Taliban Signs Amended Oil Extraction Contract With Chinese Company in Afghanistan

“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.

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.

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.

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.

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.