Tolo News: Qatar Foreign Minister Sheikh Mohammad bin Abdulrahman Al-Thani said the Islamic Emirate’s move in banning the women and girls from education is a step backward, adding that the Islamic Emirate can learn from Qatar how to run an Islamic system. Click here to read more (external link).
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By RFE/RL’s Tajik Service
October 1, 2021
Russia has urged Tajikistan and Taliban-ruled Afghanistan to take “mutually acceptable measures” to resolve tensions along the Tajik-Afghan border amid reports of an increased military build-up on both sides.
Tajik President Emomali Rahmon has refused to recognize the Taliban-led government and condemned the militant group for alleged human rights abuses in the Panjshir Valley, which was the last pocket of resistance to the group.
The Taliban has accused Dushanbe of meddling in Afghanistan’s internal affairs.
Ethnic Tajiks make up more than a quarter of Afghanistan’s 38-million population, but the Taliban is predominately Pashtun, the largest ethnic group in the war-torn country.
Last week, Rahmon reiterated his previous calls for the Taliban to form an inclusive government in Afghanistan with the participation of all political and ethnic groups in order to allay tensions.
Russia is “concerned about the growing tension in Tajik-Afghan relations against the background of the mutually acrimonious statements by the leaders of both countries,” Foreign Ministry spokesman Alexey Zaitsev told reporters in Moscow on October 1.
Zaitsev said the Taliban has revealed that tens of thousands of fighters have been deployed in the northeastern province of Takhar, which borders Tajikistan.
Russian RIA news agency cited Taliban spokesman Bilal Karimi as denying the movement was building up its forces at the Tajik border.
Tajikistan’s Foreign Ministry did not immediately respond to the comments.
Taliban spokesman Zabiullah Mujahid last week said that members of the Taliban’s special forces unit had been deployed to Takhar to beef up security in the region.
Mujahid added that Taliban fighters took over an airport in the neighboring Afghan province of Kunduz, which also borders Tajikistan.
During the Taliban’s lightning military offensive in July, Tajik Foreign Minister Sirojiddin Muhriddin expressed concern as the militants seized large swaths of territory near the border with the Central Asian nation.
Tajikistan that month also urged the Russia-led Collective Security Treaty Organization’s member states to help strengthen security along the Tajik-Afghan border.
Since then, the alliance has staged military drills in Tajikistan and Kyrgyzstan.
Russia and Uzbekistan, which also borders Afghanistan, have also held joint exercises near the Uzbek-Afghan border.
With reporting by TASS, Interfax, RIA Novosti, and Reuters
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Press TV
September 30, 2021
Story by Alireza Hashemi
Over the past several weeks, the world watched as the Taliban bounced back to power in Afghanistan, effectively nulling the war that had been launched by the United States 20 years earlier to eradicate them.
No country has so far recognized the caretaker government formed by the Taliban following their takeover of Afghanistan, and there is widespread speculation that the former militants will not be able to properly govern the country on their own.
Still, the Taliban have become all but a solid force in the country, even though they conquered Afghanistan too conveniently, as foreign forces awkwardly withdrew and as the Afghan military put up zero resistance. At least for now, the Taliban seem resolutely in power.
In Iran, Afghanistan’s immediate neighbor to the west, the rise of the Taliban has prompted debates in political circles about potential threats and opportunities. One matter is of particular concern: how will the Taliban’s seizure of power impact the long-running dispute between Iran and Afghanistan over shared water resources?
Iran has good reason to be concerned. A recent report by the Iranian Parliament’s Research Center said 282 out of 1,245 Iranian cities are currently suffering from water shortages. The situation is especially concerning in Iran’s southeast. An Iranian lawmaker from the region warned in 2016 that 25% to 30% of the region’s population had left over the past two decades because of water shortages.
