Doha, Qatar:

Taliban authorities were told women must be included in public life, UN Under-Secretary-General Rosemary DiCarlo said on Monday as she defended a decision to sideline civil society groups at official talks in Doha.

Rights organisations have strongly criticised the controversial UN move to exclude the groups, including women’s rights activists, from the two-day meeting on Afghanistan as the price for the Taliban government’s participation.

“Authorities will not sit across the table with Afghan civil society in this format, but they have heard very clearly the need to include women and civil society in all aspects of public life”, DiCarlo told a Doha news conference.

The UN-hosted meeting began on Sunday and is the third such gathering to be held in Qatar in a little over a year, but the first to include the Taliban authorities who seized power in Afghanistan for a second time in 2021.

The talks were due to discuss increasing engagement with Afghanistan and a more coordinated response to the country, including economic issues and counter-narcotics efforts.

The international community has wrestled with its approach to the Taliban since they returned to power, with no country officially recognising its government.

 ‘Gender apartheid’ 

The group has imposed a strict interpretation of Islam, with women subjected to laws characterised by the UN as “gender apartheid”.

The Taliban refused an invitation to Doha talks in February, insisting on being the only Afghan representatives, to the exclusion of civil society groups. But their condition was accepted in the build-up to this latest round.

The United States said it agreed to participate in Monday’s talks after receiving assurances that the talks would meaningfully discuss human rights.

US point man on Afghanistan Thomas West and Rina Amiri, the US special envoy on the rights of Afghan women and girls, in Doha “made clear that the Afghan economy cannot grow while half the population’s rights are not respected”, State Department spokesman Vedant Patel said.

DiCarlo, who chaired the UN talks in the Qatari capital, said she “hopes” that “there’ll be new consideration” of Taliban government policy on women in public life including girls’ education.

The UN and international delegations will have the chance to meet with civil society representatives, including women’s rights groups, following the close of the main meetings.

But Amnesty International chief Agnes Callamard said in a statement ahead of the talks that “caving into the Taliban’s conditions to secure their participation in the talks would risk legitimising their gender-based institutionalised system of oppression”.

The Taliban authorities have repeatedly said the rights of all citizens are guaranteed under Islamic law.

The head of the Taliban delegation, spokesman Zabihullah Mujahid, told the more than 20 assembled special envoys and UN officials at the opening session that diplomats should “find ways of interaction and understanding rather than confrontation”, despite “natural” differences in policy.

 ‘Engaging constructively’ 

“The Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan is keen on engaging constructively with Western nations as well,” Mujahid said.

“Like any sovereign state, we uphold certain religious and cultural values and public aspirations that must be acknowledged,” he added.

Mujahid also pressed to end sanctions, saying Afghans are “being ganged up on”.

The Taliban government spokesman questioned whether ongoing sanctions were “fair practice” after “wars and insecurity for almost half a century as a result of foreign invasions and interference”.

Russia, which has maintained an embassy in Kabul, hinted it could drop its own sanctions, saying the group were the de facto authorities.

“We’ve been saying consistently that you have to recognise this fact and deal with them as such because, whether you like it or not, this movement is running the country now. You cannot simply ignore that,” said Russia’s envoy to the UN, Vasily Nebenzya.

DiCarlo said the issue of sanctions was “raised” but not discussed in depth.

“It’s a member-state issue whether they’re going to continue certain sanctions or not. The sanctions are on people, not on the country at large,” she said

(Except for the headline, this story has not been edited by NDTV staff and is published from a syndicated feed.)

Russian presidential envoy to Afghanistan Zamir Kabulov, center right, and other members of delegations pose for a photo prior to their talks in Moscow, Russia, Wednesday, Nov. 16, 2022. Russia hosts talks on Afghanistan involving the representatives of the Taliban, other political forces in Afghanistan and neighbouring countries.
| Photo Credit: AP

Russia will remove the Taliban from a list of banned terrorist organisations, three years after they returned to power in Afghanistan, the state-run RIA Novosti news agency said on Monday.

Moscow has for years fostered relations with the Taliban, holding multiple rounds of talks and boosting trade with Afghanistan despite international sanctions.

“Kazakhstan has recently taken the decision, which we are also going to take, to remove them from the list of terrorist organisations,” RIA Novosti quoted Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov as saying.

Kazakhstan removed the Taliban from its list of banned organisations at the end of 2023.

The move could further boost diplomacy between Russia and Afghanistan, but would fall short of an official recognition of the Taliban government and what it calls the “Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan.”

