Month: July 2021

A United Nations compound in Herat, Afghanistan was attacked Friday with rocket propelled grenades and gunfire, killing an Afghan police guard and wounding other officers, the U.N. said.“The attack targeting entrances of the clearly marked United Nations facility was carried out by anti-government elements,” a U.N. statement said.Deborah Lyons, the head of U.N. Assistance Mission in Afghanistan, called the attack “deplorable.”“[W]e condemn it in the strongest terms,” said Lyons, who is also the secretary-general’s special representative for Afghanistan. “Our first thoughts are with the family of the officer slain and we wish a speedy recovery to those injured.”The U.N. statement reiterated that such attacks against its personnel and facilities are “prohibited under international law and may amount to war crimes.”The Taliban issued a statement saying the UNAMA compound in Herat was not under any threat.“It is possible that (UNAMA) guards could have sustained harm in cross-fire due to close proximity of the office to the fighting but it has now been secured as Mujahidin arrived at the scene,” said a tweet by Taliban spokesman Zabiullah Mujahid.#ClarificationOffice of @UNAMAnews in #Herat is safe & not under any threat.It is possible that guards could have sustained harm in cross-fire due to close proximity of the office to the fighting but it has now been secured as Mujahidin arrived at the scene. https://t.co/i7NnA5ooDq— Zabihullah (..ذبـــــیح الله م ) (@Zabehulah_M33) July 30, 2021Intense fighting around the city has been ongoing since late Wednesday. Local officials claimed Thursday that they pushed back a Taliban offensive on Herat and on Karokh, a district 35 kilometers northeast of Herat. It is the first time in 20 years of war that the Taliban has entered parts of Herat.  “We have tanks and military equipment and will fight against the Taliban with strength,” commando force commander Akram Khan told Tolo news, an Afghan news channel.Tolo also quoted local security officials claiming to kill at least 40 Taliban.However, in the last 24 hours, the Taliban have again captured large parts of Korokh as well as another district called Guzara, which is very close to Herat airport.Flights to Herat have been suspended for two days.On Friday, Taliban supporters posted videos on Twitter and other social media showing Taliban fighters with guns outside the headquarters of Karokh district government.  Abdul Razaq Ahmadi, a spokesman for anti-Taliban local armed forces, told VOA that Taliban and Afghan forces engaged in heavy fighting south of the city.  Jailani Farhad, a spokesman for the provincial government, said after several hours of heavy fighting, the situation around Pashtun-Pul was now normal. He also claimed that 150 Taliban were killed in the past 24 hours in the area.Dr. Arif Jalali, the head of the provincial hospital in Herat, said 21 people were wounded, including two civilians and some were transferred to the regional Herat hospital. He said five bodies, including the body of a U.N. compound guard, were moved to the hospital.
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Noor Mukadam’s last hours were terror-filled. Beaten repeatedly, the 27-year-old jumped from a window but was dragged back, beaten again and finally beheaded. A childhood friend has been charged with her killing.The gruesome death last week in an upscale neighborhood of the Pakistani capital, Islamabad, is the latest in a series of attacks on women in Pakistan, where rights activists say such gender-based assaults are on the rise as the country barrels toward greater religious extremism.Mukadam was the daughter of a diplomat, and her status as a member of the country’s elite has shone a spotlight on the relentless and growing violence against women in Pakistan, said prominent rights activist Tahira Abdullah. But the majority of women who are victims of such violence are among the country’s poor and middle classes, and their deaths are often not reported or, when they are, often ignored.”I could give you a list longer than my arm, only in one week” of attacks against women, said Abdullah. “The epidemic of sexual crimes and violence against women in Pakistan is a silent epidemic. No one sees it. No one is talking about it.”A women’s rights activist places a candle beside a poster with the pictures of Noor Mukadam, who was recently beheaded, during a candle light vigil to pay tribute to Noor and other domestic violence victims, in Islamabad, Pakistan, July 25, 2021.Still, Pakistan’s Parliament this month failed to pass a bill that seeks to protect women from violence in the home, including attacks by a husband. Instead, it asked an Islamic ideology council to weigh in on the measure — the same council that previously said it was OK for a husband to beat his wife.Data collected from domestic violence hotlines across the country showed a 200% increase in domestic violence between January and March last year, according to a Human Rights Watch report released earlier this year. The numbers were even