Al Jazeera: Campaigners raise concerns against The Hague-based court’s plan to exclude US forces from war crimes investigation. The International Criminal Court’s (ICC) decision last year to launch an investigation into alleged war crimes had raised hopes that grave atrocities committed during decades of conflict in Afghanistan would not be swept under the rug. Click here to read more (external link).
Cricket Australia Postpones First-Ever Match With Afghanistan Amid Taliban Uncertainty
Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty
November 5, 2021
Cricket Australia (CA) says it is postponing the hosting of a first-ever match against Afghanistan until “the situation is clearer” in the South Asian country following the Taliban takeover.
CA confirmed on November 5 that the test match will not take place on November 27 as scheduled in the city of Hobart.
Cricket Australia in September said it would have “no alternative” but to call off the test following reports that women’s cricket would be banned in Afghanistan following the Taliban takeover.
“Following extensive consultation with relevant stakeholders, Cricket Australia and the Afghanistan Cricket Board have agreed to postpone the inaugural men’s test match against Afghanistan,” CA said on November 5.
“CA is committed to support growing the game for women and men in Afghanistan and around the world. However, given the present uncertainty, CA felt it necessary to postpone the test match until a later time when the situation is clearer.”
CA added that it looked forward to “hosting both the Afghanistan women’s and men’s team in the not too distant future.”
The Afghan Cricket Board has sought the support of other full members of the International Cricket Council (ICC) as it seeks to regain its place in world cricket.
Taliban leaders have said they will not repeat the harsh rule of their previous government. However, many people inside and outside of the country have expressed concerns.
When previously in power, the Taliban banned most girls’ education and forbade women from going out in public without a male guardian.
Based on reporting by Reuters, AP, and AFP
Copyright (c) 2021. RFE/RL, Inc. Reprinted with the permission of Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty, 1201 Connecticut Ave NW, Ste 400, Washington DC 20036.
Tolo News in Dari – November 5, 2021
Four Female Activists Died Under Mysterious Circumstances in Mazar-E-Sharif
8am: According to the female activist’s relatives, they have contacted local Taliban officials to track down the perpetrators, but have not received a positive response. According to them, there are currently four unidentified bodies of young women in the hospital morgue, whose families have not yet been found. Click here to read more (external link).
Afghans Say They Will No Longer Use Banks
Tolo News: A number of Kabul residents said Thursday they no longer want to keep their money in the country’s banks. They said they will take out all of their previously deposited funds. Since the fall of the former government, Afghans have faced challenges in withdrawing their money from the banks and said they no longer want to deposit funds. Click here to read more (external link).
Rise In Islamization In Uzbekistan Has Progressives, Ethnic Russians Concerned
By Mansur Mirovalev
Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty
November 4, 2021
TASHKENT — Sergei grew up in Namangan, the eastern Uzbek city where Islamic traditions persisted despite decades of atheist Soviet rule.
As a young communist in high school in the 1980s, Sergei was ordered to a nearby bazaar to forcibly remove burqas — known locally as “paranjas” — from any Uzbek woman who dared wear one.
The authorities demonized and ridiculed the heavy, black, and shapeless paranjas with horse-hair veils that made women look eyeless as a sign of “medieval obscurantism.”
State campaigns against such Islamic dress went hand in hand with efforts to give women access to higher education and economic independence — and were hailed as “the awakening of the Oriental woman.”
“There was a lot of yelling and protests,” said Sergei — a gaunt, mustachioed bookstore owner — in his apartment in Tashkent. “I never thought they’d be back.”
But some four decades later, they are the most vivid visual example of the breakneck speed of Islamization that is taking place in Uzbekistan, Central Asia’s most populous country of some 36 million.
Coupled with the real or presumed threat of a resurgent Taliban in neighboring Afghanistan, the Islamization has alarmed many and sown panic among Uzbekistan’s ethnic Russian and Russian-speaking community.
Some of them — including Sergei, who owns a small bookstore and for decades dismissed the idea of moving to Russia or elsewhere — want to leave because of it.
