Following the Taliban takeover in Afghanistan, the previous government’s funding for a school for Afghans in Tajikistan’s capital was cut off. A school official hopes wealthy Afghans can step in, but so far, parents of the students have had to help cover the costs to pay rent for the school.
Related
Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty
September 22, 2021
The United Nations says it is releasing $45 million to help prevent Afghanistan’s battered health-care system, which the World Health Organization (WHO) said was “on the brink of collapse” following the Taliban’s takeover in mid-August.
Afghanistan’s health-care system was plunged into deep crisis after the Taliban swept into power in mid-August, complicating aid deliveries and leaving many health facilities understaffed.
Countries and international aid organizations have suspended disbursements for Afghanistan to prevent the Taliban from gaining access to aid money, while tens of thousands of Afghan doctors and other medics have fled the country and many female staff stayed away from work.
“Afghanistan’s health system is on the brink of collapse,” WHO chief Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus and regional director Ahmed al-Mandhari said on September 22 after a visit to Kabul. “Unless urgent action is taken, the country faces an imminent humanitarian catastrophe.”
In a statement on September 22, UN aid chief Martin Griffiths said that $45 million will go to WHO and the UN Children’s Fund (UNICEF), allowing them with the help of partner nongovernmental organizations to keep health facilities operating until the end of the year.
“Medicines, medical supplies and fuel are running out in Afghanistan. Cold chains are compromised. Essential health-care workers are not being paid,” Griffiths said, adding that “allowing Afghanistan’s health-care delivery system to fall apart would be disastrous.”
“People across the country would be denied access to primary health care such as emergency caesarian sections and trauma care.”
Tedros said nine of 37 hospitals treating COVID-19 patients have closed, while “all aspects of the COVID-19 response have dropped, including surveillance, testing, and vaccination.”
While 2.2 million people had been vaccinated before August, immunization rates have “decreased rapidly” in recent weeks, and 1.8 million doses in the country remain unused.
“Swift action is needed to use these doses in the coming weeks,” Tedros said.
Because fewer female nurses are going to work, female patients are also staying away from the clinics. However, the WHO continues to invest in training women in this field, it said.
The WHO says it has brought 170 tons of medical supplies to Afghanistan since the Taliban took power. To continue the aid, the WHO needs some 38 million dollars for the next four months.
Pakistan Army chief General Qamar Javed Bajwa (L) and Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI) chief Lt General Faiz Hameed (R).
India Today: As Pakistan attempts to assert its influence in Kabul, there is a major tussle going on between Pakistan Army chief General Qamar Javed Bajwa and Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI) chief Lt General Faiz Hameed. Sources in the intelligence agencies said the tussle has come to a point where the Pakistan Army chief has been trying to remove Hameed from his post, but has not been able to do so due to the strong influence of the Pakistani spy agency. Click here to read more (external link).
Zahra Joya
The Guardian (UK): Just over a month ago, Zahra Joya left her house in Kabul to walk to her office, as she had been doing every day. From this small office, Joya, a journalist, ran Rukhshana Media, the news agency she founded last year to report on the stories of women and girls across Afghanistan. By the time she returned home in the afternoon, however, men with guns were on street corners and her sisters were shut inside their house, shaking with fear. In just a few hours, normal life had been obliterated. Click here to read more (external link).
Seattle Times: The last time that the militant group ruled the country, in the late 1990s, it outright banned music. So far this time, the government set up by the Taliban hasn’t taken that step officially. But already, musicians are afraid a ban will come, and some Taliban fighters on the ground have started enforcing rules on their own, harassing musicians and music venues. Click here to read more (external link).
Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty
September 22, 2021
Seven female tae kwon do athletes are resettling in Australia after fleeing Taliban-controlled Afghanistan last month.
Australian Taekwondo said on September 22 that the seven women are completing quarantine this week following what it described as a high-risk evacuation via Pakistan after the Taliban seized power in mid-August.
The group is expected to settle in the city of Melbourne in the southeastern part of mainland Australia, where they plan to study, work, and continue to compete in tae kwon do.