The Taliban seized power in 2021 from a U.S.-backed government. They have enforced an extreme form of Islamic law that effectively bans women from public life.

Mr. Lavrov said Russia’s decision was about recognising the realities on the ground.

“They are the real power. We are not indifferent to Afghanistan. And above all our allies in Central Asia are not indifferent,” Mr. Lavrov said.

Russia also invited Taliban representatives to its flagship Saint Petersburg International Economic Forum, state media reported.

The event was once seen as the cornerstone of Russia’s economic relations with the West.

Russia has for years fostered ties with the Taliban.

The head of U.S. forces in Afghanistan claimed in 2018 that Moscow was providing weapons to the group — accusations Moscow denied at the time.

The Taliban has been designated a terrorist organisation in Russia since 2003.

Moscow itself has a complicated history with Afghanistan with the Soviet Union having fought a decade-long war against guerilla mujahideen fighters in the 1980s to prop up a Kremlin-backed government.

Moscow:

Russia will remove the Taliban from a list of banned terrorist organisations, three years after they returned to power in Afghanistan, the state-run RIA Novosti news agency said Monday.

Moscow has for years fostered relations with the Taliban, holding multiple rounds of talks and boosting trade with Afghanistan despite international sanctions. 

“Kazakhstan has recently taken the decision, which we are also going to take, to remove them from the list of terrorist organisations,” RIA Novosti quoted Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov as saying. 

Kazakhstan removed the Taliban from its list of banned organisations at the end of 2023.

The move could further boost diplomacy between Russia and Afghanistan, but would fall short of an official recognition of the Taliban government and what it calls the “Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan.”

The Taliban seized power in 2021 from a US-backed government. They have enforced an extreme form of Islamic law that effectively bans women from public life.

Lavrov said Russia’s decision was about recognising the realities on the ground.

“They are the real power. We are not indifferent to Afghanistan. And above all our allies in Central Asia are not indifferent,” Lavrov said. 

Russia also invited Taliban representatives to its flagship Saint Petersburg International Economic Forum, state media reported. 

The event was once seen as the cornerstone of Russia’s economic relations with the West. 

Russia has for years fostered ties with the Taliban.  

The head of US forces in Afghanistan claimed in 2018 that Moscow was providing weapons to the group — accusations Moscow denied at the time.

The Taliban has been designated a terrorist organisation in Russia since 2003.     

Moscow itself has a complicated history with Afghanistan with the Soviet Union having fought a decade-long war against guerilla mujahideen fighters in the 1980s to prop up a Kremlin-backed government. 

(Except for the headline, this story has not been edited by NDTV staff and is published from a syndicated feed.)

File picture of police officers examine the site of suicide bombing at a highway in Shangla, a district in the Pakistan’s Khyber Pakhtunkhwa province, on March 26, 2024.
| Photo Credit: AP

The Taliban defence ministry on Wednesday rejected Pakistan’s allegations that Afghans were involved in an attack on Chinese engineers, as ties between the neighbouring nations sour amidst rising insecurity.

Pakistan’s military had said at a press conference on Tuesday that a suicide bomb attack in March in Pakistan’s northern Khyber Pakhtunkhwa province, that killed five Chinese engineers, was planned in neighbouring Afghanistan, and that the bomber was an Afghan national.

“Afghans are not involved in such matters,” said Mufti Enayatullah Khorazmim, the spokesperson for Afghanistan’s Taliban-run Ministry of National Defence.

“Blaming Afghanistan for such incidents is a failed attempt to divert attention from the truth of the matter and we strongly reject it,” he added.

A suicide bomber rammed a vehicle into a convoy of Chinese engineers working on a dam project in northwest Pakistan in March, killing six people.

“The killing of Chinese citizens in an area of ​​Khyber Pakhtunkhwa that is under tight security cover by the Pakistan Army shows the weakness of the Pakistani security agencies,” Khorazmim said.

Pakistan-Afghanistan relations sour

Relations between Pakistan and Afghanistan have soured in recent months. Islamabad says Kabul is not doing enough to tackle militant groups targeting Pakistan and in March Pakistan carried out airstrikes targeting militants on Afghan territory.

Last year, Pakistan expelled nearly 3,70,000 undocumented Afghan nationals, saying the majority of suicide attacks against its security forces were carried out by Afghans, a charge Kabul rejected.

Pakistan’s military spokesman said on Tuesday that security for 29,000 Chinese nationals in Pakistan, many of them working on infrastructure projects, was the top priority for security institutions.

