Ariana: New Zealand crushed a billion Indian dreams and breezed into the semi-finals of the Twenty20 World Cup with an eight-wicket victory against Afghanistan in a key Super 12 match on Sunday. Click here to read more (external link).
Other Sports News
Yama Siawash
8am: Dawood Siawash the father of Yama Siawash today (Sunday, November 7) demanded the photos of the Central Bank cameras in the first year of his son’s assassination. Dawood Siawash also blamed ex-President Mohammad Ashraf Ghani and former Central Bank Governor Ajmal Ahmadi for not identifying his son’s murderer. Click here to read more (external link).
Child getting polio drops (file photo)
Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty
November 7, 2021
A polio vaccination drive across Afghanistan, the first of its kind in years, is scheduled to be launched on November 8, the United Nations Children’s Fund announced.
“Vaccinate your #children against polio and protect their future!” the UN agency urged families in Afghanistan via Twitter on November 7.
UNICEF and another UN agency, the World Health Organization (WHO), announced last month that the Taliban leadership had given its support to resuming house-to-house polio vaccination across Afghanistan.
The nationwide vaccination campaign was negotiated with the Taliban leadership by the WHO and UNICEF, but security concerns still exist as polio vaccination teams have been attacked in the country in the past.
The Taliban in the past accused polio vaccination teams of gathering intelligence on their militants, but they are now the de facto government of Afghanistan after toppling the internationally backed Kabul government in August.
The inoculation campaign “will be the first in over three years to reach all children in Afghanistan, including more than 3.3 million children in some parts of the country who have previously remained inaccessible to vaccination campaigns,” the WHO and UNICEF said in a statement on October 18.
Health officials say the drive aims to cover nearly 10 million children under the age of 5 against the virus, which can cause paralysis and death.
Afghanistan and Pakistan are among only a few countries in the world where polio is still endemic.
With reporting by dpa
Ariana: Afghan carpet sellers said on Saturday that their sales have declined and that it has become difficult to export to international markets. “We still have products, but our sales are very low. We used to sell three or four carpets a day, but now we sell that number a week.” Click here to read more (external link).
More Economic News
8am: The World Health Organization (WHO) has said in a recent census of the COVID-19 situation in Afghanistan that 40 people have been infected with the virus in the last 24 hours. The statistic was published by the WHO on (Friday, November 5). By the registration of newly infected patients, the total cases of COVID-19 have increased to 156,363. Click here to read more (external link).
Tolo News: In the second day of the football tournament in the capital city of Kabul, four teams played against each other. The first match was held between Simorgh Alborz and De Maiwand Atalanformer, with Simorgh Alborz winning 3-0 on Saturday morning..The second match was held between Toofan Harirod and Oqaban Hindukush later in the afternoon, with Toofan Harirod winning 3-1. Click here to read more (external link).
Reuters: It was a split second decision. Mirza Ali Ahmadi and his wife Suraya found themselves and their five children on Aug. 19 in a chaotic crowd outside the gates of the Kabul airport in Afghanistan when a U.S. soldier, from over the tall fence, asked if they needed help. Click here to read more (external link).
By RFE/RL’s Radio Azadi
November 6, 2021
Two people have been arrested in connection with the killing of four women, including a rights activist, in the northern city of Mazar-e Sharif.
A Taliban Interior Ministry official confirmed the arrests in a video statement posted on Twitter on November 6, saying the suspects confessed to luring the women to the home where their bodies were discovered this week.
The official did not say if the suspects had confessed to the killings, and offered no motive.
One of the victims has been identified as Frozan Safi, 29, a university lecturer and women’s rights activist with the Zainuddin Mohammad Babar Cultural Center. Safi sought to join her fiance abroad and feared of her future under the Taliban, which seized control of the country in mid-August, according to the director of the center.
The director told AP that Safi left her home three weeks ago to meet with someone she believed could help her leave Afghanistan.
With reporting by AP and AFP
By RFE/RL’s Radio Azadi
Michael Scollon
November 5, 2021
Hundreds of school-aged girls in Afghanistan are getting around the Taliban’s efforts to stymie their education by going online, giving them the opportunity to continue to learn everything from computer programming to sculpting to yoga psychotherapy.
“It sends a clear message to the Taliban,” said Maryam, who sees continuing her education under Afghanistan’s new hard-line rulers as a challenge. “Bring it on; we can promote our classes online. We will never stop the progress of our country.”
