Taliban | Pakistan

The World Health Organisation (WHO) has asked Taliban authorities to lift restrictions on Afghan female aid workers, allowing them to travel without male guardians and help women struggling to access care after a powerful earthquake killed 2,200 people in eastern Afghanistan. “A very big issue now is the increasing paucity of female staff in these places,” Dr Mukta Sharma, the deputy representative of WHO’s Afghanistan office, told Reuters. She estimated around 90 per cent of medical staff in the area were male, and the remaining 10pc were often midwives and nurses, rather than doctors, who could treat severe wounds. This was hampering care as women were uncomfortable or afraid to interact with male staff and travel alone to receive care. The September 1 magnitude-6 quake and its aftershocks injured more than 3,600 people and left thousands homeless in a country already dealing with severe aid cuts and a slew of humanitarian crises since the Taliban took over in 2021 as foreign forces left. The Afghan health ...

The Taliban government said on Thursday it had not arrested or monitored Afghans involved in a secret British resettlement plan after a data breach was revealed this week. Thousands of Afghans who worked with the United Kingdom were brought to Britain with their families in a secret programme after a 2022 data breach put their lives at risk, the UK government revealed on Tuesday. The scheme was only revealed after the UK High Court lifted a super-gag order banning any reports of the events. UK Defence Minister John Healey said the leak was not revealed because of the risk that the Taliban authorities would obtain the data set and the lives of Afghans would be put at risk. “Nobody has been arrested for their past actions, nobody has been killed and nobody is being monitored for that,” the Afghan government’s deputy spokesman, Hamdullah Fitrat, told reporters on Thursday. “Reports of investigation and monitoring of a few people whose data has been leaked are false.” After the Taliban swept back to power in 2021...

The International Criminal Court (ICC) on Tuesday issued arrest warrants for senior Taliban leaders in Afghanistan over the persecution of women, a crime against humanity. ICC judges said in a statement there were “reasonable grounds” to suspect Supreme Leader Haibatullah Akhundzada and chief justice Abdul Hakim Haqqani “have committed … the crime against humanity of persecution … on gender grounds”. “While the Taliban have imposed certain rules and prohibitions on the population as a whole, they have specifically targeted girls and women by reason of their gender, depriving them of fundamental rights and freedoms,” the court said. The court said the alleged crimes had been committed between August 15, 2021, when the Taliban seized power and continued until at least January 20, 2025. The Taliban had “severely deprived” girls and women of the rights to education, privacy and family life and the freedoms of movement, expression, thought, conscience and religion, ICC judges said. “In addition, other persons were...

Russia has officially recognised the Taliban government in Afghanistan as it seeks closer ties with Kabul’s leadership, Russian news agencies reported on Thursday. Moscow’s special representative for Afghanistan, Zamir Kabulov, told the state news agency Ria Novosti that the government had “recognised” the Taliban, which refers to itself as the Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan. Russia’s […]