Month: September 2021

Icelanders were voting Saturday in a general election dominated by climate change, with an unprecedented number of political parties likely to win parliamentary seats.

Polls suggested there wouldn’t be an outright winner, triggering complex negotiations to build a coalition government.

A record nine parties could cross the 5% threshold needed to qualify for seats in Iceland’s parliament, the Althing. Upstart parties include the Socialist Party, which is promising to shorten the workweek and nationalize Iceland’s fishing industry.

High turnout was expected, as one-fifth of eligible voters have already cast absentee ballots.

Climate change is high among voters’ concerns in Iceland, a glacier-studded volcanic island nation of about 350,000 people in the North Atlantic.

An exceptionally warm summer by Icelandic standards — 59 days of temperatures above 20 degrees Celsius (68 F) — and shrinking glaciers have helped drive global warming up the political agenda.

Polls showed strong support for left-leaning parties promising to cut carbon emissions by more than Iceland is already committed to under the Paris climate agreement. The country has pledged to become carbon-neutral by 2040, a decade ahead of most other European nations.

The current government is a coalition of three parties spanning the political spectrum from left to center-right, and led by Prime Minister Katrin Jakobsdottir of the Left Green Party. It was formed in 2017 after years of political instability.

Jakobsdottir remains a popular prime minister, but polls suggest her party could fare poorly, ending the ongoing coalition.

“The country is facing big decisions as we turn from the pandemic,” Jakobsdottir said during televised debates on Friday night in which party leaders vowed to end Iceland’s reliance on oil and many wanted to raise taxes on the rich.
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Merkel Makes Final Push for Successor in Germany’s Knife-Edge Polls

Chancellor Angela Merkel urged Germans Saturday to give her would-be successor Armin Laschet their vote to shape Germany’s future, in a last-ditch push to shore up his beleaguered campaign 24 hours before Germans vote.

Laschet, 60, has been trailing his Social Democrat challenger Olaf Scholz in the race for the chancellery, although final polls put the gap between them within the margin of error, making the vote one of the most unpredictable in recent years.

Merkel had planned to keep a low profile in the election battle as she prepares to bow out of politics after 16 years in power. But she has found herself dragged into the frantic campaign schedule of the unpopular chairman of her party, Laschet.

In the last week of the campaign, Merkel took Laschet to her constituency by the Baltic coast and on Friday headlined the closing rally gathering the conservatives’ bigwigs in Munich.

Merkel tugged at the heartstrings of Germany’s predominantly older electorate on Friday, calling on them to keep her conservatives in power for the sake of stability — a trademark of Germany.

“To keep Germany stable, Armin Laschet must become chancellor, and the CDU and CSU must be the strongest force,” she said.

A day before the vote, she travelled to Laschet’s hometown and constituency Aachen, a spa city near Germany’s western border with Belgium and the Netherlands, where he was born and still lives.

“It is about your future, the future of your children and the future of your parents,” she said at her last rally before the polls, urging strong mobilization for her conservative alliance.

She underlined that climate protection will be a key challenge of the next government but said this would not be achieved “simply through rules and regulations”.

“For that we need new technological developments, new procedures, researchers, interested people who think about how that can be done, and people who participate,” she said.

Laschet is a “bridge-builder who will get people on board” in shaping Germany to meet those challenges, she said.

Hundreds of thousands of people had descended on the streets on Friday urging change and greater climate protection, with a leading activist calling Sunday’s election the vote “of a century”.

‘Could backfire’

With the clock ticking down to the election, Scholz was also staying close to home at the other end of the country to chase down last votes.

Taking questions from voters in his constituency of Potsdam — a city on the outskirts of Berlin famous for its palaces that once housed Prussian kings — Scholz said he was fighting for “a major change in this country, a new government” led by him.

He also gave a glimpse of the future government he hopes to lead, saying that “perhaps it may be enough to, for instance, form a government between the SPD and the Greens”.