The Taliban are also seeking economic ties with China, the first country to formally appoint an ambassador to Kabul under the Taliban, and wish to join China-Pakistan Economic Corridor (CPEC), which is Beijing’s $65 billion investment in development and infrastructure.

Kabul:

The Taliban government has entered its first talks with the United Nations, donors and non-governmental organisations over the impact of climate change in Afghanistan, organisers said Wednesday.

After four decades of war, Afghanistan ranks as one of the countries least prepared to face the effects of climate change, which is spurring extreme weather and warping natural environments.

Foreign aid to Afghanistan has dwindled since the Taliban takeover in 2021, with donors wary of backing a government considered a pariah, leaving poor and climate-vulnerable communities further exposed.

The Norwegian Afghanistan Committee (NAC) co-hosted three days of talks ending Tuesday, country director Terje Watterdal told reporters at a news conference in Kabul.

He said it was the first time Taliban officials “joined a parallel session, face-to-face and online, with a broad range of their counterparts in the West since the change of government in August 2021”.

The talks included universities, diplomats, UN agencies, donors and grassroots members of Afghan society.

All sides agreed that “both individual and collective action is required both inside and outside of Afghanistan”, Watterdal said.

“All government ministries committed their full support for the national and international organisations working to combat climate change and reduce the impact of climate change in Afghanistan.”

Split opinions

International opinion has been starkly split over how to deal with the Taliban authorities that have enforced an austere vision of Islamic rule in Afghanistan.

Some have said they should be frozen out of the international community until they roll back their curbs on women and girls, which have seen millions shut out of education.

Others have advocated for engaging with Taliban authorities on less controversial subjects which could benefit the population of the deeply impoverished nation.

Watterdal said it is “necessary to de-politicise key development issues, such as climate change”.

But he said talks had a 50/50 male and female split “to ensure that we also have the women’s perspective when it comes to climate change”.

Climate change plays a key role in the livelihoods of Afghans, with around 80 percent of the country’s 43 million population relying on agriculture for income.

During the talks, researchers said Afghanistan is only responsible for 0.06 percent of global greenhouse gas emissions but ranks sixth among nations most vulnerable to climate change.

Afghanistan has also witnessed a temperature increase of 1.8 Celsius (35.2 Fahrenheit) since 1950, outstripping the global average of 1.5C (34.7F).

This month, Afghanistan saw huge downpours of rain which followed an unusually dry winter and claimed more than 100 lives.

Deputy Director of the National Environmental Protection Agency of Afghanistan Zainul Abideen Abid said “Climate change management is a priority”.

“We call upon all relevant United Nations agencies to avoid mere sloganeering and take practical steps,” he said, asking for more funding to be unlocked for the country.

He also called for Afghanistan to be included in the COP29 summit in Azerbaijan in November. The Taliban government was not invited to last year’s COP28 in Dubai.

(Except for the headline, this story has not been edited by NDTV staff and is published from a syndicated feed.)

Taliban security personnel stand guard atop a Humevee vehicle during a game of ‘Buzkashi’, a traditional Central Asian sport, at a field in Fayzabad, Badakhshan province, on April 16, 2024.
| Photo Credit: AFP

The Taliban have suspended the activities of two TV stations in Afghanistan, alleging they failed to “consider national and Islamic values.”

An official from the Information Ministry’s Media Violations Commission, Hafizullah Barakzai, said a court will investigate files on the two Kabul-based stations.

Noor TV and Barya TV cannot operate until the court gives its verdict.

“Despite repeated warnings and recommendations, Noor TV and Barya TV did not follow journalistic principles, they did not consider national and Islamic values,” Barakzai said on Tuesday.

He gave no further details on the alleged violations.

Many journalists lost their jobs after the Taliban takeover in 2021, with media outlets closing over a lack of funds or because their staff left the country.

Women journalists face additional hardships because of work bans and travel restrictions.

There was no immediate comment from the two broadcasters.

Noor TV, which began broadcasting in 2007, is backed by the country’s former Foreign Affairs Minister and leader of Jamiat-e-Islami party, Salahuddin Rabbani.

Barya TV began operations in 2019 and is owned by Gulbuddin Hekmatyar, the former prime minister, and the warlord leader of Hizb-e-Islami party who is still based in Kabul.

The Afghanistan Journalist Center called the suspensions an illegal act by the Taliban-controlled government. It also said the suspensions were another step toward further media restrictions in the country.

In its annual report from 2023, the center said it documented at least 168 instances of violations of journalists’ rights, including one death and 61 arrests.