There are hopes that the creation of a stable government in Kabul that ends the permanent state of war in the country could offer a better chance of alleviating the water scarcity in Iran’s southeast, which is hit by declining rainfall as well as water mismanagement. But there are also concerns that a new Taliban government would be even more uncompromising than a previous regime that was run by the Taliban from 1996 to 2001.
A long-running feud
A dispute over access to the river Hirmand (called Helmand in Afghanistan) has been going on for one and a half century. The river begins in Hindu Kush mountains and flows over a thousand kilometers before feeding the Hamoun Lake, shared between Iran and Afghanistan. The lake, designated a world biosphere reserve in 2016 by UNESCO, is of top importance for the environment and economy of the largely arid and poor regions of Iran’s southeast.
The two countries signed a treaty in 1973 to share the waters, which stipulated that Afghanistan would each year release around 850 million cubic meters of water to Iran. But the treaty was never implemented in full and negotiations never advanced, as Afghanistan plunged into decades of instability and various governments adopted different policies toward Iran. In 1999, for instance, the Taliban’s previous government totally shut down the flow.
After the 2001 US-led invasion of Afghanistan, Iran frequently complained that far less water was entering Iran than was agreed under the treaty. Tehran has also objected to the development of dams on the river that further restricted the rivers’ flow.
In late March this year, following the opening of the Kamal Khan dam on the river, Afghanistan’s then-president Ashraf Ghani used discourteous language to say that Tehran would have to offer Afghanistan oil for any amounts of water above what had been agreed in the 1973 treaty, which is 850 million cubic meters per year.
Many ordinary Iranians reacted with fury, and bilateral relations were strained. Iran said the dam would significantly decrease the water’s flow and cause the further drying up of the Hamoun Lake. But Ghani — who fled Kabul earlier this year as the Taliban arrived at the gates of the Afghan capital — dismissed Iran’s concerns, arguing that the construction of dams was meant to ensure water security and wouldn’t affect Iran’s share.
Reasons for optimism
Since their return to power, the Taliban have been striking a less confrontational tone toward Tehran. Top Taliban officials have said both Afghanistan and Iran, as two Muslim countries, must enjoy fair access to shared water resources.
Further boosting optimism among the Iranians, reports emerged in recent weeks that more water had been flowing to Iran since the Taliban took power, even though the Taliban rejected those reports.
Potentially, then, there is room for talks between Iran and the new rulers in Kabul on the shared water resources. Any negotiations could even involve the environmental flow to feed Hamoun wetlands, which was not part of the 1973 treaty negotiations.
Hossein Rabiei, an assistant professor of Political Geography at Kharazmi University, told Press TV’s website that there were reasons to be optimistic about cooperation by the Taliban. However, Mr. Rabiei said all rulers, the Taliban included, would base many of their political decisions on economic and social considerations as well.
“The Taliban government might refuse to give Iran its fair share of water if the Afghan nation faces a serious drought. They might also use water as their only leverage to extract concessions from Iran if they cannot find ways to ease their energy shortages or if they need access to international waters,” Mr. Rabiei said.
Some speculate that the friendlier Taliban behavior may be a tactical decision. Nozar Shafiei, an Iranian professor of international relations and a former lawmaker, said the Taliban might be hoping to buy time to solidify their grip on Afghanistan, citing the failure of the previous Taliban regime to observe the 1973 treaty.
But Mr. Shafiei also raised the possibility that the new Taliban government might act more tactfully, considering that it vitally needs Iran’s assistance for running the land-locked country.
“Iran might be able to solve its water problem in eastern regions through other resources, including the Persian Gulf. But the Taliban might not be able to find a replacement for the many opportunities Tehran could offer,” he told Press TV’s website.
Many uncertainties ahead
Aside from the water issue, there is a host of other areas where Iran could hope to enlist Afghan cooperation, including to prevent more Afghan migrants coming to Iran, fight drug trafficking, eliminate the presence of militant groups on Iran’s borders, and expand trade. In return for Afghan cooperation in those areas, Iran can contribute to Afghanistan’s future development.