Scholz, currently finance minister in Merkel’s coalition government, has avoided making mistakes on the campaign trail, and largely won backing as he sold himself as the “continuity candidate” after Merkel in place of Laschet.

Described as capable but boring, Scholz has consistently beaten Laschet by wide margins when it comes to popularity.

As election day loomed, Laschet’s conservatives were closing the gap, with one poll even putting them just one percentage point behind the SPD’s 26 percent.

Laschet went into the race for the chancellery badly bruised by a tough battle for the conservatives’ chancellor candidate nomination.

Nevertheless, his party enjoyed a substantial lead ahead of the SPD heading into the summer.

But Laschet was seen chuckling behind President Frank-Walter Steinmeier as he paid tribute to victims of deadly floods in July, an image that would drastically turn the mood against him and his party.

As polls showed the lead widening for the SPD, the conservatives turned to their greatest asset — the still widely popular Merkel.

Yet roping in the chancellor is not without risks, said political analyst Oskar Niedermayer of Berlin’s Free University.

“Merkel is still the most well-liked politician. But the joint appearances can become a problem for Laschet because they are then immediately being compared to each other,” he said.

“And it could therefore backfire because people could then think that Merkel is more suitable than Laschet.”

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Cameroon Villagers Call for Help Against Elephants Destroying Crops, Houses

Conflict between Cameroonians and local wildlife has led to street protests Saturday in the western village of Bakingili. Farmers and villagers say elephants are destroying their plantations and scores of houses, reportedly leading to the killing of two elephants this month. Authorities blame locals for occupying elephant habitats and caution against killing the endangered animals.

More than 200 villagers marched, demanding help in Bakingilli, a farming village in Cameroon’s English-speaking South-West region.

The villagers say elephants have destroyed more than 250 banana, plantain, corn and bean plantations. They say several dozen homes also have been destroyed by elephants in the past two months.

Vincent Njie, who says he is the spokesperson for the villagers, said Saturday’s protest is the third in two months. Njie said villagers do not understand why the government is reluctant to help kill or chase the animals out of Bakingili.

“The elephants come out even at daytime, scaring even school children. The principals (teachers) are even afraid to go to school because they think that if they go there they will meet elephants. Elephants should be evicted so that we continue our normal lives. Most of the people living in Bakinggili rely on farming. Please, we need help,” Nije said.

Bakingili lies at the foot of Mount Cameroon, known locally as Mount Fako. In 2009, Cameroon’s government created the 58,000-hectare Mount Cameroon National Park to protect biodiversity.

The government said that between 2009 to 2019, the elephant population in the park increased from less than 170 to about 300.

Delphine Ikome, the highest-ranking government wildlife official in Cameroon’s South-West region, says most of the forest where elephants live has been turned into plantations and villages, provoking conflicts between the gigantic animals and humans.

“These elephants that we are protecting have become a threat to the community around this protected area, the Mount Cameroon National Park. We have come here to appeal to the population of Bakingili, to tell them to conserve our protected areas to improve the livelihoods of our local communities,” Ikome said.

She said elephants are critically endangered because of habitat loss and fragmentation. She said elephants roam over long distances and play a key role in spreading tree seedlings to balance natural ecosystems and reduce climate change.

The villagers said they killed two elephants in the park this month. Wildlife officials have yet to confirm the deaths.

A conservation group, The Last Great Ape, or LAGA, has been protecting elephants in Cameroon. The group’s vice president, Eric Kabah Tah, says the government has a responsibility to protect both its citizens and its wildlife.

“The government should learn lessons from other areas where such conflicts have been successfully resolved through the use of some conservation methods to send away the animals and ensure that both parties live in peace. Certain sounds are played in such a way that it could scare off the wildlife. But there should be long-term solutions such that humans should be able to understand where the limits of their area is so that they don’t encroach into wildlife habitat to avoid such conflicts,” Tah said.

Cameroon has an estimated 6,500 elephants. Conservation groups such as LAGA say the country still has one of the largest elephant populations left in Africa.

