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July 31, 2010 :: RSS :: Print :: Email
BBC Persian (Translated by RAWA): A recent research in Afghanistan shows that the number of women committing suicide in the country has been increasing. Faiz Mohammad Kakkar, the advisor of the president of Afghanistan in healthcare matters who took part in this research said that the reason for 90% of the suicides were acute depression or mental illnesses. Full news...
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July 30, 2010 :: RSS :: Print :: Email
Aljazeera: Rioters in the Afghan capital have set fire to two US embassy vehicles shouting "death to America" after one of the SUVs collided with a civilian car killing a number of passengers, officials and witnesses have said. Police fired into the air to disperse the crowd of angry Afghans who threw stones and chanted "death to Karzai" in reference to Hamid Karzai, the Afghan president. Full news...
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July 30, 2010 :: RSS :: Print :: Email
The Financial Times: The suicide rate in the US army now exceeds the rate across the US as a whole, with an increasing number of active duty soldiers taking their lives due to stress, according to a in-depth army study into the effect of nine years of war on its troops. If deaths associated with high-risk behaviours – including drink-driving and drug overdoses – are taken into account, more soldiers are dying by their own hand than in combat, the report found. Full news...
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July 30, 2010 :: RSS :: Print :: Email
The Christian Science Monitor: Afghanistan elections planned for September aren't supposed to include parliamentary candidates with ties to militias. Problem is, many of those disqualified aren't actually involved with militias. 'The net caught a few small fish while the sharks swam around it,' says one election official. Full news...
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July 30, 2010 :: RSS :: Print :: Email
SocialistWorker.org: THE RELEASE of more than 92,000 classified documents relating to the war in Afghanistan by the muckraking Web site WikiLeaks has left the Obama administration and its war partners trying to defend the indefensible. The Obama White House was quick to denounce the WikiLeaks release. At first, it claimed that the documents didn't reflect the reality of the war, since they only run through last December--before the implementation of Obama's "surge" plan announced late last year. Full news...
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July 30, 2010 :: RSS :: Print :: Email
Associated Press: Three U.S. service members were killed in blasts in Afghanistan, bringing the toll for July to at least 63 and making it the deadliest month for American forces in the nearly 9-year-war. A NATO statement Friday said the three died in two separate blasts in southern Afghanistan the day before. The statement gave no nationalities, but U.S. officials say all three were Americans. The officials spoke on condition of anonymity pending notification of kin. Full news...
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July 29, 2010 :: RSS :: Print :: Email
IWPR: Residents of the northern Afghan province of Sar-e Pol are campaigning against the nomination of men they accuse of being former warlords as parliamentary candidates. They have called on Afghanistan’s election body to exclude Haji Mohammad Rahim and Gul Mohammad Pahlavan, both former militia commanders, from the list of candidates for the September ballot. Full news...
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July 29, 2010 :: RSS :: Print :: Email
The Guardian: Iran is engaged in an extensive covert campaign to arm, finance, train and equip Taliban insurgents, Afghan warlords allied to al-Qaida and suicide bombers fighting to eject British and western forces from Afghanistan, according to classified US military intelligence reports contained in the war logs. The secret "threat reports", mostly comprising raw data provided by Afghan spies and paid informants, cannot be corroborated individually. Full news...
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July 28, 2010 :: RSS :: Print :: Email
The New York Times: The war in Afghanistan will consume more money this year alone than we spent on the Revolutionary War, the War of 1812, the Mexican-American War, the Civil War and the Spanish-American War — combined. A recent report from the Congressional Research Service finds that the war on terror, including Afghanistan and Iraq, has been, by far, the costliest war in American history aside from World War II. It adjusted costs of all previous wars for inflation. Full news...
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July 28, 2010 :: RSS :: Print :: Email
The Guardian: Survivors of an alleged Nato rocket attack on a small town in Helmand, which the Afghan government says killed 52 civilians, spoke today of their anger at what they claim was a deliberate air strike, despite coalition denials. Many residents of the town say they believe the strike, which they say was a missile attack on a mud house where people were hiding from nearby fighting, was deliberate. “The foreign forces could see us,” said Haji Abdul Ghafar, a 38-year-old farmer who had fled to Regey from a nearby village. Full news...