The athletes are in Australia on humanitarian visas.
Australian Taekwondo said that it is working to evacuate an eighth female tae kwon do athlete who remains in the Afghan capital, Kabul.
Players from Afghanistan’s women’s soccer team are among dozens of athletes reportedly given visas to live in Australia as tens of thousands of Afghans, fearing reprisal attacks and repression, fled the country last month after the Taliban toppled the Western-backed government in Kabul.
When the Taliban imposed its brutal rule on Afghanistan from 1996 to 2001, girls were not allowed to attend school and women were banned from work, education, and sports.
The hard-line Islamist group has suggested it is now more moderate, but the Taliban-led, all-male government has rolled back the rights of girls and women in recent days.
Australian Taekwondo’s chief executive Heather Garriock said former Australia national soccer captain and humanitarian advocate Craig Foster worked with the Australian government, Australian Taekwondo, and Oceania Taekwondo on the evacuation of the seven female tae kwon do athletes.
“The lives of these women were in danger,” Garriock said, adding that they “will be welcomed with open arms” in Australia.
One of the athletes, Fatima Ahmadi, said she was grateful for the help of everyone who helped her and her teammates escape.
“I feel so good about arriving in Australia,” said Ahmadi. “We are safe here without any danger.”
Afghanistan’s new rulers have indicated that women and girls will face restrictions in playing sports, with a senior Taliban official saying earlier this month it was “not necessary” for women to play sports.
A sports official in the Taliban-led administration later said top-level leaders of the group were still deciding.
According to human rights groups, many women in Afghanistan are now dressed in burqas covering their whole bodies and leave their homes only with a male guardian. Most have stopped other activities to avoid violence and reprisals.
With reporting by AP and ABC NEWS
Other Sports News
ISIS trainees
Jeff Seldin
VOA News
September 22, 2021
WASHINGTON — Those watching the Taliban establish a government and assert control over Afghanistan are growing ever more wary of pledges by the group’s leaders to make sure no terrorist organization can ever again use the country as a base for attacks against the United States.
The Taliban’s counterterrorism commitment was a key part of the 2020 Doha Agreement that paved the way for the U.S. exit and eventual military evacuation from Afghanistan. Yet despite some praise for the businesslike way the Taliban cooperated with Washington’s withdrawal, there have been few signs of any real action.
“Now is the time for the Taliban to show their commitment to not allow Afghan soil to be used by ISIS-K or any other terrorist group that threatens the security of the United States or its allies, and certainly not innocent Afghans for that matter,” a State Department spokesperson told VOA on the condition of anonymity in order to discuss the sensitive subject.
“We are closely watching the Taliban’s actions across the country,” the spokesperson added. “We’ll hold them accountable.”
Top U.S. military and intelligence officials have been even more blunt.
“I don’t know that they’re doing anything at all for us right now,” General Kenneth “Frank” McKenzie, commander of U.S. Central Command, said Friday when pressed by VOA on whether the Taliban were making good on their counterterrorism promise.
Threat to US
The director of the National Counterterrorism Center (NCTC) told lawmakers Tuesday that with the Taliban now in control of Afghanistan, terror groups like al-Qaida, long intertwined with the Taliban, and the Islamic State’s Afghan affiliate, known as IS-Khorasan or ISIS-K, could try to target the U.S. homeland in as little as a year.
“We’ve got to monitor and assess whether that’s going to happen faster,” Christine Abizaid said.
Taliban leaders have repeatedly pushed back against accusations that they will allow groups like al-Qaida and IS-Khorasan to flourish.
Taliban denial
On Tuesday, Taliban spokesperson Zabihullah Mujahid went even further, denying that either of the groups had a foothold in the country.
“We do not see anyone in Afghanistan who has anything to do with al-Qaida,” Mujahid told a news conference in Kabul.
“The ISIS that exists in Iraq and Syria does not exist here,” he added. “We are committed to the fact that, from Afghanistan, there will not be any danger to any country.”
U.S. and international intelligence officials, however, say the evidence shows otherwise.
