Over 80 Children Infected With Polio In Afghanistan & Pakistan
The World Health Organisation (WHO) announced that 81 cases of polio have been recorded in Afghanistan and Pakistan since the beginning of this year.
The World Health Organisation (WHO) announced that 81 cases of polio have been recorded in Afghanistan and Pakistan since the beginning of this year.
The organisation reported on Monday that 25 cases of polio had been identified in Afghanistan and 56 in Pakistan.
According to the World Health Organisation, two new cases of polio were recorded last week in the cities of Uruzgan and Helmand and one in the Khyber Pakhtunkhwa province of Pakistan.
According to information published by the World Health Organisation, which provides monthly polio statistics in Afghanistan and Pakistan, six cases of polio were recorded in Afghanistan and six in Pakistan last year.
The Taliban, however, claim that no positive cases of polio have been reported in Afghanistan this year.
Recently, the International Organisation for Migration (IOM) announced that from September 2023 to August 2024, 67,752 Afghan children received the polio vaccine with the support of the Global Polio Eradication Initiative.
The United Nations Assistance Mission in Afghanistan (UNAMA) said that a number of young people from the southern provinces of Afghanistan participated in an ongoing dialogue to craft a unified vision for the country’s future.
According to UNAMA, these young people expressed concern about the lack of basic human rights, despite being satisfied with security in the country and the reduction of poppy cultivation.
UNAMA said in a statement on Monday, December 2, that the youth of Helmand, Kandahar, Nimroz, Uruzgan and Zabul provinces came together over the course of a year and finally drafted a charter to "engage with [Taliban] government officials and the international community”.
UNAMA has said that the charter constitutes the aspirations of these young people, but did not elaborate further on it.
"While young participants acknowledged positive changes after August 2021, such as improved security and reduced poppy cultivation, [but] they expressed concern about persistent unemployment, limited access to education, lack of basic human rights, and the widespread impacts of climate change," the UN mission wrote.
One of the participants told UNAMA representatives, "Unfortunately, we feel unheard, sidelined, and disappointed, and we are losing hope. We don’t want to merely survive; we want the opportunity to thrive and contribute to the country’s development and future."
According to UNAMA's estimates, three-quarters of Afghanistan's population is under the age of 30. Decades of war, instability, and underdevelopment have affected the youth, especially those in rural areas. According to UNAMA, young people face severe challenges, including unemployment, illiteracy, poverty and social deprivation, and many of them are considering migrating from the country in search of better opportunities.
The expert meeting of the foreign ministers of the member countries of the Economic Cooperation Organisation (ECO) began on Monday without the presence of Taliban members in Mashhad.
The main meeting of ECO foreign ministers will be held tomorrow (Tuesday). It is not yet clear whether the Taliban has been invited to the meeting or not.
Earlier, an Iranian Foreign Ministry official had said that Amir Khan Muttaqi, the Taliban's foreign minister, will not attend the 28th meeting of foreign ministers of the member states of the Economic Cooperation Organisation (ECO). Ahmad Masoumifar clarified that not inviting the Taliban is the decision of the ECO secretariat. The Taliban has not commented on the group's presence at the summit.
Last year, no representative from Afghanistan was invited to participate in the ECO meeting.
According to Iranian media reports, in addition to expert delegations and ambassadors of ECO member countries in Tehran, the foreign ministers of Tajikistan and Kazakhstan and the ECO secretary general have arrived in Mashhad.
According to IRNA, the head of the Islamic Republic of Iran's Foreign Ministry's mission in Khorasan Razavi province said, "A wide range of different issues in the region will be put on the agenda of the summit by senior experts and officials at today's ECO expert meeting."
On the sidelines of the first day of the ECO summit in Mashhad, Ahmad Masoumifar said that these issues revolve around transit, environment, inter-agency trade, customs, and banking transactions.
"In addition to officials from member countries, the summit will be attended by the head of the ECO Trade and Development Bank, the heads of ECO affiliated institutions and other unions in the region, including the eight Islamic developing countries, and the Asian Dialogue Forum," he told reporters.
The ECO was created on the initiative of Iran, Turkey and Pakistan, and then Afghanistan, Tajikistan, Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan, Kyrgyzstan, Turkmenistan and Azerbaijan joined it.