Revival Or Radicalization?
While paranjas are a rare sight in the capital, Tashkent, many women — including teenage girls — are seen sporting hijabs and dressing conservatively. Their numbers have increased manyfold since President Shavkat Mirziyoev’s government lifted a ban on the wearing of head scarves in public places in July.
And many men grow full beards — something deemed impossible and even perilous during the 1991-2016 rule of first Uzbek President Islam Karimov, a former Communist Party apparatchik who initially resisted the Soviet Union’s dissolution.
His government even instructed police to detain and forcibly shave full-bearded men and interrogate them about their alleged “Islamic radicalism.” Thousands of Muslims who practiced their faith outside government-approved mosques were jailed, according to rights groups and Western observers.
After coming to power in 2016, Mirziyoev initially amnestied many jailed Muslims and secular dissidents and gradually eased religious freedoms — a policy that was recently reversed with suspected Islamists being jailed, as was outlined in a report for the U.S. Council on International Religious Freedom.
These actions are no doubt being taken because of the speed of Islamization in the country. “One can witness the growing number of radical youth, and the government [indirectly] encourages it [with its policies],” Nigara Khidoyutova, who was forced out of Uzbekistan after co-founding the opposition Free Farmers Party in 2005, told RFE/RL.
“Coupled with the growing corruption, a weak civil society, the illiteracy of the youth, omnipresent lawlessness and injustice, it creates a combustive mix that only needs a spark,” she said.
Inspired By The Taliban
Another recent event — the Taliban’s takeover of Afghanistan in August — made the Islamization look more worrisome to Uzbekistan’s ethnic Russian community of some 720,000 (there were about 1.65 million ethnic Russians in the Uzbek S.S.R. in 1989).
Some religious Uzbeks hailed the Taliban’s triumph, saying on Telegram channels and social networks that they were inspired by the “expulsion” of the Americans from the war-torn country and supported Afghan society being based on Shari’a law.
Timir Karpov, a human rights advocate and founder of the 139 Documentary Center art gallery, told RFE/RL that “ideas of the Taliban” have gained real traction in Uzbekistan. “That’s why [so many ethnic Russians and Russian speakers] are tense and have their suitcases ready,” he said.
The Taliban sent delegations to the Central Asian countries and Moscow to assure them that their ethnic Pashtun movement no longer embraces international jihadists such as Osama bin Laden and will treat Afghanistan’s minorities — including Uzbeks and Tajiks — fairly.
But many Uzbeks remember the panic caused in 1999, when a squad of Taliban-backed Uzbek Islamists briefly seized a village in southern Kyrgyzstan and demanded passage to Uzbekistan’s section of the Ferghana Valley.
Even though Bishkek and Tashkent said the insurgents had eventually been “liquidated,” the raid spurred a small exodus of ethnic Russians, Russian speakers, and even progressive ethnic Uzbeks.
Creating ‘Mankurts’
Famous Kyrgyz writer Chingiz Aitmatov created the term “mankurt” for his 1980 novel The Day Lasts More Than A Hundred Years to describe an unthinking slave — a condition created by a form of torture involving a shrinking camel hide tied around one’s shaved head.
Nationalists all over Central Asia use the macabre term to describe their ethnic kin — Kazakhs, Kyrgyz, Turkmen, and Uzbeks — who grew up speaking Russian. And the communists did everything they could to breed generations of “mankurts.”
Soviet Uzbekistan absorbed several massive migrations, including the hundreds of thousands of ethnic Russians, Ukrainians, and Jews who were evacuated to its warmer, warless climes during the World War II Nazi invasion of the U.S.S.R.
Many opted to stay — and witnessed the arrival of entire deported ethnic groups — Crimean Tatars, Pontic Greeks, Volga Germans, and Koreans from Russia’s Far East. After the 1966 earthquake that leveled parts of Tashkent, tens of thousands more people arrived from all over the Soviet Union to help rebuild the city.
