Taliban Gathers Panjshir Clerics to Issue Fatwa Against Resistance Forces

The United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) in a new report published on Tuesday said that the economic production of Afghanistan has fallen by about 20% after the Taliban’s return to power in 2021.

According to the UNDP report, despite some initial signs of economic recovery, including a relatively stable exchange rate, increased exports, increasing demand for labour, and reduced inflation, Afghanistan's GDP has declined by about 3.6 percent in 2022.

Abdallah Al Dardari, the UNDP country representative, said that the continuous provision of 3.7 billion dollars in foreign aid in 2022 has helped prevent the economic collapse of Afghanistan.

According to this report, of a total of 3.7 billion dollars in foreign aid in Afghanistan, 3.2 billion dollars have been provided by the United Nations.

This organisation has said that the aid has directly reached 26.1 million people and has also been effective in the stability of the Afghani currency and curbing inflation in Afghanistan.

The United Nations added that if the level of aid remains the same, Afghanistan's GDP will increase by 1.3 percent this year, but the prospects for long-term economic recovery will remain weak.

The United Nations has said that the Taliban's restrictive decrees on the rights of women and girls, including a directive that prohibits women from working in UN offices, directly affect economic productivity and can also affect the level of aid inflow in Afghanistan.

The United Nations Development Programme has predicted that if foreign aid is reduced by 30% from $3.7 billion to $2.6 billion, Afghanistan's GDP will fall by 0.6%, which could lead the country at the highest level of poverty in the world.

In the message, however, the Taliban has claimed that the group has expanded its educational activities throughout Afghanistan.

The message stated that the education of "children" is one of the obligations of the Taliban government and the group will take effective measures to support this goal.

Meanwhile, it has been almost 600 days since the Taliban closed girls' schools above the sixth grade in Afghanistan. The group has also banned girls and women from university-level education.

The Taliban leader also addressed foreign affairs issues in Afghanistan in his Eid message. The message stated that the Taliban wants to have good relations with neighbouring countries and the world. The message stated, "As Afghanistan does not want to interfere in the internal affairs of any other country, it emphasises that other countries should not interfere in our internal affairs."

The Taliban leader’s Eid message addressed the issue of the promotion of virtue and prevention of vice also and stressed that the Taliban government and Afghan citizens must cooperate with the ministry in charge of addressing vice and virtue.

The leader of the Taliban also said that the Taliban government has implemented "significant reforms in culture, education, economy, and media" and stressed that the moral and cultural impacts of the occupation of Afghanistan are ending.

Although the Taliban occasionally publishes messages and decrees attributed to Hibatullah Akhundzada, the group’s leader, has not been seen in public yet.

The meeting has been organised by the Austrian Institute for International Affairs.

The upcoming Vienna meeting will discuss the situation in Afghanistan and will continue for three days.

This is the second meeting of anti-Taliban political figures in Vienna. The previous meeting had been held in 2022, for three days, and discussed the future of Afghanistan.

In the 2022 meeting, thirty Afghan figures including Ahmad Massoud, and former Afghan National Security Advisor Rangin Dadfar Spanta, discussed international pressure on the Taliban, and support for the resistance against the group in Afghanistan.

A source close to the NRF said that they hope the Vienna meeting will facilitate more cooperation among the political forces opposing the Taliban.

The Pakistani embassy in Kabul has not yet officially confirmed Nizamani’s return to Kabul.

On December 2, 2022, the Pakistani embassy in Kabul came under attack by armed men who shot at the embassy from a nearby location.

Shehbaz Sharif, the Prime Minister of Pakistan at that time, announced that the attack was an assassination attempt on the life of the head of the country's embassy in Kabul and said that he wanted "immediate investigations and the arrest of the perpetrators of the attack”.

Nizamani had left Kabul due to security concerns of Islamabad for its top diplomat in Afghanistan.

After the Taliban’s takeover of Afghanistan in 2021 providing health services to the people of Afghanistan has rapidly declined.

Earlier, WHO announced that nearly 900,000 children have been suffering from severe malnutrition in Afghanistan in 2023. According to WHO, a total of 2.3 million children in Afghanistan are facing malnutrition.

Since the Taliban came to power, along with the economic structures, Afghanistan's health system has also been severely damaged and the activities of tens of health centers in the country have been stopped.