ECO is a regional organisation established by Iran, Pakistan and Türkiye in 1964 with the aim of promoting economic and cultural cooperation among member states. Then, since 1992, with the admission of seven new countries, including Afghanistan, Azerbaijan, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, Turkmenistan, and Uzbekistan, the number of its members has increased to 10 countries.
Since joining the Economic Cooperation Organisation (ECO), Afghanistan has always been an active member of this regional organisation. However, the Taliban's return to power in 2021 and the group's lack of recognition have caused Afghanistan's representative to be absent from many important international meetings. Afghanistan was also the biggest absentee from last year's ECO meeting in Tashkent, Uzbekistan.
Taliban spokesman Zabihullah Mujahid posted a video on social media network X on Monday and wrote, "The work of the TAPI project is actually going on in Afghanistan."
The officials of the Taliban and Turkmenistan restarted work on the TAPI project on September without the presence of the officials of India and Pakistan.
This project was opened for the second time on Wednesday last week, in the presence of Mullah Hasan Akhund, the Prime Minister of the Taliban, and Gurbanguly Berdimuhamedow, the national leader of Turkmenistan.
The TAPI pipeline is a major regional project that will transport Turkmenistan's gas through Afghanistan to Pakistan and India.
The Taliban said at that time that they support this project and cooperate with the contracted companies of this project in the areas under the control of this group.
The practical work of this project was not implemented due to insecurity in Afghanistan.
This project is one of the largest regional projects, it is 1,821 km long.
According to Reuters, militants affiliated to the Islamic Republic entered Syria from Iraq on Sunday evening to join the fight against anti-government rebels.
According to this report, Popular mobilisation forces and forces of Kata’ib Hezbollah of Iraq as well as Fatemiyoun are present in this mission.
A senior Syrian army source has confirmed that these militants crossed the Abu Kamal border and entered Syria on the evening of Sunday, December 2.
Ayatollah Rahimi Sighani Bamiani criticised the Shiite migrants of Afghanistan living in Iran who were willing to participate in the Syrian war. In response to the request of immigrants to participate in this war, he said that the participation of Afghans in the Syrian war "is not jihad, it is aggression”.
In a video message published on Sunday, Ayatollah Bamiani criticised Iran's view of Afghans and said, "Iran uses Afghan refugees as fuel and in the end throws them out as spies, looters, identity-less and terrorists."
Lashkar Fatemiyoun is a paramilitary force under the supervision of the Quds Force, the overseas branch of the IRGC, most of whose members are Afghan immigrants living in Iran, and a large number of them have been killed in Syria.
With the start of the attacks of the opposition forces of the Syrian government, the civil war in this country has entered a new phase. These attacks started on Wednesday and reports indicate that the anti-government forces have captured parts of the city of Aleppo and Idlib.
According to reports, more than 250 people have been killed in the first three days of these clashes, and this figure includes at least 140 rebels and 87 Syrian government forces.
Abbas Araghchi, the Foreign Minister of the Islamic Republic, said on Sunday before his trip to Damascus that the Islamic Republic "resolutely supports the Syrian government and army”.
The Islamic Republic considers the survival of the Syrian government very important to secure its regional interests, and for this reason, the forces of the Islamic Republic entered the battlefield in Syria in 2017. It is said that around 2000 forces of the Islamic Republic were killed in Syria at that time.
The spokesperson of the Taliban’s Ministry of Health announced on the occasion of World AIDS Day that 200 cases of AIDS have been registered in Afghanistan this year.
Sharafat Zaman Amarkhel said that the number of patients with AIDS has reached 3,700.
In a video message on the occasion of World AIDS Day, the spokesperson of the Taliban’s Ministry of Health claimed that with the efforts of this group, the number of AIDS patients has "reduced" as compared to previous years.
He said that eight treatment centres and 61 AIDS diagnosis centres are operating throughout Afghanistan.
According to Amarkhel, the Ministry of Health of this group is trying to increase the care related to 1400 patients under treatment and to inform them about this disease by launching awareness programmes in remote areas.
Today, the World Health Organisation announced that by the end of 2023, about 40 million people in the world will be struggling with the HIV virus.
The United Nations reported this year that in 2023, one person died every minute due to AIDS.