The “Sovietization” equaled the Russification of locals and the newcomers. Many urban Uzbeks sent their children to Russian-language schools — while almost every Uzbek male went through two years of compulsory military service in which they spoke compulsory Russian.
Another major factor that deprived Uzbeks of their immense cultural heritage was when Moscow replaced their Arabic-based alphabet in the 1920s with a Latin one — and then a Cyrillic one in the 1930s.
The teaching of Arabic in Uzbekistan was reduced to one university, while the U.S.S.R.’s only theological school functioned in the ancient city of Bukhara — and was shown to foreign Muslim dignitaries such as Indian Prime Minister Lal Bahadur Shastri or champion boxer Muhammad Ali as proof of “religious freedom.”
Theological works by Muslim renaissance men such as Avicenna were no longer available to generations of Uzbeks, and their religiosity was reduced to the knowledge of basic prayers and rituals.
Breeding Jihadism
But in places like the densely populated Ferghana Valley, Islam remained entrenched in many walks of life. One of the valley’s main cities, Namangan, played a crucial role in the birth of Uzbek jihadism.
The 1981-91 Soviet-Afghan war gave thousands of Central Asian conscripts a chance to see a deeply religious Muslim society.
Two war veterans and Namangan natives, Tohir Yuldash and Juma Namangani, declared Shari’a law in Namangan — their hometown — in 1991 and publicly humiliated President Karimov when he arrived for talks and made mistakes in the Islamic prayer ritual.
Yuldash and Namangani later fled to Afghanistan to launch the militant Islamic Movement of Uzbekistan (IMU) that organized the 1999 incursion into Kyrgyzstan and later fought against the U.S.-led coalition in Afghanistan.
Years after the IMU founders’ death, many of its members pledged allegiance to the Islamic State group and morphed it into the Islamic State-Khorasan group that is currently battling the Taliban.
Uzbekistan’s Russians are not always familiar with the intricacies of their fight in Afghanistan — but see how it influences religious Uzbeks. “The Taliban may not come here today, but they affect the minds of locals,” Fyodor, Sergei’s son-in-law, told RFE/RL. He is also packing up to leave for Russia, citing Islamization as the main reason. He is ready to sell his small publishing company and apartment in a luxurious building.
Fyodor is worried about the future of his 5-year-old daughter, Polina, who is the only ethnic Russian in her kindergarten class. “She has no one to play with,” he said as she quietly watched a Russian cartoon on his phone.
Copyright (c) 2021. RFE/RL, Inc. Reprinted with the permission of Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty, 1201 Connecticut Ave NW, Ste 400, Washington DC 20036.
As Taliban Attempts To Transform From Insurgency To Government, Suicide Bombers Remain Key To Its Strategy
FILE — Tarana Akbari, 12, screams in fear moments after a suicide bomber detonated a bomb in a crowd at the Abul Fazel Shrine in Kabul, Dec. 06, 2011. Photographer Massoud Hossaini won a Pulitzer Award for this photo in 2012.
By Abubakar Siddique
Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty
November 4, 2021
During its 20-year insurgency, the Taliban employed suicide bombers as a lethal tool to kill foreign and Afghan government troops and terrorize the civilian population.
Even now, as the Taliban attempts to transform from an insurgency into a government, its contingent of trained suicide bombers remains central to its military and political strategy, experts say.
In a victory parade after retaking power, the Taliban displayed its suicide bombers and arsenal of explosives-laden suicide vests. The parade triggered outrage among many Afghans who said Taliban suicide attacks had killed hundreds of civilians over the years.
The militants also announced the formation of a new “martyrdom brigade” made up of suicide bombers, in a move that experts say is an attempt to rebrand its suicide bombers as elite fighters ready to protect the new government.
“The current Taliban leadership seeks to retroactively take ownership of suicide bombing in all its forms and to give it a new meaning that will help it transform a decentralized insurgency into a unified government,” says David Edwards, a professor of anthropology at Williams College.
He says the new suicide bomber brigade is intended to “confer legitimacy on the Taliban leadership as it attempts to turn itself into a semblance of a government with regular troops under its command and not just covert agents of violence.”