Maryam, who provided only her first name to RFE/RL’s Radio Azadi, is one of about 1,000 girls who have signed up to take classes with the Herat Online School since it was launched just weeks after the Taliban seized power in mid-August.
The school is the brainchild of Angela Ghayour, an Afghan-born educator who lives today in Brighton, Britain. Ghayour left the western city of Herat as a child in the early 1990s to escape the devastating civil war in Afghanistan and realized while living as a refugee in Iran that she had a knack for education.
The school’s name is a nod to her native city of Herat, but the courses are available free of charge to girls anywhere in Afghanistan or elsewhere with access to the Internet, including Afghan refugees in Iran who have been denied an education.
“The goal is to prevent discrimination in education,” Ghayour said in written comments to RFE/RL. “In Afghanistan, gender discrimination has deprived girls and women of their right to education. In Iran, Afghan families are discriminated against in education because they do not have residence permits.”
Ghayour lists potential students’ and teachers’ lack of access to mobile phones and the Internet as the school’s biggest hurdle.
“I see girls studying at night because their father works outside the home during the day and the smartphone is not at home,” Ghayour said. “So, the girls wait for their father to come home, and then use his smartphone to go online and learn.”
While Ghayour, teachers, and managers volunteer their services, the school collects donations to help students get connected.
“The Herat Online School started the day after the Taliban entered Herat with the motto ‘the pen instead of the gun,’” Ghayour said of the Taliban’s capture of the city just days before it took the capital, Kabul, on August 15.
“Even before they closed the doors of universities and schools to girls, there were fears that the same story would repeat itself and women would be deprived of education and jobs for years by the Taliban,” Ghayour said.
“Because of my years of experience teaching Persian literature to bilingual children from afar, which also yielded good results, I decided to teach Afghan girls with the help of volunteer teachers from around the world.”
Students say that the school provides a lifeline to their future education.
“Through the online school in Herat, we wanted to continue our lessons with the arrival of the Taliban and take advantage of the opportunity that has been created for us,” a student named Fatemeh told Radio Azadi.
“The online school in Herat became a window of hope for all the girls who were concerned,” she said. “They can no longer afford not to be able to study.”
The fears that their education would end are not unfounded. When the Taliban was last in power, from 1996 to 2001, its strict interpretation of Islam barred girls from going to school and women were banned from both work and education.
The Taliban has attempted to assuage concerns that it will return to its brutal style of rule, saying just days after taking control that it was “preparing for the education of high-school girls as soon as possible.” But the extremist group then issued a blanket ban on the education of girls over the age of 7 — grades six to 12.
And while the ban is not being enforced in some areas — girls have since been allowed to return to both private and state-run secondary schools in five northern provinces, and the Taliban authorities recently announced that a women’s-only institute, the Moraa Education Complex in Kabul, will provide education for orphaned girls — obvious concerns remain.
Even under the previous government’s comparatively liberal view on girls’ education, more than one-third of girls over the age of 15 were illiterate as of 2019, according to government statistics.
In September, UN Deputy Secretary-General Amina Mohammed called on the international community to support Afghan women and prevent a reversal of the two decades of gains in girls’ education that followed the Taliban’s ouster in 2001, after which millions of girls enrolled in school.
“You can be assured that we will continue to amplify your voices and make it a zero condition that girls must have an education before the recognition of any government that comes in,” Mohammed said during a panel discussion on the sidelines of the UN General Assembly.
The Taliban government has yet to be recognized by any country, in part because of the previous regime’s legacy of terrorism, brutality, and its stance on girls’ and women’s rights.
The course offerings at the Herat Online School include several classes that could potentially be at odds with the Taliban’s belief system.
Music, for example, has been banned by the Taliban, although the militant group’s position has been inconsistent. The arts have also suffered previously under the Taliban.
Yet art classes, sculpting, calligraphy, music, and even yoga psychotherapy are on offer by the Herat Online School.
Already about 200 teachers are working with the school, and another 300 volunteers are at the ready. The school works just like any other, with tests and student evaluations.
“The establishment of the Herat Online School proves one thing,” Ghayour told RFE/RL. “The Afghan people have reacted negatively to the Taliban and will resist.”
Written by RFE/RL senior correspondent Michael Scollon, based on reporting by RFE/RL’s Radio Azadi.