rights groups have documented years of violations against Afghan refugees and migrants in Iran, including physical abuse, detention in unsanitary and inhumane conditions, forced payment for transportation and accommodation in camps, slave labor, and the separation of families.
In 2015, Iranian Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei issued a decree allowing all Afghan children to go to school. But Afghans are still denied many other basic services, including access to medical care, jobs, and housing.
US MQ-9 Reaper drone (file photo)
8am: Local sources in Helmand province have confirmed that as a result of U.S. airstrikes on a weapons depot in Helmand province, 30 Taliban militants are killed. According to sources, the U.S. carried out a drone attack on the Taliban’s weapons depot last week at Shorabak Airport. Click here to read more (external link).
Related
Ariana: The International Cricket Council (ICC) will receive a report back from its working group into the issue of Afghanistan women’s cricket within the next two days. Women’s cricket in Afghanistan has faced an uncertain future after the Islamic Emirate took over the country in August last year. Click here to read more (external link).
Akmal Dawi
VOA News
April 7, 2022
Seven American women from various organizations visited Kabul last week despite a State Department advisory warning U.S. citizens against traveling to Afghanistan because of “civil unrest, armed conflict, crime, terrorism, kidnapping and COVID-19.”
The group, including one from a female-led grassroots organization called Code Pink, spent a week in meetings with Taliban officials, local people and women’s rights activists. They said they returned home “disappointed.”
“The purpose [of the trip] originally was to celebrate the opening of the girls’ schools,” Medea Benjamin, co-founder of Code Pink who was with the group, said in a phone interview from her home in San Francisco.
But two days before traveling to Afghanistan, the group was informed that the Taliban, contrary to earlier assurances, had unexpectedly extended their ban on secondary schools for girls.
“We debated whether we should still go and decided it was important to show our support for the girls and try to do whatever we could to persuade the Taliban that that was a very bad decision,” Benjamin said.
Benjamin said Taliban officials told the group during the visit that the school ban was temporary.
“There was so much heartbreak among the young women that we met with,” Benjamin said. “They told us about how their hopes and dreams had been dashed, and how disappointed they were that they weren’t able to join with their brothers, and how important education is to them.”
The school ban has received universal condemnation, including among Islamic scholars inside and outside Afghanistan, who have called on Taliban leaders to reopen schools for girls.
Extreme poverty
Afghanistan has been grappling with massive hunger impacting about 94% of its estimated 36 million people, aid agencies say.
During their weeklong trip, the women witnessed the poverty on Kabul’s streets.
“We saw signs of severe economic distress from malnourished children and very needy people at food distribution sites. … We saw women waiting for bread in bread lines and just signs of economic distress everywhere,” said Kelly Campbell, co-founder of September Eleventh Families for Peaceful Tomorrows.
To avert the looming humanitarian crisis in Afghanistan, the United Nations has called for $4.4 billion in aid for 2022. But donors have pledged only $2.4 billion.
While the United States has been the largest humanitarian donor to Afghanistan with a commitment of $512 million to the U.N. appeal, the women said the U.S. can and should do more to alleviate Afghan suffering.
“The U.S. spent $300 million a day for 20 years on war and occupation, and yet hasn’t even spent the equivalent of two days on the humanitarian appeal,” Benjamin said.
The U.S. war in Afghanistan, which lasted almost two decades, cost more than $2.3 trillion, according to research by the Watson Institute at Brown University.
Frozen Afghan funds
In the aftermath of the Taliban’s takeover of power in August 2021, the U.S. government imposed a freeze on more than $7 billion of Afghanistan’s financial reserves in New York.
The funds are also sought by a group of 9/11 victim families through a lawsuit filed in New York that blames the Taliban for the terrorist attacks in the U.S. in 2001.
In February, President Joe Biden signed an executive order that split the Afghan funds — $3.5 billion to be released to an Afghan humanitarian trust fund and the other half to be held until the lawsuit is settled.
“These funds do not belong to 9/11 families. They don’t belong to the U.S. They don’t belong to the Taliban. They belong to the people of Afghanistan,” said Campbell, who lost a family member in the 9/11 attacks in New York. She added that the freezing of funds has contributed to the humanitarian crisis in Afghanistan.
Campbell said her organization has 275 active members, all family members of those killed in the 9/11 attacks, who strongly oppose the lawsuit filed by another group of 9/11 victim families.
“I haven’t spoken to a single 9/11 family member who’s excited about taking funds from starving Afghan people,” Campbell said.
Campbell and Benjamin said they would like to travel to Afghanistan in the future but until then will advocate for better U.S. policies toward the war-torn country.
“I don’t think a failed state in Afghanistan is in the interests of the United States or the world community. We’ve already seen the results in the past,” Benjamin said.
“We have a lot of interesting information to share with our own government,” said Campbell.
Modern Diplomacy: According to intelligence reports, Taliban’s weapons depot at Boston Billion Pound Base or Shurab Airport in Helmand province was destroyed in an airstrike. A heavy explosion at a weapons depot at the Shurab military base took place on Wednesday last week, a source close to the Taliban said the blast was not caused by fire; relatively, it was an airstrike that targeted the depot, followed by an airstrike that destroyed the depot. Click here to read more (external link).
8am: Local sources in Panjshir province have reported that the National Resistance Front (NRF) forces carried out an attack on a Taliban militants’ base in Mata village of Khenj district of the province on Tuesday night, April 5. According to sources, four Taliban militants are killed and three others injured as a result of the raid. Click here to read more (external link).