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Refugees in Turkey Fearful as Sentiment Turns Against Them

09/25/2021 ITasLeave a comment

Fatima Alzahra Shon thinks neighbors attacked her and her son in their Istanbul apartment building because she is Syrian.

The 32-year-old refugee from Aleppo was confronted on Sept. 1 by a Turkish woman who asked her what she was doing in “our” country. Shon replied, “Who are you to say that to me?” The situation quickly escalated.

A man came out of the Turkish woman’s apartment half-dressed, threatening to cut Shon and her family “into pieces,” she recalled. Another neighbor, a woman, joined in, shouting and hitting Shon. The group then pushed her down a flight of stairs. Shon said that when her 10-year-old son, Amr, tried to intervene, he was beaten as well.

Shon said she has no doubt about the motivation for the aggression: “Racism.”

Refugees fleeing the long conflict in Syria once were welcomed in neighboring Turkey with open arms, sympathy and compassion for fellow Muslims. But attitudes gradually hardened as the number of newcomers swelled over the past decade.

Anti-immigrant sentiment is now nearing a boiling point, fueled by Turkey’s economic woes. With unemployment high and the prices of food and housing skyrocketing, many Turks have turned their frustration toward the country’s roughly 5 million foreign residents, particularly the 3.7 million who fled the civil war in Syria.

In August, violence erupted in Ankara, the Turkish capital, as an angry mob vandalized Syrian businesses and homes in response to the deadly stabbing of a Turkish teenager.

Turkey hosts the world’s largest refugee population, and many experts say that has come at a cost. Selim Sazak, a visiting international security researcher at Bilkent University in Ankara and an advisor to officials from the opposition IYI Party, compared the arrival of so many refugees to absorbing “a foreign state that’s ethnically, culturally, linguistically dissimilar.”

“Everyone thought that it would be temporary,” Sazak said. “I think it’s only recently that the Turkish population understood that these people are not going back. They are only recently understanding that they have to become neighbors, economic competitors, colleagues with this foreign population.”

On a recent visit to Turkey, United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees Filippo Grandi acknowledged that the high number of refugees had created social tensions, especially in the country’s big cities. He urged “donor countries and international organizations to do more to help Turkey.”

The prospect of a new influx of refugees following the Taliban takeover of Afghanistan has reinforced the unreceptive public mood. Videos purporting to show young Afghan men being smuggled into Turkey from Iran caused public outrage and led to calls for the government to safeguard the country’s borders.

The government says there are about 300,000 Afghans in Turkey, some of whom hope to continue their journeys to reach Europe.

Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan, who long defended an open-door policy toward refugees, recently recognized the public’s “unease” and vowed not to allow the country to become a “warehouse” for refugees. Erdogan’s government sent soldiers to Turkey’s eastern frontier with Iran to stem the expected flow of Afghans and is speeding up the construction of a border wall.

Immigration is expected to become a top campaign topic even though Turkey’s next general election is two years away. Both Turkey’s main opposition party, the Republican People’s Party, or CHP, and the nationalist IYI Party have promised to work on creating conditions that would allow the Syrian refugees’ return. waste collection fees foreigners there to propel them to leave.

Following the anti-Syrian violence in the Altindag district of Ankara last month, Umit Ozdag, a right-wing politician who recently formed his own anti-immigrant party, visited the area wheeling an empty suitcase and saying the time has come for the refugees to “start packing.”

The riots broke out on Aug. 11, a day after a Turkish teenager was stabbed to death in a fight with a group of young Syrians. Hundreds of people chanting anti-immigrant slogans took to the streets, vandalized Syrian-run shops and hurled rocks at refugees’ homes.

A 30-year-old Syrian woman with four children who asked not to be named for fear of reprisals said her family locked themselves in their bathroom as an attacker climbed onto their balcony and tried to force the door open. The woman said the episode traumatized her 5-year-old daughter and the girl has trouble sleeping at night.

Some shops in the area remain closed, with traces of the disturbance still visible on their dented, metal shutters. Police have deployed multiple vehicles and a water cannon on the streets to prevent a repeat of the turmoil.