Hamed Hekmatara, a PHD student of political geography at Tehran University, said Iran could both resolve the water issue and advance the war on drug trafficking by offering assistance to the Taliban in the agriculture sector.
“The Taliban have banned poppy farming and asked foreign governments to help replace poppy cultivation with other agricultural products. Iran can help improve farming technologies and practices and provide farmers with efficient irrigation systems,” Mr. Hekmatara said.
“This allows Iran to get rid of the long-running problem of drug trafficking. Tehran can also ask the Taliban for more water in exchange for the assistance. This would be a win-win situation,” he added.
On Wednesday (September 29), AFP reported that prices of opium in Afghanistan had skyrocketed following an announcement by Taliban spokesman Zabihullah Mujahid last month that the Taliban did not want to see “any narcotics produced” in the country anymore.
Previously, the Taliban have been no friend to Iran. It remains to be seen whether mutual interests would encourage collaboration, including in the vital area of water resources, where cooperation could mean better life for drought-affected communities on both sides of the border.
(Editing by Hossein Jelveh)
WSJ: The Taliban have displaced hundreds of families belonging to Afghanistan’s Shiite Hazara community in central Afghanistan, reinforcing fears of renewed persecution against a minority that suffered under Taliban rule in the past. The evictions this week in the Gizab district of Uruzgan province… Click here to read more (external link).
Al Qaeda leader, Ayman al-Zawahri
Abubakar Siddique
Abdul Hai Kakar
Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty
September 30, 2021
Afghanistan’s Taliban militants have promised the world for years that they wouldn’t allow their country to be used as a terrorist base. In an agreement with the United States last year, the Taliban pledged specifically to not allow Al-Qaeda to “threaten the security of the United States and its allies” from Afghan soil.
But U.S. security czars have warned just one month after the Taliban’s seizure of Kabul that a reconstituted Al-Qaeda with aspirations to attack the United States could become a reality within three years.
“I don’t see why it would take so long for Al-Qaeda to reconfigure,” said Michael Semple, a former European Union and United Nations adviser in Afghanistan. “It is unduly optimistic about what hurdles Al-Qaeda might face in taking advantage of the permissive environment that they now face in Afghanistan.”
He pointed to the Taliban’s appointment of Mullah Tajmir Jawad as the deputy head of intelligence as evidence of how seamlessly Al-Qaeda can regain strength in Afghanistan, where its leaders enjoyed safe haven two decades ago while they launched a string of bombings globally against U.S. interests and orchestrated the 9/11 attacks.
Jawad is a former commander of the Haqqani network, a deadly military wing of the Taliban. Accused of planning high-profile attacks, he is now tasked with handling some of the country’s most sensitive security issues.
“Until last month he was running a suicide bombers’ training camp — that’s how favorable an environment [Afghanistan] has become [for Al-Qaeda],” Semple told RFE/RL Gandhara. “The kind of people that Al-Qaeda treats as their peers or supporters are now moving straight out of the suicide-bomber training camps into running the intelligence service.”
Keeping A Lower Profile
Jawad is far from the only Taliban leader accused of facilitating international terrorism. Yet experts are saying that, this time around, Al-Qaeda might seek a lower profile in Afghanistan, instead adopting a hub-and-spoke approach with regional affiliates and franchises across the Muslim world.
Semple, now a professor at Queen’s University in Belfast, says the centrality of the Haqqani network within the Taliban government’s security apparatus is a major boost to Al-Qaeda because relations between Haqqani family elders and Al-Qaeda’s Arab leaders predate the organization’s formal founding in the late 1980s.
The extended Haqqani family and its loyalists now constitute a key part of the Taliban-led government. Sirajuddin Haqqani, the son of the late eponymous leader Mawlawi Jalaluddin Haqqani, and Mawlawi’s brother Khalil ur-Rahman Haqqani are both ministers in the Taliban cabinet, with the former heading the Interior Ministry and the latter the Refugee Affairs Ministry. Washington has designated both as global terrorists and still offers rewards of up to $10 million for information leading to their arrest.
