Taliban officials announced that three people have been wounded in an explosion in Kabul on Saturday. Khalid Zadran, the Taliban’s police spokesperson in Kabul, said that the explosion occurred in the Diwanbegi area of district 5 of Kabul city.
According to Zadran, a roadside IED exploded and hit a civilian vehicle. However, eye witnesses told Afghanistan International the number of casualties of the explosion is higher than what the Taliban has announced.
A witness said, "In this explosion, at least one person was killed, and six others were injured."
According to local sources, the vehicle hit by the explosion was ferrying the employees of Ministry of Higher Education of the Taliban.
No group has claimed responsibility for the explosion so far.
Tamana Zaryab Paryani and her four sisters arrived in Germany on Thursday after two unsuccessful attempts to flee Afghanistan. The five sisters were among the female Afghan protesters who had been arrested by the Taliban in early 2022.
Zarmina Paryani told Afghanistan International that the five sisters had been barred from leaving Afghanistan. Paryani added that she and her four sisters had been detained by the Taliban twice while trying to flee Afghanistan.
The five sisters finally entered Pakistan from the Spin Boldak border crossing on August 15, 2022, and then reached Germany on Thursday.
After the Taliban took over Afghanistan in 2021 and imposed severe restrictions on women, including the ban on girls' education, Afghan female rights activists held several protests in Kabul.
Taliban General Directorate of Intelligence (GDI) raided the house of these activists on January 19, 2022, and detained four of the sisters including Tamana Paryani, Zarmina Paryani, Karishma Paryani, and Shafiqa Paryani from their house in Kabul. They were in Taliban detention for 26 days.
Shortly after their detention, national and international rights groups condemned the Taliban's crackdown on these female activists and demanded their immediate release.
Zarmina Paryani told Afghanistan International that after their release from the Taliban detention, they tried to enter Pakistan from Torkham border crossing for the first time on May 19, 2022, but the Taliban intelligence agents detained and imprisoned them.
According to her, the Taliban took them to Kabul and imprisoned the sisters for 10 days.
"When we were identified at the border of Torkham, we were very scared," Paryani said. “Dr. Bashir, the head of Taliban intelligence in Nangarhar, threatened us with death warnings, several times. After a round of interrogation, in the middle of the night, while we were treated badly, humiliated and insulted, Taliban transferred us back to Kabul with five of their men. They imprisoned us for another 10 days.”
According to Paryani, after their release from the Taliban detention, they tried to flee Afghanistan again. This time they got identified and detained again, but without their sister Tamana Zaryab Paryani.
For the third time, the five sisters fled Afghanistan through Spin Boldak in Kandahar province and escaped to Pakistan.
Paryani added that they paid the smugglers to prepare a fake ID card to be able to leave Afghanistan. She said that during their trip, they wore the traditional Kandahari dress, and tried to look similar to Kandahari women.
Tamana Zaryab Paryani is one of the female activists who along with many others protested against the Taliban in the first days of the group's return to Afghanistan.
Paryani, who is 25-years-old, is a champion of bodybuilding and the winner of two gold medals in Afghanistan.
The National Resistance Front (NRF) accused the Taliban of forced displacement, ethnic cleansing, and war crimes in northern Afghanistan. Ali Maisam Nazary, NRF’s Foreign Relations head, said that the Taliban’s crimes deepen the crisis and social rifts in the country.
According to Nazary, resistance against the Taliban is the only path forward to preserve the life, home, land, honour, and values of the Afghan people.
Nazary’s statement has been issued when, based on Taliban’s orders, forced displacement of 400 families had started in Mohajer Qeshlaq village of Khwaja Bahauddin district of Takhar province on Tuesday.
The Taliban officials have given the residents of the village three days to evacuate their homes.
Two local residents had told Afghanistan International that the families had been ordered to evacuate their homes on Tuesday, and at least 100 families have been displaced on Wednesday.
According to the sources, if these families do not leave the village within three days, "they will be forcibly evicted from their homes and they will not have the right to move out their belongings and clothes”.
A local resident had told Afghanistan International that women, children, and men have fled to the fields and cannot even afford to buy a tent.
Earlier, local sources from Baghlan Province had told Afghanistan International that the Taliban had forced at least five families to leave their village in Andarab district.
According to sources, the group had given five days to 10 other families in the district to leave their homes.
These families had been evicted from their homes due to their alleged ties to the NRF forces.
Several reports of the forced displacement of Panjshir and Baghlan residents have been published too.
In some cases, the Taliban have told displaced families that they do not have the right to live all over the nine northern provinces of Afghanistan.
The Taliban have continuously denied these reports.
Taliban will send the group’s proposal and viewpoints on economic issues to the Organisation of Islamic Cooperation (OIC) by the end of October 2022. According to the Taliban, their proposal will be sent to the OIC’s Standing Committee for Economic and Commercial Cooperation.
The OIC’s Standing Committee for Economic and Commercial Cooperation (COMCEC) is scheduled to be held for three days in October in Türkiye.
COMCEC is one of the specialised committees of the Organisation of Islamic Cooperation, which was established in 1981 with the approval of the OIC memebers.
Turkiye is the chair and host of the COMCEC annual meetings.
COMCEC works to address the economic challenges and support the development of Islamic countries. The Taliban hope to receive support of COMCEC for Afghanistan’s economic development.
According to the Taliban-controlled Bakhtar News Agency, representatives of the Ministries of Finance, Industry and Trade, Agriculture, Irrigation and Livestock, information and culture, Telecommunications and Information Technology, and the Ministry of Transportation of the Taliban participated in the meeting of COMCEC on Thursday.
In the meeting, economic projects in trade, transportation, communication, poverty reduction, tourism, agriculture, and financial cooperation sectors have been discussed.
According to Talkwalker, a website for social media analytics, the hashtag #StopHazaraGenocide has crossed six million tweets. According to the data, the hashtag has been tweeted 6.04 million times.
Hazara activists launched a Twitter campaign on October 3 with the #StopHazaraGenocide hashtag. The campaign had been started by Hazara rights activists after a suicide attack on an educational center on September 30 in western Kabul.
Supporters of the campaign have urged the international community to recognize that a genocide is currently underway against the Hazara Shia community in Afghanistan.
So far, many politicians, rights activists, artists and members of the Hazara ethnic community have joined the Twitter campaign.
Along with Afghan artists, politicians, and cultural activists, well-known figures such as Elif Shafaq, the well-known Turkish-British novelist have joined the campaign to call for a stop to the genocide of Hazara community in Afghanistan.
The Twitter campaign supporters believe that Hazaras of Afghanistan have been systematically targeted and are facing genocidal killings.
In recent years, attacks on Hazaras, especially on their educational centers, have increased. Islamic State-Khurasan has taken responsibility for most of the attacks.
A week after the deadly suicide attack in Kabul, Rahe Danishgah Educational Center has shut down its operations due to security threats. Yousuf Dehzad, director of Rahe Danishgah Educational Center confirmed to Afghanistan International that they will no longer operate in Kabul.
According to Dehzad, during the five years of operations at Rahe Danishgah, they have witnessed several attacks on educational institutes in Kabul.
He mentioned the deadly attacks on Mawud Educational Center; Kawsar-e-Danesh Center; Seyyed al-Shuhada High School, and Kaaj Educational School, which killed and injured hundreds of young Hazara Shia teenagers.
Dehzad added that with each passing day, the number of students participating at these centers has decreased due to security threats and because the atmosphere of fear and intimidation has been increasing.