Pakistan Occupied Afghanistan Last Year, Say Free Afghanistan Campaigners on Twitter

The Afghan women said that the Taliban and al-Qaeda are both terrorist groups and they should not be defined as good and bad terrorists.

Holding a symbolic gathering at an unknown location in Afghanistan and Pakistan, these Afghan women questioned the international community’s interaction with the Taliban outside Afghanistan.

On the one-year anniversary of the fall of Kabul to the Taliban, these women said that the Taliban is a terrorist group and a threat to humanity.

Taliban officials seem to have been caught off-guard regarding details about the explosion which took place on Saturday in Dasht-e-Barchi area of western Kabul as there are conflicting reports about the number of people injured.

Doubts over the number of people injured comes as the Taliban member in charge of District 13 security in Kabul city said that two Taliban members and two civilians had been injured in the explosion in Dasht-e-Barchi.

Many believe that the Taliban officials don’t share the exact number of casualties of blasts and attacks across Afghanistan.

Sources of Afghanistan International said that the explosion took place close to the National Identity Card distribution office.

The son of the famous anti-Soviet resistance commander, Ahmad Shah Massoud, had pledged last year that he’d seek talks with the Taliban, however, he said that the Taliban remains uninterested in reforming its backward ways.

“There’s no other option but to resist until [Taliban members] understand and realize they need to also submit—as [do] all of us—to a legitimate process which brings a legitimate government which is accountable to the people of Afghanistan, and also to the world,” he told Kamal Alam, a nonresident senior fellow at the Council’s South Asia Center and a special adviser and representative of the Massoud Foundation (of which Massoud is the president).

Stating that the Taliban are not interested in talking, he added that he tried to make the Taliban understand that "legitimacy in Afghanistan cannot be achieved through the gun”.

Massoud also said that the NRF tried working with regional actors to hammer out some sort of peace with the Taliban, but those efforts too failed. “Unfortunately,” he noted, Taliban leaders “have not changed. They are even more radical than before.”

Massoud urged world leaders to avoid considering the group a “Taliban 2.0” that somehow changed for the better after returning to power. “They failed in fighting international terrorism because they share the same ideology” as terrorist groups, he said. “They failed in creating inclusivity because they don’t believe in it,” he adds.

Massoud, whose father was assassinated by al-Qaeda just days before the September 11 attacks, pointed to the Taliban’s apparent sheltering of al-Qaeda leader Ayman al-Zawahiri, who was killed by a US airstrike last week. The fact that Zawahiri was living in central Kabul is “a clear indication that [Taliban leaders] have completely aligned with such terrorism entities and organisations,” Massoud said.

The leader of the resistance front said that NRF’s struggle is a lonely one because “no country is supporting us”.

In the video clips, circulating on social media, depicting the women's protesters, it can be seen that the demonstration did not last long and the Taliban stopped them by firing aerial shots.

In 2021 soon after the fall of Kabul, groups of women activists came to the streets and held demonstrations for women’s rights. However, then too, the Taliban had suppressed the demonstrators in Kabul and other provinces. They detained some of the women activists and imprisoned them for a while.

However, a group of women activists, have once again made it to the streets as the one year anniversary of the collapse of Kabul to the Taliban nears.

The ICRC has been taking immediate steps to save lives and keep health care facilities running in Afghanistan and has also been paying the salaries of nearly 10,500 health professionals (around one third of whom are women); the fuel to run heating, power generators and ambulances; and for patients' food and medicines, since the past 10 months.

However, Cipolla added that it’s not just the health care system that needs immediate support. Cipolla said that with more than half the population in need of humanitarian assistance and nearly 20 million people estimated to be acutely food insecure, the future is bleak for mothers and fathers of 100,000-plus babies born this year.

Cipolla stated that it is the moral and humanitarian obligation of organisations to ensure that the newborns of Afghanistan and their families are provided with the assistance they need. “States and development agencies must return to Afghanistan and continue their support for Afghans, who are already facing an unbearable situation,” Cipolla said.

Describing the healthcare system from nearly a year ago, Cipolla said that the medical system was about to shut down as the country's dedicated medical staff hadn't been paid in months, and the needed drugs and equipment for quality care weren't available.

Citing figures, Cipolla, said that mothers and pregnant women could not always be adequately treated as the country was already facing one of the highest maternal mortality rates in the world, with 638 women dying per 100,000 live births.

Stating that despite their best efforts, humanitarian organisations don't have the capacity to meet the growing needs of the Afghan population, Cipolla, recommended that without urgent international support and investment, millions of children, women and men face immediate life-threatening issues.