A group of women took to the streets of Kabul on Oct. 26 to protest the continued barring of girls from schools since the Taliban takeover, and accused the international community of being silent about what is going on in Afghanistan. The… Read moreAfghan women protest barring of girls from schools
Some 5,000 troops from member states of the Russian-led Collective Security Treaty Organization (CSTO) on Oct. 18 initiated military maneuvers code-named “Echelon-2021,” Search-2021″ and “Interaction-2021” in Tajikistan near the border with Afghanistan. More than half of the troops involved are… Read moreRussia-led bloc in war games on Afghan border
The Shi’ite Hazara people of Afghanistan were targeted for genocide by the Taliban when the fundamentalist militant group was last in power, and Amnesty International now reports that new massacres targeting the ethnicity have already started. Taliban forces unlawfully killed 13 ethnic… Read moreAfghanistan: massacre and cleansing of Hazaras —already
The Taliban are steadily “dismantling the human rights gains of the last 20 years,” said Amnesty International in a new briefing issued jointly with the International Federation for Human Rights (FIDH) and the World Organization Against Torture (OMCT), documenting the militant group’s wide-ranging… Read moreTaliban ‘stamping out human rights’ in Afghanistan
Protests broke out in the traditional Taliban stronghold of Kandahar on Sept. 14, as the city’s new administrators issued an order that the families of soldiers in the vanquished Afghan army vacate a military-owned housing complex where they had been… Read moreAfghan protests continue despite repression
In Episode 88 of the CounterVortex podcast, Bill Weinberg revisits his predictions from 20 years ago, and from a month ago, about what the world would look like on the 20th anniversary of 9-11. The attack, and Dubya Bush’s Global… Read morePodcast: 9-11 and the GWOT at 20
The Taliban used gunfire, beatings and arrests to disperse scores of protesters who marched through Kabul on Sept. 7—the largest demonstration the Afghan capital has seen since the militant group seized power last month. Videos shared on social media showed activists shouting in… Read moreTaliban repress anti-Pakistan protest in Kabul
The Taliban on Sept. 6 announced that they have taken the Panjshir Valley from the incipient National Resistance Front of Afghanistan (NRFA). In an audio statement from an undisclosed location, NRFA leader Ahamd Masoud pledged to carry on the fight, and called upon Afghans to… Read morePakistan backing Taliban takeover in Afghanistan?
Women marched in Afghanistan’s northern city of Mazar-e-Sharif Sept. 6, demanding that their rights be protected and their voices heard in the new government now being formed. Signs read “We want political participation at all levels.” They also declared that they… Read moreAfghanistan: women protest Taliban rule
In Episode 87 of the CounterVortex podcast, Bill Weinberg calls out revisionist online propaganda telling us (for instance) that Ronald Reagan in 1985 called the Taliban the “equivalent of America’s Founding Fathers”—when the Taliban actually didn’t even exist back then, and… Read morePodcast: against Afghanistan revisionism
With absurd hubris, Biden in his speech on Aug. 31—the day the last US troops left Kabul under the deadline agreed to with the Taliban—declared that “the United States ended 20 years of war in Afghanistan.” It’s perverse enough that he called… Read moreAfghanistan: no, the war is not over
The Taliban killed an Afghan folk musician Aug. 29, days after stating that they would ban music from being played in public places. Fawad Andarabi was shot dead by Taliban fighters who arrived at his farm in the village of Kishnabad,… Read moreAfghan folksinger executed by Taliban