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July 28, 2010 :: RSS :: Print :: Email
Amnesty International: Amnesty International is calling on NATO to provide a clear, unified system of accounting for civilian casualties in Afghanistan, as leaked war logs paint a picture of an incoherent process of dealing with civilian casualties. Around 92,000 leaked US military files on the war in Afghanistan covering the period 2004-2009 were released Sunday by the website Wikileaks. Full news...
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July 28, 2010 :: RSS :: Print :: Email
The Guardian: Tensions between the US, Afghanistan and Paistan were further strained today after the leak of thousands of military documents about the Afghan war. As members of the US Congress raised questions about Pakistan's alleged support for the Taliban, officials in Islamabad and Kabul also traded angry accusations on the same issue. The details emerge from more than 90,000 secret US military files, covering six years of the war, which caused a worldwide uproar when they were leaked yesterday. Full news...
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July 28, 2010 :: RSS :: Print :: Email
PAN: The Taliban militant publicly flogged a man and a woman on the charge of having illicit relations in the southern province of Ghazni, an eyewitness said on Tuesday. Watched by a number of people, the flogging happened in the Khuzayee area of Moqur district on Sunday. "The militants knocked them down and awarded each of them 60 lashes," an eyewitness, who did not want to be named, told Pajhwok Afghan News. Full news...
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July 28, 2010 :: RSS :: Print :: Email
United Press International: Iranian security forces shot dead three asylum seekers trying to cross the border from Afghanistan, Afghan provincial officials said. Provincial officials from the western Afghan province of Nimruz said Iranian security forces killed three Afghans and injured three others as they attempted to cross into Iran. Nimruz officials said Afghanistan doesn't have the capability to enforce security along the border with Iran. Full news...
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July 27, 2010 :: RSS :: Print :: Email
IRIN: Three years after President Hamid Karzai appointed a commission to investigate a mass grave site in the Chimtala plains, north of Kabul city, the site, the commission and the truth are missing. Dozens of mass graves have been disturbed or destroyed over the past eight years, and with them crucial evidence about atrocities committed and their perpetrators, human rights groups say. “In some cases, people have deliberately tampered with or destroyed a mass grave in order to hide criminal evidence,” Afghanistan Independent Human Rights Commission (AIHRC) official Ahmad Nader Nadery told IRIN. Full news...
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July 27, 2010 :: RSS :: Print :: Email
The Wall Street Journal: Cooperation among Iran, al Qaeda and other Sunni extremist groups is more extensive than previously known to the public, according to details buried in the tens of thousands of military intelligence documents released by an independent group Sunday. U.S. officials and Middle East analysts said some of the most explosive information contained in the WikiLeaks documents detail Iran's alleged ties to the Taliban and al Qaeda, and the facilitating role Tehran may have played in providing arms from sources as varied as North Korea and Algeria. Full news...
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July 27, 2010 :: RSS :: Print :: Email
The Telegraph: The man, described as a “notorious criminal” is said to have secured his position through the influence of Iran’s Revolutionary Guard over local warlords in southern Afghanistan. He then set about dividing control of the local opium trade with a neighbouring police chief and extracting a cut of profits from farmers for himself, it is alleged. Full news...
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July 26, 2010 :: RSS :: Print :: Email
The Guardian: The depths of crime and drug-dealing in Afghan society are highlighted in lurid terms by the US intelligence reports. One log claims to describe how a "notorious criminal" was recruited to spy for Iran. It says he returned to Afghanistan and then became a police chief, gaining power and wealth by drug-dealing. This byzantine story comes from Bala Beluk, a district in the country's south-western province of Farah. Full news...
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July 26, 2010 :: RSS :: Print :: Email
Fox News: We’re shown in the last three weeks the police have shut down three different operations all doing business in our area. In one of them the police say a man recruited minors as prostitutes, used Craigslist to advertise for clients and did it all while never leaving New York City. In a second and separate case police say Arash Abbas ran an organization using adult girls he would book into high end hotel rooms across the county. Full news...
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July 25, 2010 :: RSS :: Print :: Email
The Guardian: The Nato coalition in Afghanistan has been using an undisclosed "black" unit of special forces, Task Force 373, to hunt down targets for death or detention without trial. Details of more than 2,000 senior figures from the Taliban and al-Qaida are held on a "kill or capture" list, known as Jpel, the joint prioritised effects list. In many cases, the unit has set out to seize a target for internment, but in others it has simply killed them without attempting to capture. Full news...
