Khaf-Herat Rail Line Raises Iran’s Export to China & Central Asia, Says Iranian Official

According to the Taliban statement, these people were detained in the Qargha area of Kabul city. The Taliban have sentenced them to three months in prison.

According to the Taliban’s supreme court, these people had been flogged in the presence of the group’s officials and the public.

Shortly after taking over Afghanistan in August 2021, the Taliban started rolling out corporal punishment for Afghan citizens.

Human rights groups have expressed concerns that under the Taliban reign, those detained have no access to due processes.

These groups have condemned the corporal punishment of Afghan citizens.

The Taliban’s Ministry of Interior has issued the letter to the group’s police chiefs across 34 provinces of Afghanistan and warned about “suicide attacks” by ISIS.

On Tuesday, Abdul Matin Qane, the Taliban’s interior ministry spokesperson, confirmed that the letter had been issued by the ministry, but refused to provide further information about the potential threats against senior Taliban officials.

In the letter, the Taliban's Ministry of Interior said that ISIS wants to carry out suicide and hand grenade attacks against Taliban governors, police chiefs, and other civil officials inside their "homes and offices".

Several high-ranking Taliban officials, including Mullah Yaqoob, the group’s defence minister, have been on the Hajj pilgrimage.

Earlier, a letter from the Taliban's Ministry of Interior had been circulating on social media, in which it had been stressed that a group connected to the ISIS wants to enter Afghanistan from Pakistan.

However, the Taliban have repeatedly tried to neglect the security threats posed by ISIS across Afghanistan. Taliban intelligence sources told Afghanistan International that currently, the Taliban considers ISIS a bigger threat than any other armed opposition groups in Afghanistan.

In 2023, ISIS has proved capable of killing senior Taliban officials, including the group’s former governor of Balkh, and Badakhshan provinces.

In the last 20 years, the Taliban used similar tactics to the ISIS to kill officials and political leaders of the previous government.

Haqqani added that the group will not allow any confrontation between the two educational institutions.

According to Haqqani, after 45 years, now there is an opportunity for solidarity and unity between madrassas, schools, and universities in Afghanistan.

Neda Mohammad Nadeem, the Taliban’s Minister of Higher Education, also asked university lecturers and teachers to compete in innovation and scientific research.

While the two senior Taliban officials talk about university education, the group has transformed schools and educational centers in different provinces of Afghanistan into madrassas and several teachers have been fired and mullahs or people sympathetic to the Taliban have been appointed instead of them.

The Haqqani Network changed the famous “Habibia” school in Khost province, which had 7,000 students, into “Al-Jihad Madrassa”.

Recently, the Taliban has removed teacher training units from the structure of Afghanistan’s Ministry of Education, which has caused unemployment of more than 4,000 employees, of these educational units in Afghanistan.

According to Taliban officials, this company has asked for security for its staff in Afghanistan.

Mutiullah Sahibzada, deputy director of the Food and Drug Authority, said that the Taliban facilitates an investment environment and security has been guaranteed across Afghanistan.

Sahibzada asked the Chinese company to increase its investment in the medicine sector in Afghanistan and focus more on the production of medicines that have not been produced in Afghanistan before.

After the Taliban’s return to power in 2021 in Afghanistan, the group has repeatedly announced the investment of Chinese companies, especially in the mining sector of the country.

In 2022, the Taliban signed an oil extraction contract with a Chinese company in northern Afghanistan for 25 years.

Aynak copper mine in Logar province has also been contracted with a Chinese company, but the mining operations have not kicked off at the mining site yet.

The reactions come after Anas Haqqani, senior Taliban member and brother of the group’s interior minister, expressed support for Twitter which has been dubbed as a rival to the newly launched “Threads” app.

Jane Ferguson, a journalist from PBS, said, “Haqqani (his fighters have been murdering Afghan journalists and their families for years) feels good about Twitter’s freedom of speech….”

Anas Haqqani's recent tweet about Twitter has been interpreted by many as his entry into the fight between Elon Musk and Mark Zuckerberg, the owners of Twitter and Meta companies.

Despite severe violations of freedom of speech in Taliban-controlled Afghanistan, this well-known figure of the Haqqani network on Monday said that Twitter doesn’t have an intolerant policy like Meta platforms.

Besides reactions of journalists to Anas Haqqani’s statement, Ali Maisam Nazary, the head of foreign relations of the National Resistance Front, said on Twitter that the Haqqani faction of the Taliban is notorious for "massacres of civilians and assassination of journalists", and now he has praised Twitter for its commitment to freedom of expression.

Nazary said that the group’s own actions contradict these values as they commit war crimes and suppress “the rights and liberties of Afghanistan’s citizens, particularly their freedom of expression”.

He asked Elon Musk, the executive chairman of Twitter, to prevent terrorist groups that threaten global security from exploiting the social media network.

Homeira Qaderi, prominent human rights defender, also reacted to Haqqani’s stance on Twitter.

She pointed to the detention of her brother, Khalid Qaderi, a journalist from Herat city and wrote, “My brother who is a journalist, was imprisoned for a year just for expressing his opinion.”

Qaderi said that it is “shameful” that Anas Haqqani talks about freedom of speech.

Natiq Malikzada, another Afghan journalist , also wrote on his Twitter handle, “While Anas Haqqani lectures us on freedom of expression, the Taliban intelligence under the control of his brother Sirajuddin Haqqani is busy shackling journalists that defy the group’s policy on media censorship.”

Twitter is one of the most favoured social media networks of the Taliban’s officials and supporters of the group. In a joint research in 2022, researchers from four prestigious universities in the United States and Canada found that the Taliban have used Twitter and other social networks as a weapon to dominate Afghanistan.

These researchers investigated the use and influence of Taliban accounts in social networks from April 1 to September 16, 2021.

In this research, it has been stated that the Taliban was more successful in using Twitter than the 18 main Afghan news organisations.

Anas Haqqani talks about freedom of speech on Twitter even though after the Taliban's takeover of Afghanistan, about 60 percent of the media has collapsed or has been banned in Afghanistan and the Taliban intelligence detains journalists.

In late 2022, Afghanistan’s Journalists Center in a report said that after the Taliban’s takeover of the country, media and journalists’ freedom in Afghanistan has severely deteriorated.