Edwards also noted that the Taliban’s would-be suicide bombers were “members of elite cadres who parade in regimental order wearing colorful uniforms that showcase the different types of suicide bomber and their function.”
In October, the Taliban announced that it was deploying its “martyrdom brigade” along the border with Tajikistan. The move came amid tensions between the Taliban-led government and Dushanbe, which accused the group of monopolizing power.
Abdul Basit Badar, the head of the brigade, told RFE/RL’s Radio Azadi in October that the suicide bombers were “ready to defend our country at any cost.”
“This brigade is ready to be deployed to our borders whenever there is fighting or a threat on our borders,” he said, adding that his unit was equipped with U.S. and Russian-made weapons.
‘Ideological Messaging’
The Taliban’s acting interior minister, Sirajuddin Haqqani, held a gathering for the families of suicide bombers at a luxury hotel in Kabul last month. During the gathering, he lauded suicide bombers for their “sacrifice” and promised their families land and money.
Haqqani is head of the notorious Haqqani network, the lethal arm of the Taliban. The network is a U.S.-designated terrorist organization and Haqqani is among the FBI’s most-wanted fugitives.
“I want to do something for the families of our martyrs that reverberates with the entire nation,” said Haqqani, according to an audio recording of his October 18 speech obtained by RFE/RL. “I would like to give them a plot of land and a special card that identifies them as members of the families of our martyrs so that their status is even higher than ours.”
Haqqani sought to defend the Taliban’s use of suicide bombers, saying that “without fighters seeking martyrdom, we will not be able to fight the infidels,” in reference to foreign forces and the former Afghan government.
Haqqani also revealed the religious justification that the Taliban has used to carry out suicide bombings.
Recalling how the Taliban conducted the January 2018 suicide attack on the Intercontinental Hotel that killed 40 people, Haqqani said the commander leading the assault “greeted me and swore that Prophet Muhammad is personally leading their operation.”
In response, some in the audience wept and many shouted “Allahu Akbar,” or “God is great.”
Edwards says the Taliban has “turned the tactic of suicide bombing into the centerpiece of its ideological messaging and the suicide vest itself into its central symbol.”
‘Glorifying Suicide Bombings’
Sami Yousafzai, a veteran journalist who has reported on the Taliban since its emergence in the 1990s, says by praising suicide bombers the Taliban is alienating both the Afghans it hopes to rule and the international community it needs to fend off an economic and humanitarian crisis.
“Instead of trying to unite Afghans with a narrative of peace after claiming to have won the war, they want to bask in what they view as their glory and celebrate tactics such as suicide bombings that killed and maimed many Afghan civilians,” he says.
But Yousafzai says the Taliban is not united in using suicide bombers as a pillar of its political strategy.
“Glorifying suicide bombings is something even sane voices within the Taliban were keen to avoid because it is preventing them from gaining support at home and legitimacy abroad,” he says.
The Taliban’s all-male government is dominated by hard-line veterans and loyalists, many of whom are under UN and U.S. sanctions for their ties to terrorism. The Taliban-led government, which is almost exclusively made up of Pashtun clerics, has not been recognized by any country.
There has been infighting between Taliban hard-liners and more moderate figures, who are keen to gain international recognition and local legitimacy.
The Taliban is not the only group employing suicide bombers.
The rival Islamic State Khorasan Province (IS-K) extremist group, which has been waging an intensifying war with the Taliban, has conducted a series of deadly suicide bombings targeting the Shi’ite minority and the new government.
Afghans who had hoped that the Taliban takeover would spell an end to decades of war are now bracing for more violence, including suicide bombings.
On November 2, at least 19 people were killed, including a Taliban commander, and dozens more wounded in a gun and bomb assault on a military hospital in Kabul. IS militants claimed responsibility for the attack.
“We still have to live in fear of these attacks,” said Nasima, a former government worker.
