Sources confirmed a firefight on the Torkham border between Taliban and Pakistan military on Thursday. Pakistani officials said that the shelling was started by the Taliban forces, and as a result, an Afghan citizen had been killed and a Pakistani officer had been wounded.
Following this incident, the border has been closed, but the Taliban have not reacted to the reports so far.
The border clashes occur while the political tension between Pakistan and the Taliban has intensified in recent days.
Earlier, the Taliban forces and the Pakistani military had a military confrontation on the border of Torkham and Spin Boldak.
The Taliban’s Ministry of Mines and Petroleum announced that it has signed a contract for oil extraction from the Amu Darya basin with a Chinese company on Thursday. Taliban Minister of Mines, Shahabuddin Delawar, said that duration of the oil extraction contract is 25 years.
This is the second time that the Chinese company has signed this oil field contract with amendments and according to the Taliban, China will invest 150 million dollars in the first year of the project.
Delawar added that by signing this contract, the Chinese company "CPEIC" will invest 150 million dollars in the first year and 540 million dollars in three years in the exploration and extraction sector in 4,500 square kilometers located in the provinces of Sar-e-Pol, Faryab, and Jawzjan.
The oil capacity of this field is estimated to be around 87 million oil barrels.
The Taliban’s Minister of Mines also said that in three years, Afghanistan will export oil while meeting its domestic demands.
The Taliban official said that technical teams have reviewed the contract, which was signed in the past, for eight months, and as a result, it was amended and signed again.
Delawar did not provide details about the amendments, but said that one of the added items is that the company must hire workers from inside Afghanistan.
According to the Taliban official, the project will add 3,000 jobs in Afghanistan.
The "exploration and extraction" contract of the Amu Darya oil field had been signed with the Chinese company in 2011 during the presidency of Hamid Karzai.
Hugo Shorter, the Chargé d'Affaires of the UK Embassy, said that the Taliban is jeopardising the future of Afghanistan by denying the right to education and work for Afghan women and girls. Shorter said that Taliban have a collective responsibility to reverse their decision.
“It is a tragedy for Afghanistan - as the only country in the world to ban women and girls from secondary and higher education and from most government jobs - that the Taliban have now banned women from working for NGOs too," Shorter said in a Tweet.
The British diplomat said that in their reactions, some of the Taliban said that the international community is hypocritical in its response to attacks on women’s rights and that this is an internal Afghan matter, but he emphasised that more need to be done globally to protect women’s rights.
According to Shorter, from equality of pay to eliminating gender-based violence and harassment of women, the UK works to address these issues through its laws, courts, social services, police, and with international partners.
Shorter added that Afghanistan under the Taliban is being held to the same standards as all other countries, in line with their international legal obligations.
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.