worse after March, when COVID-19 lockdowns began, according to the report.In 2020, Pakistan was near the bottom of the World Economic Forum’s global gender index, coming in at 153 of 156 countries, ahead of only Iraq, Yemen and Afghanistan, which held the last spot despite billions of dollars spent and 20 years of international attention on gender issues there.Many of the attacks in Pakistan are so-called honor killings, where the perpetrator is a brother, father or other male relative. Each year, more than 1,000 women are killed in this way, many of them unreported, say human rights workers.”The authorities have failed to establish adequate protection or accountability for abuses against women and girls, including so-called ‘honor killings’ and forced marriage,” according to the HRW report.Rights groups have been sharply critical of Pakistani Prime Minister Imran Khan and his government, saying he panders to the religious right and excuses the perpetrators of attacks on women.A former cricket star who has married three times, Khan once had a reputation as a womanizer but has now embraced a conservative Islam. He keeps close ties with a religious ceric who blamed COVID-19 on “the wrongdoing of women.” He once appeared to blame women for attacks by men saying, “if you raise temptation in society … all these young guys have nowhere to go, it has consequences in the society.”Women’s rights activists demonstrate to condemn the violence against women in Lahore, Pakistan, Saturday, July 24, 2021.His information minister, Fawad Chaudhry, says Khan’s statements have been taken out of context and denied violence against women is on the rise, without offering evidence. He said his government encourages women in politics and sports and in provinces where Khan’s party dominates human rights legislation has been strengthened.”I think this perception is not really close to reality, that in Pakistan women are not safe or maybe that there’s a misogyny in practice in Pakistan,” Chaudhry said in an interview.Yet last week, one of Khan’s Cabinet ministers, Ali Amin Gandapur, told a rally of thousands of mostly male supporters, that he would “slap and slap” a female opposition political leader.Last September, a senior police officer blamed a woman who was ambushed and gang raped in front of her two children, saying she should not have been traveling at night and without a man.Such remarks reflect an increase in ultraconservative and even extremist religious values in Pakistan, said Amir Rana of the Pakistan Institute of Peace Studies.The country has seen an explosion of religious organizations and religious political parties, many with extreme beliefs, said Rana, whose organization tracks and documents extremism in Pakistan.These organizations have tremendous reach in most cities and towns, where they provide services from education to health care, and thus have extensive ability to influence social values, said Rana.The history of religious extremism in Pakistan is complicated, and Chaudhry, the information minister, argued that America shares responsibility for the role it played in the region in the 1980s. At that time, Pakistan’s military dictator aided by the U.S. used religious fervor to inspire Afghans to fight an invading Soviet Union. Many of those Afghans ended up in Pakistan as refugees.”And very conveniently now, the U.S. media and U.S. authorities … blame everything on Pakistan and have left the region,” he said.Pakistan’s prominent rights activist Tahira Abdullah speaks about violence against women during an interview with The Associated Press in Islamabad, Pakistan, July 27, 2021.But Abdullah, the rights activist, said Pakistan cannot shirk its own responsibility, noting that same dictator, Gen. Mohammad Zia-ul Haq, introduced Islamic laws that, among other things, reduced women’s rights to inheritance, limited the value of their testimony in court and made reporting a rape almost impossible by requiring four male witnesses.In Mukadam’s assault, police have charged Zahir Jaffar, the son of a wealthy industrialist, with murder. Initial reports say she was killed after spurning his marriage proposal. It’s not clear whether Jaffar has a lawyer.The brutality of the assault — the attacker used so-called brass knuckles — and the fear that his high social status means he could be freed, galvanized many in Pakistan to speak out. They have held protests and a candlelight vigil and launched a social media campaign #justicefornoor to preempt attempts to use influence and money to whisk the accused out of the country.In one petition circulating online, the author demanded the country’s judicial system “hold perpetrators of violence responsible. We demand justice. We demand it swiftly. We demand it for Noor. We demand it for all women.”Zarqa Khan, a student who attended a candlelight vigil for Mukadam, bemoaned how religion now pervades so much of life in Pakistan and how today she fears walking alone on the streets.”I just didn’t feel safe outside anymore,” said Khan. “And that shouldn’t be the scenario.”