Copyright (c) 2021. RFE/RL, Inc. Reprinted with the permission of Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty, 1201 Connecticut Ave NW, Ste 400, Washington DC 20036.
Taliban leader warns of infiltrators
Mullah Hibatullah Akhundzada
Al Jazeera: The supreme leader of the Taliban, Haibatullah Akhunzada, has warned the group that there may be “unknown” entities among their ranks who are “working against the will of the government”. Click here to read more (external link).
Fact check: Did the Afghan cricket board really thank India for ‘paying’ well?
Geo News: While fans in the stadium thoroughly rooted for their favourite sides to keep players’ spirits high, a conspiracy started brewing on Twitter regarding the disappointing performance of the Afghan side. The microblogging platform exploded with memes and claims that the Afghan cricket team had allegedly ‘fixed’ the match. Click here to read more (external link).
‘Empty Shell’: Extreme Depression, Suicidal Thoughts Haunt Afghan Women Under Taliban Rule
By Ron Synovitz
RFE/RL’s Radio Azadi
November 4, 2021
Life has become a nightmare of despair for 22-year-old Maryam Rezaei since the Taliban seized power in Afghanistan less than three months ago.
In early August, before the Taliban stormed into her neighborhood in the western city of Herat, Rezaei was among more than 10,000 women who were studying at Herat University.
She also earned money as a journalist at a local radio station.
But now, despite Taliban promises to let women receive an education, there is still no word about when she might be allowed to go back to her university studies.
Confined to her home under the Taliban’s strict rules for women, Rezaei has given up hope of ever working again.
She told RFE/RL’s Radio Azadi that she feels the onset of extreme depression and often thinks about committing suicide to escape her plight.
“It is really hard for me when I think about the fact that I have no freedom, no security, and no basic rights,” Rezaei says.
“I have lost everything that I have worked for and all of my goals,” she says. “It makes me lose my temper. I feel like an empty shell of a human being. I am in captivity and I am just waiting for my death.”
After toppling the internationally recognized government in Kabul, the Taliban promised to show more moderation than during its brutal rule from 1996 to 2001, when girls were barred from attending school and women were prevented from working outside their homes.
But Afghan women accuse the new, all-male Taliban-led government of breaking its promises. The militants have banned many girls from attending secondary school. The vast majority of women have been ordered not to return to work. And Afghan women protesting their plight have been attacked or detained by Taliban fighters.
Many Afghan women say the return of Taliban rule feels like being sentenced to a life in prison.
Shayestah, a former employee of an Afghan government agency in Kabul, says she is also suffering from extreme depression.
The Taliban’s repressive rules have left many Afghan women unemployed. For Shayestah, the loss of her job has wreaked havoc on her family’s income in the midst of a worsening economic crisis.
Most disheartening, Shayesteh explains, is the feeling that she has lost all of her dreams about the future along with the values that she cherished.
“Our outlook has been destroyed,” Shayesteh tells RFE/RL. “I have lost my job and I am worried about my future. My spirit is in a very bad way.”
“Most Afghan women have been fired and their duties are unknown at the moment,” she says. “Since our future remains unclear, it has negatively affected our thoughts and emotions.”
Good Old Days?
Rezaei says she now looks back at the years before the Taliban’s return to power as “the good old days.”
But studies on mental health issues in Afghanistan during the past two decades suggest such feelings are only relative to the current plight of Afghan women.
Researchers note that improvements in the freedoms, rights, and quality of life for Afghan women were painfully gradual under previous governments.
They conclude that although there were positive developments for women’s rights and empowerment, progress was often constrained by socio-cultural impediments and conservative Islamic views about the role of women in Afghan society.
Meanwhile, ongoing war and poverty intensified depression and anxiety disorders among the highly traumatized population.
A study published last June as part of a mental health initiative of the World Health Organization (WHO) revealed that nearly half of all Afghans suffer from psychological stress and are impaired by mental health problems.
That national survey, led by McGill University psychiatry professor Viviane Kovess-Masfety, found that post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) is Afghanistan’s most prevalent mental health issue.
