Taliban Bars Karzai From Leaving Afghanistan, Say Sources

The report stated that the ammunition from previous wars were left around outposts of the former government.

Over the past few years, explosives and planted mines have been one of the main factors of Afghanistan people’s death, especially children.

Over the past four decades of war, almost all of the involved parties created minefields for taking down the opponent.

Earlier, the United Nations Mine Action Service (UNMAS) had said that clearing Afghanistan from mines and ammunition would at least need 10 years.

The goal of the military exercise has been stated as to prepare member countries to deal with terrorists crossing Central Asian borders from Afghanistan.

The military exercise’s practical operations took place at the Harbmaydon training site near the border with Afghanistan.

Afghanistan and Tajikistan have 1,300 kilometers of joint borders.

This exercise has been carried out while Emomali Rahmon, the president of Tajikistan, said that tens of thousands of suicide bombers are being trained in Afghanistan and many terrorists have been active near the borders of the two countries.

Armenia, Belarus, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Russia, and Tajikistan are members of the Collective Security Treaty Organisation. In the past year, these countries held several military exercises on the borders of Tajikistan and Uzbekistan near Afghanistan.

She added that the social and personal exclusion of women in Afghanistan is an example of violence against women.

Nusseibeh urged for concrete actions with regard to Afghan women and added, "It is not enough to talk about empowering women, and we must give them power."

She added that women's share in economic activities increases their ability to deal with violence.

Since regaining control of Afghanistan in 2021, women do not have peace and freedom even in their personal affairs such as freedom of dressing, traveling, shopping, going to parks and hotels, hospitals, driving cars or even mourning at the mosques and prayer halls.

It should be noted that it has been over a year that girls above the sixth grade have not been allowed to attend school due to various excuses by the Taliban.

Bennett has emphasised that during his visit to Afghanistan, he had informative meetings with the people concerned and visited important regions.

The UN Special Rapporteur on Human Rights visited Panjshir province on Wednesday and met with local Taliban officials and residents of the region.

Bennett’s visit to Panjshir comes at a time when the residents of Paryan district of the province had protested against the Taliban.

Last month, following the Taliban’s killing of the members of the National Resistance Front (NRF) forces in cold blood in Panjshir, Bennett had asked the Taliban to investigate the killings. However, his stance had been met with criticisms by the NRF officials.

It added that such accounts portray how the Taliban are trying to supress the women’s protests.

“It’s difficult to overstate the incredible bravery of these and other Afghan women who protest against Taliban abuses,” said Heather Barr, associate women’s rights director at Human Rights Watch. “These women’s stories show how deeply threatened the Taliban feel by their activities, and the brutal lengths the Taliban go to try to silence them.”

HRW urged the Taliban to immediately release everyone detained for exercising their rights to free speech and peaceful protest. It asked the group to respect the rights of all to peaceful assembly and free expression, including journalists covering protests. “They should end all arbitrary detention, ensure due process, including promptly charging suspects in custody before an independent judge, and providing immediate access to counsel,” the report sought.

The global organisation said that the women experienced threats, beatings, dangerous conditions of confinement, denial of due process, abusive conditions of release, and other abuses.

The report also claimed that the male relatives of these protesters had been assaulted and administered electric shocks. In the report, HRW has detailed the torture and mistreatment of three women who had been arrested by the Taliban during a single raid on a safe house in Kabul in February 2022.

The report added, “The three women described being held initially in a single cramped and stiflingly hot room with a total of 21 women and 7 children for five days, provided virtually no food or water or access to a toilet. The Taliban held them for several weeks, and abusively interrogated them, without allowing access to counsel or other due process rights, forcibly coerced confessions, and severely tortured the men. The Taliban compelled the three women’s families to hand over the original deeds to their property as the price for release, with the threat that the Taliban would confiscate the property if the women got into trouble again.”

It also added that anyone responsible for torture or other ill-treatment should be impartially investigated and appropriately prosecuted.

It also asked governments engaging with the Taliban to press them to comply with Afghanistan’s obligations under international law including to respect freedom of speech and assembly, to ensure due process, and to prevent torture and other ill-treatment.

After the Taliban seized control of Afghanistan on August 15, 2021, they immediately began rolling back the rights of women and girls. Women began to protest on the streets since Taliban’s first week in power, despite the grave risks they faced in doing so. The Taliban response was brutal from the beginning, beating protesters, disrupting protests, and detaining and torturing journalists covering the demonstrations.