Although the numbers reflected a decrease compared to 2022, when the center recorded 260 incidents, the center noted that eight media outlets were banned in 2023 Five were temporarily barred from operating, while three remained banned outright.

Despite promising a more moderate rule, the Taliban have imposed their interpretation of Islamic law, or Shariah, in many aspects of daily life.

During their first time in power, in the late 1990s, the Taliban barred most television, radio and newspapers in the country.

Prime Minister Narendra Modi in Tirunelveli on April 15, 2024.
| Photo Credit: PTI

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Russia said on Tuesday it had important matters to discuss with Afghanistan’s Taliban leaders and was working to remove the Taliban from its list of banned terrorist organisations.

“This is a country that is next to us, and one way or another we communicate with them,” Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov told reporters.

“We need to resolve pressing issues, this also requires dialogue, so in this regard we communicate with them like practically everyone else – they are the de facto authority in Afghanistan.”

Peskov did not elaborate on the “pressing issues”, but Russia suffered its deadliest attack for 20 years last month when gunmen rushed into a concert hall outside Moscow, killing at least 144 people.

Islamic State terrorists claimed responsbility and US officials said they had intelligence that it was the network’s Afghan branch, Islamic State Khorasan, that was responsible. Russia has said it is also investigating a Ukrainian link, something Kyiv and the United States have strongly rejected.

The Taliban returned to power in Afghanistan in 2021 after the withdrawal of US-led foreign forces, but have remained until now on a list of organisations that Russia designates as terrorist.

(Except for the headline, this story has not been edited by NDTV staff and is published from a syndicated feed.)

Taliban forces patrol near the entrance gate of Hamid Karzai International Airport. File
| Photo Credit: Reuters

Russia said on Tuesday it had important matters to discuss with Afghanistan’s Taliban leaders and was working to remove the Taliban from its list of banned terrorist organisations.

“This is a country that is next to us, and one way or another we communicate with them,” Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov told reporters.

“We need to resolve pressing issues, this also requires dialogue, so in this regard we communicate with them like practically everyone else — they are the de facto authority in Afghanistan.”

Mr. Peskov did not elaborate on the “pressing issues”, but Russia suffered its deadliest attack for 20 years last month when gunmen stormed a concert hall outside Moscow, killing at least 144 people.

Islamic State militants claimed responsbility and U.S. officials said they had intelligence that it was the network’s Afghan branch, Islamic State Khorasan, that was responsible. Russia has said it is also investigating a Ukrainian link, something Kyiv and the United States have strongly rejected.

The Taliban returned to power in Afghanistan in 2021 after the withdrawal of U.S.-led foreign forces, but have remained until now on a list of organisations that Russia designates as terrorist.

In June 2015, a few months after the Islamic State (IS) announced its Wilayat Khorasan, the Taliban wrote a letter to the IS chief, Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi. The Taliban’s demand was that the IS should stop recruiting jihadists in Afghanistan. Both the Taliban and the Islamic State were insurgencies that time.

The letter, signed by the then political committee chief of the Taliban, Mullah Akhtar Mansour said there was room for “only one flag and one leadership” in the fight to re-establish Islamic rule in Afghanistan. Mullah Mansour would later become Taliban’s leader and be killed by a U.S. air strike in May 2016.

The Islamic State faction, which came to be known as the Islamic State-Khorasan, did not stop recruiting disgruntled Taliban fighters. Nor did it stop launching terror attacks across Afghanistan. Today, the Taliban are no longer an insurgency. They are the government in Kabul. And the IS-Khorasan has emerged as the most powerful branch of the Islamic State networks. It has training centres in the Taliban-ruled Afghanistan. It has recruited thousands of disgruntled Central Asians. It has carried out a number of attacks in recent months, including the January twin bombings in Kerman, Iran, a strike on a church in Istanbul and a massive attack on a concert hall in the outskirts of Moscow on March 22.

Armed gunmen opened fire at the Crocus City Concert Hall and threw explosives, killing at least 137 people and wounding nearly 200 others, in one of the worst terrorist attacks in Russia in years. Russian authorities have arrested and charged four Tajik nationals for the attack.

When the Islamic State announced the formation of the Khorasan Wilayat in January 2015, referring to an geographical area encompassing Afghanistan, Pakistan and Central Asia, the group’s immediate strategy was to exploit the divisions within the main jihadist groups operating in the region. It appointed Tehrik-i-Taliban Pakistan (TTP) commander Hafiz Saeed Khan as its leader and former Afghan Taliban commander Abdul Rauf Aliza as his deputy (both were killed in U.S. strikes). It attracted members from different militant organisations such as Lashkar-e-Taiba, Jamaat-ud-Dawa, the Haqqani Network and the Islamic Movement of Uzbekistan into its fold.