“If you are a member of Al-Qaeda trying to make arrangements to keep your leaders and key operatives safe and out of view and avoiding trouble from the local authorities, what more could you dream of than to have your well-wishers take over the Interior Ministry?” Semple said.
He said Al-Qaeda regional affiliates already had a large presence in Afghanistan even before the Taliban takeover last month and foreign militants are now embedded within Taliban units. Many of these were even part of the Al-Qaeda’s shura, or council, in Pakistan’s North Waziristan region before a Pakistani military operation in June 2014 pushed them over the border into Afghanistan.
“We know about the fighters from the Caucuses, from different parts of the Russian Republic; we know about the Uzbekistanis, we know about the Uyghurs, we know about the Tajikistanis, we know about significant numbers of Turks — their presence is well-known,” he said.
A Shared History
A June UN report noted that “large numbers of Al-Qaeda fighters and other foreign extremist elements aligned with the Taliban are located in various parts of Afghanistan.” It said the primary arbiter between the Taliban and Al-Qaeda is the Haqqani network. “Ties between the two groups remain close, based on ideological alignment, relationships forged through common struggle and intermarriage.”
Analysts see the alliance between the Taliban and Al-Qaeda as partly rooted in their shared history. Al-Qaeda has pledged allegiance to Taliban leaders since Osama bin Laden first pledged it to Mullah Mohammad Omar in the 1990s. Omar’s successors Mullah Akhatar Muhammad Mansur and Mawlawi Haibatullah Akhundzada received it, too, from their counterparts in Al-Qaeda. While the Taliban follows the conservative Deobandi subsect and most Al-Qaeda leaders and members are puritanical Salafis, both organizations have worked hard to prevent doctrinal differences from fissuring the alliance. The emergence of the Islamic State (IS) militants, an ultra-radical Salafi group, appears to have cemented their alliance in seeking to prevent IS from hijacking jihadist fronts.
Semple said it’s likely that Al-Qaeda’s Arab core leadership will relocate to Afghanistan after sheltering in neighboring Iran and Pakistan during the past two decades. “I would expect more of them shifting to Afghanistan now that the U.S. counterterrorism operation has been so thoroughly disrupted and the Taliban are in control,” he added.
The Taliban, however, is adamant that Al-Qaeda is not present in the country. “We do not see anyone in Afghanistan who has anything to do with Al-Qaeda,” Taliban spokesman Zabihullah Mujahid told journalists in Kabul last week. “We are committed to the fact that, from Afghanistan, there will not be any danger to any country.”
The Taliban has forcefully opposed the “over the horizon” attacks that U.S. officials hope they can employ against possible terrorist threats from Afghanistan. On September 28, the Taliban accused Washington of violating international laws and their February 2020 Doha agreement by operating drones in Afghan airspace.
In testimony to the Senate Armed Services Committee that same day, General Mark Milley, chairman of the U.S. Joint Chiefs of Staff, declared the Taliban a terrorist organization that has not broken ties with Al-Qaeda. “A reconstituted Al-Qaeda or ISIS [Islamic State militants] with aspirations to attack the U.S. is a very real possibility, and those conditions to include activity in ungoverned spaces could present themselves in the next 12-36 months,” he said.
The ‘Near Enemy’
Earlier in September, David Cohen, deputy director of the CIA, said Washington is “already beginning to see some of the indications of some potential movement of Al-Qaeda to Afghanistan.”
Abdul Sayed, a researcher following Islamic radical groups in Afghanistan and Pakistan, however, said Al-Qaeda has little incentive to make Afghanistan its global base.
“Before 9/11, Al-Qaeda wanted to spread the jihadist movement in the Muslim world by launching terrorist attacks globally,” he told Radio Mashaal. “But in recent years, it focused on supporting and strengthening regional jihadist networks such as returning the Taliban [to power] in Afghanistan or the Tehrik-e Taliban Pakistan, which it created and strengthened.”