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Taliban assassinations of Afghan pilots detailed by Reuters this month mark another “worrisome development” for the Afghan Air Force as it reels from a surge in fighting, a U.S. government watchdog said in a report released on Thursday.At least seven Afghan pilots have been assassinated off base in recent months, two senior Afghan government officials told Reuters, part of what the Islamist Taliban says is a campaign to see U.S.-trained Afghan pilots “targeted and eliminated.”As the United States prepares to formally end its 20-year military mission in Afghanistan on Aug. 31, Taliban insurgents are quickly seizing territory once controlled by the U.S.-backed government of President Ashraf Ghani, raising fears they could eventually try to take the capital, Kabul.The Special Inspector General for Afghan Reconstruction (SIGAR), in its quarterly report to Congress covering the three-month period through June, broadly portrayed an Afghan Air Force (AAF) under growing strain from battling the Taliban amid the U.S. withdrawal – and becoming less ready to fight.The AAF’s fleet of UH-60 Black Hawk helicopters, for example, had a 39 percent readiness rate in June, about half the level of April and May. All Afghan airframes were flying at least 25% over their recommended scheduled-maintenance intervals, SIGAR reported.”All aircraft platforms are overtaxed due to increased requests for close air support, intelligence, surveillance, reconnaissance missions and aerial resupply now that the (Afghan military) largely lacks U.S. air support,” it wrote.At the same time, air crews remain over-tasked due to the deteriorating security situation in Afghanistan and a pace of operations that “has only increased”, it said.SIGAR also cited the Reuters report.”Another worrisome development concerning AAF aircrew was a (Reuters) report that the Taliban is deliberately targeting Afghan pilots,” it said, before presenting the Reuters’ findings without additional comment.Along with Afghanistan’s Special Forces, the Afghan Air Force is a pillar of the nation’s strategy for preventing a Taliban takeover of cities. But special operations forces are also being misused, SIGAR reported.It said most Afghan National Army corps refuse to execute missions without support from its elite commandos. Citing NATO data, SIGAR said that when Afghan commandos arrive, they are misused to perform tasks intended for conventional forces, including route clearance and checkpoint security.Still, the report cautioned that it was difficult to evaluate what constituted military misuse of the elite forces when the Afghan government “is fighting for its existence.” 
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Afghanistan’s Taliban took responsibility this week for the killing of a comic in the country’s south, raising the specter of revenge killings as the U.S. and NATO put the final touches on their departure.A video of two men slapping and abusing Nazar Mohammad, better known as Khasha Zwan, spread widely on social media. He was later killed, shot multiple times. Taliban spokesperson Zabihullah Mujahid acknowledged that the two men were Taliban.The men have been arrested and will be tried, Mujahid said. He alleged that the comic, from the southern part of Kandahar province, was also a member of the Afghan National Police and had been implicated in the torture and killing of Taliban.Mujahid said the Taliban should have arrested the comic and brought him before a Taliban court, instead of killing him.Mohammad was not a TV personality but would post his routines on TikTok. He was known for crude jokes, funny songs, poking fun at himself, and often making fun of topics thrown at him from fans.The brutality of the killing heightened fears of revenge attacks. It also undermined the Taliban’s assurances that no harm would come to people who worked for the government, with the U.S. military or with U.S. organizations.Hundreds of people are reportedly being held by Taliban in areas they have overrun. Schools have been burned and reports have emerged of restrictions being imposed on women akin to those imposed when the insurgents last ruled Afghanistan. Back then, they had denied girls access to schools, and barred women from working.In an interview last week with The Associated Press, Taliban spokesperson Suhail Shaheen said the group’s commanders have orders not to interfere with civilians, or impose restrictions in newly captured areas. He said that when complaints of wrongdoings arise, they are investigated.However Patricia Gossman of Human Rights Watch says that revenge killings have been committed by all sides during Afghanistan’s decades of war.”The war — all 43 years of it — has a revenge-driven dynamic,” she said in an interview on Tuesday. “Revenge for past wrongs, including terrible atrocities, committed by one side or the other has been a mobilizing factor for all the various armed forces.”For example, in 2001 when the U.S.-led coalition ousted the Taliban and many surrendered, hundreds were packed into containers by troops loyal to warlord Rashid Dostum, with dozens suffocating in the brutally hot sun. Others who returned home after the Taliban defeat were often singled out for extortion by government officials.Reports have also since surfaced of U.S.-allied warlords calling in American airstrikes on supposed Taliban, or al-Qaida targets that turned out to involve personal vendettas, not extremists.”Each new horror — understandably — brings new outrage,” Gossman said. “With no hope for any other kind of justice, this is likely to continue… and every side is far too blind to the fact that this sense of outrage and horror at wrongs done is shared.”The fear of revenge has driven as many as 18,000 Afghans who worked for the U.S. military to apply for Special Immigration Visas to the United States. In Washington and in NATO capitals there is a growing demand to evacuate Afghans who worked with the military.The U.S. has promised it will move quickly on thousands of special visa requests.Gossman pressed for investigations into alleged atrocities.”The U.N. should be much more engaged in investigating these atrocities, as Afghan and international human rights groups have called for, and has happened in other countries,” she said. 
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