Sources said that several explosions took place inside a brigade of the Taliban's Mansoori Corps in Ismailkhel Mandozai district of Khost province. Sources told Afghanistan International that the explosions took place on Tuesday at midnight.
According to these sources, the sound of these explosions had also been heard in Khost city.
The Taliban local officials have not commented on the reports of the explosion, and the Ministry of Defense of the group in Kabul said that it is not aware of these explosions.
In 2022, there were also reports of a US drone strike on the Taliban's Mansoori Corps in Gereshk district of Helmand and in Gardiz, the center of Paktia province. At that time, the Ministry of Defense of the Taliban denied these reports.
Afghan reporter, Faizullah Faizbakhsh, has been released from the Taliban prison after five months in detention. The Afghan Journalists Center announced that Faizbakhsh has signed a guarantee letter to get released from the Taliban intelligence detention in Kabul.
He had been detained by the Taliban while filming the neighbourhood where the leader of al-Qaeda, Ayman al-Zawahiri, had been killed in Kabul.
Faizbakhsh was detained along with American journalist Ivor Shearer in Shirpur area of Kabul.
Shearer is an American journalist and filmmaker, and along with another American citizen was freed by the Taliban and returned to the US in late December 2022.
The American authorities did not give any explanation about the conditions under which the two Americans had been released. Tom West, the US Special Representative for Afghanistan had welcomed their release.
After the detention of Faizbakhsh, his family told Afghanistan International that they do not know about his whereabouts.
US State Department spokesperson Ned Price said that the US strongly condemns the Taliban’s ban on women working for non-government organisations, but they will respond in a way that protects the humanitarian interests of the Afghan people.
He said that the US is vetting options that will allow them to maintain a strong, principled position as the single largest donor of humanitarian assistance in Afghanistan.
He stressed that they want to maintain this stance while also preventing the humanitarian situation from deteriorating even further as a result of the difficult operating environment the Taliban have created.
Price was referring to the Taliban’s latest decree on December 24, the Taliban issued the edict barring humanitarian organisations from working with women, barring female employees of national and international nongovernmental organisations from the workplace.
Ned Price said that this decision puts at risk millions of Afghans who depend on humanitarian assistance for their very survival and called on the Taliban to urgently reverse this harmful decision.
“As long as the Taliban is not able to fulfill these commitments, we will respond in a way that registers our strong condemnation while continuing to support the Afghan people. And we’re going to be very careful not to do anything that could further imperil the humanitarian well-being of the Afghan people,” Price said.
He said that the Taliban announced it on Christmas Eve because the group thought that Western nations would have been distracted by the Christmas holiday and would have been slow in responding. However, we continued with swift condemnation against this outrageous decision, he added.
“We are monitoring the evolving situation very closely, the impacts that this edict has had and may potentially yet have, and we’re in constant contact with UN and NGO partners on the state of their operations in Afghanistan,” the US state department spokesperson stated.
The US also noted that the ban is already significantly impeding humanitarian actors’ ability to deliver vital and lifesaving assistance to millions, and has forced some organisations to pause their operations.
This comes even as the Taliban continue to demonstrate their contempt for the welfare and the rights and freedoms of the Afghan people, particularly women and girls, and their disinterest in normal relations with the international community.
We are committed to helping to alleviate the suffering of the Afghan people, who are the victims of the Taliban’s own harmful policies, and we are looking at what specific consequences can be labeled – can be levied against the Taliban to register our condemnation – again, doing so in coordination with allies and partners.
Price emphasised that there will be a response from the United States regarding the Taliban’s repeated breaking of commitments on human rights, formation of an inclusive government and other issues.
Taliban spokesperson, Zabihullah Mujahid, asked Pakistan to refrain from "baseless and provocative" statements. Without referring to the Taliban, Pakistan's National Security Committee had announced on Monday that no country is allowed to provide shelter to terrorists.
Mujahid didn’t refer to the meeting, but called the recent statements of the Pakistani officials unfortunate and said that this group is trying to prevent Afghan soil from being used against Pakistan and other countries.
Mujahid added, "Pakistan has a responsibility to try to control the situation, to avoid baseless and provocative statements, because such statements and mistrust are not in the interest of any party."
Following the increase in attacks by Tehreek-e-Taliban Pakistan (TTP), the National Security Committee of Pakistan led by Prime Minister, Shehbaz Sharif, assessed the country's security, especially the terrorist attacks in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa and Balochistan provinces.
The council stressed that Pakistan reserves the right to defend its people.
Pakistan's interior minister had said on Saturday that if the Taliban does not destroy hideouts of TTP in Afghanistan, Pakistan may consider attacking these sanctuaries.
Rana Sanaullah added that according to international laws, his country has the right to attack the bases of TTP in Afghanistan.
Sources told Afghanistan International that the diplomats in the embassy of Afghanistan in Tehran have declined to handover the embassy to a Taliban representative. Sources added that the Taliban has nominated Fazl Mohammad Haqqani as the new head of the embassy in Tehran.
According to the sources, the Taliban’s new move has been made with the agreement of Hassan Kazemi Qomi, the Iranian ambassador to Kabul.
Sources said that they are ready to shut down the embassy’s operation in Tehran, but will not give it to the Taliban representative.
Other sources in the Taliban’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs said that an agreement has been reached between the Taliban officials and Hassan Kazemi Qomi, the new ambassador of the Islamic Republic of Iran in Kabul, to introduce a Taliban member as the acting head of the Afghan embassy in Tehran.
These sources said that the diplomats of the Afghan embassy said that they are willing to seal the embassy and handover the key to the Foreign Ministry of the Islamic Republic, but are not willing to handover the embassy to the Taliban representative.
According to the sources, Haqqani is now in Tehran and is trying to take over the embassy. Currently, Afghan diplomat, Abdul Qayyum Soleimani, is the head the Afghan embassy in Tehran.
Soleimani was the deputy ambassador in the previous government, but after the resignation of the then ambassador to Tehran, Abdul Ghafoor Liwal, he took charge of the embassy.
Local sources in Herat confirmed that journalist and poet Khaled Qaderi has been released from Taliban's prison after nearly a year. The journalist had been detained by the Taliban intelligence in April 2022 on charges of publishing critical thoughts about the group.
Qaderi had been sentenced to one year in prison by a military court in Herat province.
The Taliban has not reacted to the reports of the release of Qaderi.
After Qaderi’s detention, his family criticised the Taliban that they had detained and imprisoned him without any crime.
Reporters Without Borders had reacted to Qaderi’s detention and trial and said that in the last twenty years in Afghanistan, this was the first time that a journalist had been tried in a military court.
After returning to power in 2021, the Taliban has imposed severe restrictions on the media and reporters in Afghanistan.