Assassiné par Al-Qaïda deux jours avant les attentats du 11 septembre 2001, le commandant Massoud avait alerté les Occidentaux des dangers du terrorisme islamiste, sans être écouté. Il jouit d’une bonne image chez nous. Pourtant, dans un pays terriblement rétrograde et en guerre, la plupart des Afghans gardent un souvenir mitigé de lui.
Diplomate, Jean-Yves Berthault a été en poste à l’ambassade de France à Kaboul entre 1979 et 1981. Conseiller politique de la mission spéciale de l’ONU en Afghanistan en 1997, il a dirigé la mission diplomatique française à Kaboul de 1998 à 2001. Il est l’auteur de Déjeuners avec les Talibans, Révélations d’un diplomate.
Turkey’s president told German President Steinmeier that the EU member states should provide swift assistance to Afghanistan’s neighbors to cope with irregular migration.
Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan renewed a call to the European Union to help Afghanistan’s neighbors cope with the Afghan refugee influx, warning against reliving the 2015 Syrian refugee wave.
Members of the Islamic Emirate were seen on Monday touring the Mes Aynak copper mine, which two Chinese companies had been developing.
China’s Jiangxi Copper Co Ltd said that it and the Metallurgical Corp of China (MCC) were monitoring the situation in Afghanistan and would push forward with the development of the Mes Aynak copper mine when they could.
Afghanistan’s new acting Foreign Minister Mawlawi Amir Khan Muttaqi has called for sanctions to be lifted against the Islamic Emirate and said urgent global help is needed to help deal with the “major humanitarian crisis” currently gripping the country.
A group of Afghan pilots are expected to be transferred to a US military base from Uzbekistan this weekend, under a new agreement between the US and Uzbek governments, The Wall Street Journal reports citing people familiar with the matter.
Following the Taliban’s recent rise to power in Afghanistan, articles in the Arab press, especially the Saudi and Emirati press, claimed that the Taliban shares many similarities with other extremist organizations in the Arab and Muslim world, including Al-Qaeda, ISIS, the Muslim Brotherhood (MB), Hamas and Hizbullah. The articles claimed that the MB’s ideology, shaped by its ideologue Sayyid Qutb and its founder Hassan Al-Banna, which involves directing accusations of heresy against all Muslims who are not MB members, gave rise to the ideologies of other extremist Islamist organizations that emerged in later periods. This includes Al-Qaeda, whose leaders Osama Bin Laden and Ayman Al-Zawahiri were influenced by the writings of Sayyid Qutb.
No one in the Iranian government was sad to see U.S. and NATO troops leave Afghanistan. In fact, Tehran would prefer to have the Taliban next-door than often-hostile Western powers. But Shiite-majority Iran has also been a target of attacks in the past from the Sunni Islamist Taliban, and it worries that if Afghanistan descends into chaos, it could negatively affect Iran’s ability to exert influence and trade with its neighbor—or worse, that the volatility could spill over into Iran. Tehran will have to pull off a delicate balancing act if it’s to benefit from the U.S. and NATO withdrawal.
Kabul International Airport will be fully operational for domestic and international flights in the next two days, officials said.
Mawlawi Abdul Hadi Hamdan, head of Kabul airport, stated that domestic flights have already resumed and that technical efforts are being made to resume all international flights.
The brother of Amrullah Saleh, the former Afghan vice president who became one of the leaders of an opposition force in the Panjshir valley, has allegedly been “executed” by Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan forces, his nephew said on Friday.