South East Asia

Celebratory gunfire erupted in Kabul on Friday night as rumours circulated that the Taliban had captured the Panjshir Valley, a last holdout against the Taliban sweep.

Heavy clashes have been reported in recent days between the Taliban and the Panjshir Valley-based National Resistance Forces (NRF), headed by former vice president Amrullah Saleh and Ahmad Massoud, the British-educated son of Ahmad Shah Massoud, who was killed in a suicide bombing two days before the 9/11 attacks in the US.

A close senior aide to Al Qaeda founder Osama bin Laden has returned to Nangarhar province in eastern Afghanistan two weeks after the Taliban seized control of the country.

A video verified by the The National shows Amin ul-Haq being driven through a checkpoint in the passenger seat of a white four-wheel-drive to a rapturous welcome by supporters.

The calamitous scenes at Kabul’s airport, where thousands of people are scrambling to escape the Taliban before an August 31 deadline, prove the US is not concerned with the fate of ordinary Afghans, Islamist leader Gulbuddin Hekmatyar told The National.

With days before the US ends its 20-year presence in Afghanistan and with tens of thousands of Afghans soon to be left stranded, Mr Hekmatyer said the facts speak for themselves.

Since the Taliban took power in Afghanistan, the humanitarian emergency there has become even more dire. This briefing note outlines the most pressing issues and steps to help relieve the suffering.

Dramatic scenes at the Kabul airport of Afghans desperate to leave the country, and horrific bombings there, captured the world’s attention in the weeks after the Taliban took power. The focus is now shifting to a much larger, multi-faceted humanitarian crisis throughout the country. Violence, displacement, drought and the COVID-19 pandemic hit the Afghan population with accelerating force in recent years, and the humanitarian disaster gathered pace in May as the final withdrawal of U.S. and allied forces began. Afghans teemed across borders seeking refuge after the government collapsed on 15 August.

Americans have been shocked by videos of thousands of Afghans risking their lives to flee the Taliban’s return to power in their country – and then by an Islamic State suicide bombing and ensuing massacre by U.S. forces that together killed at least 170 people, including 13 U.S. troops.

Even as UN agencies warn of an impending humanitarian crisis in Afghanistan, the U.S. Treasury has frozen nearly all of the Afghan Central Bank’s $9.4 billion in foreign currency reserves, depriving the new government of funds that it will desperately need in the coming months to feed its people and provide basic services.

In the wake of intense fighting and the rapid transfer of power to the Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan (also known as the Taliban), people are facing widespread instability, mass displacement, and the disruption of basic services, including health care. Despite the challenges, Doctors Without Borders/Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF) teams continue to provide essential medical care across all five of our projects in Afghanistan—in Herat, Helmand, Kandahar, Khost, and Kunduz provinces. Here, two medical staff members working in Lashkar Gah (Helmand province) and Khost city describe the recent changes they have witnessed, and how they have affected patients and health care providers alike.

Afghanistan does not have the necessary means to ensure the security of Kabul Hamid Karzai International Airport and requires the support of a foreign country in this regard, Afghanistan’s former Prime Minister Gulbuddin Hekmatyar said Tuesday, underlining that Turkey is the best and most reliable candidate for the mission, considering the deep relations between the two countries.

In an exclusive interview in Kabul, the veteran Afghan leader said that he and his party, the Hezb-e-Islami party, discussed the security and management of the Kabul airport with the Taliban.

The calamitous scenes at Kabul’s airport, where thousands of people are scrambling to escape the Taliban before an August 31 deadline, prove the US is not concerned with the fate of ordinary Afghans, Islamist leader Gulbuddin Hekmatyar told The National.

With days before the US ends its 20-year presence in Afghanistan and with tens of thousands of Afghans soon to be left stranded, Mr Hekmatyer said the facts speak for themselves.

Taliban forces and fighters loyal to local leader Ahmad Massoud fought in Afghanistan’s Panjshir Valley on Thursday, with each side saying it had inflicted heavy casualties in the last province resisting Taliban rule.

After the fall of Kabul on August 15, several thousand fighters from local militias and the remnants of army and special forces units have massed in Panjshir.

The leader of Afghanistan’s only region not to have fallen to the Taliban has said he would be willing to join a Taliban government, but only if the group proved itself to be inclusive and respect the rights of all Afghans.

Ahmad Massoud, 32, leads forces in the Panjshir Valley and said that war was on the cards if the group attempted an attack on his region.

In his first interview since the fall of Kabul last week, he told The National he had seen little evidence the group had changed over the past two decades.