According to a United Nations assessment from June, al-Qaida, and its affiliate, al-Qaida in the Indian Subcontinent (AQIS), have as many as 500 members in Afghanistan. AQIS, it said, “operates under the Taliban umbrella from Kandahar, Helmand (notably Baramcha) and Nimruz provinces.”
Rise in terror fighters
More recent U.S. assessments concluded that since the Taliban takeover, there are at least “2,000 hardcore ISIS fighters” roaming in the country. Previous U.N. assessments indicated the number might be even higher.
In written testimony submitted to Congress on Tuesday, the NCTC’s Abizaid further warned that IS-Khorasan “maintains a steady operational tempo in Afghanistan and retains the ability to execute attacks in cities like Kabul.”
And both IS-Khorasan and al-Qaida could soon see their numbers start to grow.
“We are already beginning to see some of the indications of some potential movement of al-Qaida to Afghanistan,” Central Intelligence Agency Deputy Director David Cohen said last week during an intelligence and security conference just outside of Washington.
Western counterterrorism officials and aid workers on the ground in the region have further warned that both al-Qaida and IS-Khorasan have been laying the groundwork for a sure but steady expansion once U.S. troops finally left the country.
Furthermore, despite a string of recent attacks against the Taliban across Afghanistan claimed by IS-Khorasan, officials and analysts say they have seen few signs of a serious or concerted crackdown by Taliban forces since they took power.
Moves like giving a leading role to Sirajuddin Haqqani, a senior leader of the Haqqani Network which has maintained close ties to both al-Qaida and IS-Khorasan, have also gotten their attention.
“[It] certainly concerns me,” Federal Bureau of Investigation Director Christopher Wray said Tuesday at a Senate hearing on threats to the U.S. homeland, calling the Taliban itself a “terrorist organization.”
“We are concerned about what the future holds, whether it’s the possibility of another safe haven, whether it’s the possibility of ISIS-K being able to operate more freely in a less secure environment,” Wray added.
Still, there are some who see hope that the Taliban will keep both al-Qaida and IS-Khorasan in check.
“They know that the last time they harbored al-Qaida and it engaged in an outwardly directed attack, an attack on our homeland, certain things followed, which I believe the Taliban would have an interest in not seeing repeated,” the State Department spokesperson told VOA. “So, whatever their views on al-Qaida, there is a strong disincentive built in to allow it to engage in outwardly directed attacks.”
Natural enemies
The Taliban’s long-standing ties with al-Qaida also make it a natural enemy of IS-Khorasan.
As recently as March of last year, U.S. officials credited the Taliban with helping oust IS-Khorasan from its Afghan strongholds.
But some more recent intelligence assessments, not from the U.S., reported the Taliban had been using IS-Khorasan, through the Haqqani Network, to attack the now defunct U.S.-backed Afghan government.
And even if the Taliban want to crack down on IS-Khorasan cells, they may not have the right capabilities.
“I don’t think what we’ll see from the Taliban will be traditional [counterterrorism], as we think of it,” Colin Clarke, director of policy and research at the global intelligence firm The Soufan Group, told VOA.
“It’s much easier to play a spoiler role than to perform effectively in the role of counterinsurgent,” he said. “I think the Taliban could be effective in clearing an area, but it will struggle more with holding it.”
“At the end of the day, it’s insurgent fratricide, and we’ll see guerrilla-on-guerrilla engagements between the Taliban and ISIS-K … assassinations, hit-and-run attacks, the use of IEDs, and other classic insurgent tactics.”
Ayaz Gul in Islamabad contributed to this report.
Related
Sohail Shaheen
Ariana: Taliban has asked to address world leaders at the United Nations in New York this week and nominated their Doha-based spokesman Suhail Shaheen as Afghanistan’s UN ambassador, according to a letter seen by Reuters on Tuesday. Click here to read more (external link).
Reuters: Indian officials said on Tuesday they had seized nearly three tonnes of heroin originating from Afghanistan worth an estimated 200 billion rupees ($2.72 billion) amid the chaos following last month’s takeover of the country by the Taliban. Click here to read more (external link).