Sayed argued that unlike in the 1990s, when Al-Qaeda’s global jihad created problems for the Taliban and ultimately led to the demise of its regime as a result of the U.S.-led military attacks in retaliation for 9/11, the group will take a new approach. “Al-Qaeda will try to keep a close contact with Taliban-ruled Afghanistan, but it would like to avoid doing anything that could create problems for the Taliban,” he said.
Abdul Basit, a research fellow at the S. Rajaratnam School of International Studies in Singapore, agreed. He predicted that Al-Qaeda is unlikely to pursue any large-scale attacks.
“Al-Qaeda would not like to waste the Taliban’s victory again but might like to use their presence in the country to strengthen their regional affiliates in the subcontinent, Yemen, Somalia, and the Sahil,” he told Radio Mashaal.
Based on the recent statements of its central leadership, Basit said, Al-Qaeda is focused on a new goal.
“They are eager to concentrate on the near enemy, which means they will focus on the government of some Muslim countries instead on attacking the far enemy, which is the United States,” he said.
In Nimroz Province in southern Afghanistan, archaeologists are working to preserve a number of ancient buildings that are at risk of total collapse. They appear to have the support of local Taliban officials. But a recent video showing the demolition of a historical fort has raised concerns that Taliban leaders might return to former policies of destroying cultural heritage instead of preserving it.
Tolo News: Senior Pentagon officials said Wednesday the collapse of the Afghan government and its security forces in August could be traced to a 2020 U.S. agreement with the Taliban that promised a complete U.S. troop withdrawal. Click here to read more (external link).
Lisa Schlein
VOA News
September 30, 2021
GENEVA — The International Federation of Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies is appealing for $24 million to prepare for the potential outflow of tens of thousands of Afghan refugees into neighboring countries in the coming months.
The anticipated exodus of refugees following the Taliban takeover of Afghanistan in mid-August has not happened. Although internal displacement is rife, the U.N. refugee agency reports just over 30,000 people have fled across borders in search of international protection since January.
However, the International Red Cross Federation say it expects refugee numbers to surge as humanitarian and economic conditions in Afghanistan worsen.
Red Cross spokeswoman Nathalie Perroud told VOA Afghanistan is in the grips of multiple complex emergencies. She said millions of people are suffering from severe drought, food and water shortages, internal displacement, the COVID-19 pandemic, and a shattered economy. A major problem, she said is access to banking services.
“We have reports of people really queuing very, very long hours to just access cash flow. And the maximum that they can withdraw is $200 per week. So that means that people are really out of cash and that their basic needs may not be met in the immediate future,” said Perroud.
The Red Cross reports 18 million people lack basic services and urgently need humanitarian aid to survive. It warns Afghanistan’s looming harsh winter threatens greater misery and hardship.
Perroud said this grim situation is likely to send tens of thousands of Afghans fleeing into neighboring countries in the coming months. She said the Red Cross is making preparations to provide them with the protection and humanitarian assistance they need.
“So, the current situation in Afghanistan is quite alarming and that is why we are getting ready for even the worst scenario. The displacement or refugee situation may not happen, but we would rather be prepared now rather than wait for this massive population of movement to happen and not know how to deal with it,” said Perroud.
The Red Cross says it requires $24 million to provide aid and protection to about 160,000 Afghan refugees for an initial 12-month period. It says it will focus most of its efforts on Iran, Pakistan, and Tajikistan, but adds preparations could be extended to other countries of asylum in Central Asia.
The Afghan national women’s handball team was ready to play in international championships this month, but they were blocked from traveling and competing by the Taliban’s de facto ban on women’s sports. The team’s captain, Homaira Barakzai, says she has been housebound in Kabul for the past month out of fear of reprisals. She spoke to RFE/RL’s Radio Azadi about her frustration at being barred from the tournament and a promising career in sports.