It also found that PTSD risk was higher for Afghan women than men, and that Afghan women who suffer from PTSD are “nine times more at risk of suffering from depression.”
“Curiously, PTSD diagnosis was not familiar to psychiatrists in Afghanistan,” Kovess-Masfety said. “When we were conducting our validity studies on cases, the [Afghan] psychiatrists did not find any PTSD cases in their outpatient clientele, whether depressed, anxious, or cases with substance-use disorders.”
Kovess-Masfety concluded that trauma has been so common among Afghans for so long that having symptoms of PTSD “did not cause mental health consultation, whereas sadness, loss of pleasure, and the other depressive symptoms were considered as abnormal.”
Her survey found that only 12 percent of Afghans mentioned the “consequences of trauma events” to describe why they sought help for mental health problems.
That compared to 65 percent who have sought help in recent years because of “sadness” and 27 percent because of “anxiety.”
Now, since the Taliban’s return to power, Afghan psychiatrists say they are seeing an increase in the number of women who seek help for depression.
“Most of our patients lately are women — women’s rights activists, former government employees, journalists, and women who were actively employed under the previous Afghan government but have now lost their jobs,” says Wahid Nourzad, head of the mental health department at Herat District Hospital.
“These days, we really have many patients,” Nourzad told RFE/RL. “Some of them are suffering from poverty and unemployment. There also has been an increase in domestic violence against women and children.”
Kabul-based psychiatrist Walid Hussainkheil says he thinks the main causes of increased depression among Afghan women are poverty, unemployment, and isolation under the Taliban’s new rules.
“Their social connections are broken,” he explained. “They move away from social gatherings and they think of suicide, which is very dangerous.”
Suicidal Tendencies
Even before the Taliban’s return to power, nearly 2 million Afghan women had been diagnosed with severe depression.
Studies based on the records of the previous government’s Health Ministry confirm that major depressive disorder (MDD) and domestic violence were the main causes of attempted suicide by Afghan women.
Ayesha Ahmad, an expert on global mental health at St. George’s University in London, notes that Afghanistan has long been the only place in the world where the suicide rate for women is higher than for men.
In a 2017 essay based on her research into a nationwide trend of Afghan women committing suicide by setting themselves on fire, Ahmad warned that 80 percent of the country’s estimated 3,000 suicides each year were women.
She noted that the rate of domestic violence against women and girls in Afghanistan was among the highest in the world.
“Eighty percent of marriages take place without the consent of the bride, who is often a child,” Ahmad said. “An estimated 10 percent of all marriages are a result of ‘baad’ practice,” an Afghan tribal custom where a girl or woman from a convicted criminal’s family is given as compensation to the victim’s relatives as a servant or a bride.
Ahmad found that Afghan women who attempted suicide and survived were often abandoned by their families because of the taboo that suicide carries.
She also found that “socio-cultural beliefs and taboos” have created a barrier that prevents many Afghan women from disclosing their mental health issues to medical professionals and seeking help.
“Afghan women would not be setting themselves alight unless the pain they have inside is more than the pain of flames,” Ahmad said. “The lack of space for a woman’s narrative, and limited modes of written and spoken expression, mean that a woman’s suffering or sadness is confined to her body and mind.”
“The flames are a symbol of the fire she is experiencing within herself and her home,” Ahmad concluded. “The vivid sacrifice of life through self-immolation is, ultimately, the only form of defense she holds. Her only agency is her decisions around her death.”
Psychiatrists say patients who suffer from extreme depression often respond positively to changes in their environment, recreation, and travel.
Kovess-Masfety’s study concluded last June that education also was an effective choice of intervention for clinically depressed Afghan women.
But those treatment options have vanished under the restrictions imposed on women by Afghanistan’s new Taliban-led government.
That has Afghan psychiatrists bracing for further increases in the number of women with depressive disorders — including those who attempt suicide.
Written and reported by Ron Synovitz with reporting by RFE/RL’s Radio Azadi.
Copyright (c) 2021. 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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