The IS-K declared its allegiance to Abu Bakr Baghdadi, the self-declared Khalifa, who was killed by an American strike in 2019. In operational tactics and ideology, it followed its parental organisation. The key goal is to establish “Islamic rule” in the “province” and for that they are ready to wage “jihad”. In a video message released in in 2015. the IS-Khorasan stated: “There is no doubt that Allah the Almighty has blessed us with jihad in the land of Khorasan since a long time ago, and it is from the grace of Allah that we fought any disbeliever who entered the land of Khorasan. All of this is for the sake of establishing the Shariah.”

When the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria came under pressure in 2015 and 2016, the core organisation shifted its focus to Afghanistan. The IS was losing territories to Kurdish militias in Syria and government forces and Shia militias in Iraq. In Afghanistan, a fractured country batted by civil war, the IS saw an opportunity to rebuild its organisation. Having built its base in eastern Afghanistan, the IS-Khorasan issued propaganda messages, calling on Muslim youth across Asia to join the group. Many radicalised youth, including dozens from India, travelled to Afghanistan to either join the IS or live an “Islamic life” under the Caliphate’s rule.

But this upset the Taliban, which did not want its monopoly of violent jihad to be challenged. The Taliban are a tribal, nationalist militant force, backed by Pakistan, whereas the IS-Khorasan doesn’t believe in national borders — they are global jiahdists fighting for a transnational Islamist Caliphate.

The ideological and operational differences led to open clashes between the IS- Khorasan and the Taliban. When the Taliban seized Kabul and took over prisons in August 2021, they freed several of their members, but executed IS-Khorasan militants and leaders. Currently, Shahab al-Muhajir is the Emir” of the group.

Why Russia?

The U.S. has carried out a number of targeted attacks, killing several of the IS-Khorasan leaders. In April 2017, then President Donald Trump ordered troops to drop the ‘Mother of all Bombs’, the most powerful non-nuclear bomb, on IS caves in eastern Afghanistan. But despite the U.S.’s targeted bombings and the Taliban’s counter-attacks on the ground, the IS-Khorasan has continued to expand its operations. When the Taliban established its regime in Kabul, the IS-Khorasan proclaimed that it is the real jihadist outfit. Militants from Central Asia who were part of the Islamic State Caliphate swelled the IS-Khorasan’s ranks after they relocated to Afghanistan.

The IS-Khorasan also launched propaganda videos targeting Afghanistan’s ethnic minorities such as Tajiks and Uzbeks, who were excluded by the Taliban’s Pashtun-only regime. Russia, its President Vladimir Putin and Iran emerged as the key enemies in the IS’s propaganda videos. After the Moscow attack, the IS said its soldiers had killed a “lot of Christians”. It also said Russia had “blood of Muslims on its hands”, referring to its military operations in Afghanistan, Chechnya and Syria.

Why does the IS hate Russia and Iran?

The answer lies in Syria.

The IS was founded in in Syria in 2014 amid the country’s civil war. It had grand ambitions, which were thwarted by Russia’s 2015 intervention. The IS captured eastern Syrian cities of Raqqa and Der Ezzour in 2013 and 2014, and it wanted to topple the regime of President Bashar al-Assad and capture Damascus, the seat of power of the Umayyad Caliphate in the seventh century.

But Russia’s intervention, along with help from Iran, which is a Shia majority republic, made sure that President Assad survived the civil war. In 2017, when the IS captured the ancient Syrian city of Palmyra, Russians fought along with the Syrian troops to liberate the city. Subsequently, the IS’s physical Caliphate was crushed by a host of forces — Kurds, Iraqis, Syrians and Iran-trained Shia militias with air cover from Russia and the U.S. Now, the IS-Khorasan sees ‘Christian’ Russia and ‘Rejectionist’ Iran (in the IS lexicon, Shias are “rejectionists”, who rejects the first three Caliphs of Sunni Islam) as top enemies.

Today, the IS-Khorasan wants to be the centre of global jihadism. Back-to-back attacks in different places from Istanbul to Kerman to Moscow suggest that the group is on a path to revival, six years after its physical Caliphate was destroyed. Chaos in West Asia, a base in Afghanistan, and foot soldiers from Central Asia are all helping the group expand its activities, with a highly sophisticated internet propaganda.

Reporting: Stanly Johny

Production: Shibu Narayan and Shikha Kumari