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July 25, 2010 :: RSS :: Print :: Email
The Guardian: Behind the military jargon, the war logs are littered with accounts of civilian tragedies. The 144 entries in the logs recording some of these so-called "blue on white" events, cover a wide spectrum of day-by-day assaults on Afghans, with hundreds of casualties. They range from the shootings of individual innocents to the often massive loss of life from air strikes, which eventually led President Hamid Karzai to protest publicly that the US was treating Afghan lives as "cheap". Full news...
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July 24, 2010 :: RSS :: Print :: Email
The Nation: According to a report form Helmand province, Friday evening (July 23) at about 6:00 pm local time, as many as 40 innocent non-combatant civilians were martyred and 34 more were seriously injured in Rigi area of Sngin, Helmand. The report indicates the deadliest incident occurred while several dozens defenseless villagers including children and women, fearing the US savage invaders’ air strikes, gathered in Hajji Mohammad Husain house Full news...
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July 24, 2010 :: RSS :: Print :: Email
PAN: Seven children were injured when coalition forces bombed a village in the southern province of Helmand on Saturday, health officials said. Three girls and four boys were injured in the air strike in Sangin district, the director of Mirwais Hospital, Dr. Abdul Qayyum Pukhla, told Pajhwok Afghan News. He said the condition of the seven was improving. Full news...
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July 24, 2010 :: RSS :: Print :: Email
The News: Afghan leader Malalai Joya is resistance personified. She is the most vocal critic of both US occupation of Afghanistan and the ruling warlords. At the same time, she speaks dismissively of the Taliban: "Their violence is no resistance". However, Malalai Joya hardly grabs headlines in the Pakistani media that often glorifies the mindless violence of the Taliban. But she is a household name in Afghanistan and a known figure internationally. She was called "Afghanistan's most famous women" by the BBC a few years ago. Full news...
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July 22, 2010 :: RSS :: Print :: Email
AFP: Women living in Afghanistan's safest region are retreating behind the veil amid fears they are being stalked by a resurgent Taliban determined to trample their rights. Human rights groups are concerned that plans by the Afghan government to make peace with the Taliban could lead to an erosion of women's liberties. But as attacks escalate across the previously peaceful north, and the insurgency's footprint expands, women are losing confidence that their hard-won rights are inviolable. Full news...
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July 20, 2010 :: RSS :: Print :: Email
ISN Security Watch: A recent survey by Integrity Watch Afghanistan (IWA) shows a sharp expansion in corruption in Afghan society. Most Afghans now see the payment of bribes as a routine part of obtaining government services. In the three years since IWA came out with its previous corruption survey, the amount paid in bribes more than doubled, the watchdog group found. Afghans paid an estimated $1 billion in bribes in 2009, whereas IWA pegged the figure in its 2006 survey at $466 million. Full news...
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July 19, 2010 :: RSS :: Print :: Email
PAN: Residents of the eastern province of Nangarhar are worried about deteriorating security, blaming corrupt officials and "irresponsible" foreign forces for the surge in violence. Over the past one-and-a-half months, there have been at least 28 incidents of violence in Nangarhar, including three rocket attacks on the provincial capital, 11 roadside bombs targeting NATO vehicles and at least three suicide attacks, according to a Pajhwok tally. Full news...
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July 17, 2010 :: RSS :: Print :: Email
AP: The inspector general investigating fraud, waste and abuse in the USD51 billion Afghanistan reconstruction program has received a failing grade from his peers. The council of government auditors who reviewed the work asked Attorney General Eric Holder to consider suspending or rescinding law enforcement powers of the Afghanistan reconstruction watchdog. Full news...
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July 17, 2010 :: RSS :: Print :: Email
The Independent: Women in Taliban-held areas of Afghanistan say they are once again being threatened, attacked and forced out of jobs and education as fears rise that their rights will be sacrificed as part of any deal with insurgents to end the war in Afghanistan. Women have reported attacks and received letters warning of violence if they continue to work or even contact radio stations to request songs. Full news...
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July 15, 2010 :: RSS :: Print :: Email
CNN: More U.S. soldiers killed themselves last month than in recent Army history, according to Army statistics released Thursday, confounding officials trying to reverse the grim trend. The statistics show that 32 soldiers killed themselves in June, the highest number in a single month since the Vietnam era. Twenty-one of them were on active duty, while 11 were in the National Guard or Army Reserve in an inactive status. Full news...