Syrians are often accused of failing to assimilate in Turkey, a country that has a complex relationship with the Arab world dating back to the Ottoman empire. While majority Muslim like neighboring Arab countries, Turks trace their origins to nomadic warriors from central Asia and Turkish belongs to a different language group than Arabic.

Kerem Pasaoglu, a pastry shop owner in Istanbul, said he wants Syrians to go back to their country and is bothered that some shops a street over have signs written in Arabic instead of Turkish.

“Just when we said we are getting used to Syrians or they will leave, now the Afghans coming is unfortunately very difficult for us,” he said.

Turkey’s foreign minister this month said Turkey is working with the United Nations’ refugee agency to safely return Syrians to their home country.

While the security situation has stabilized in many parts of Syria after a decade of war, forced conscription, indiscriminate detentions and forced disappearances continue to be reported. Earlier this month, Amnesty International said some Syrian refugees who returned home were subjected to detention, disappearance and torture at the hands of Syrian security forces, proving that going back to any part of the country is unsafe.

Shon said police in Istanbul showed little sympathy when she reported the attack by her neighbors. She said officers kept her at the station for hours, while the male neighbor who threatened and beat her was able to leave after giving a brief statement.

Shon fled Aleppo in 2012, when the city became a battleground between Syrian government forces and rebel fighters. She said the father of her children drowned while trying to make it to Europe. Now, she wonders whether Turkey is the right place for her and her children.

“I think of my children’s future. I try to support them in any way I can, but they have a lot of psychological issues now and I don’t know how to help them overcome it,” she said. “I don’t have the power anymore. I’m very tired.

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Suicide Car Bomb in Somali Capital Kills at Least 7, Official Says

A suicide car bomb killed at least seven people in the Somali capital on Saturday at a street junction near the president’s residence, an official said.

“A suicide car bomb that exploded at Ceelgaab junction killed seven people and injured eight others,” Muawiye Mudeey, district commissioner of Mogadishu’s Hamarjajab district told Reuters.

It was not immediately clear who was responsible for the attack, but al Shabab, which wants to overthrow the government and impose its interpretation of Islamic law, frequently carries out such bombings.

A Reuters witness at the scene of the blast reported seeing seven cars and three rickshaws destroyed by the blast, and the whole junction covered in blood.
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‘A Lot of Impatience’: Youth Climate Protesters Return to the Streets

Young climate activists from Greta Thunberg’s Friday for Future movement resumed mass street protests on Friday for the first time since the pandemic began, demanding drastic action from global leaders ahead of U.N. climate talks in November.

From Nairobi to Washington, marchers — including Thunberg, who joined protests in Berlin — carried placards and homemade banners during the demonstrations, which drew fewer protesters than before COVID-19 in most cities.

“It’s slightly disappointing there are less people than there used to be, but people will come back. The problem is not going away,” said Erin Brodrick, 17, one of about 250 protesters in London’s Parliament Square.

Before the pandemic, the square often overflowed with activists during larger Friday marches.

Brodrick said young people “feel really scared about the future of the planet” as they see climate change impacts strengthen and emissions continue to rise, despite a raft of political promises to slash them.

But because underage protesters cannot vote, “what else can I do but come out here?” she said, wielding a green “Planet Over Politics” sign.

In Barcelona, about 200 youth activists, children and parents joined a protest around a cloth depicting the Earth, showing their support for a court action launched in June aimed at forcing the Spanish government to boost its climate policy.

Gathered in the Catalan capital’s main square, they also demanded a stop to a planned expansion of Barcelona’s airport.

Filip Frey, a 23-year-old Polish activist studying engineering in Barcelona, said younger people will be the ones who pay for the selfish actions of politicians who “only care about their publicity, their money, their power.”

“We are just furious and angry,” he said, urging society as a whole to join the youth protests. “If we don’t do anything, nothing will change and we will just burn or drown.”

‘Not being heard’

In Nairobi, where about 30 activists in green-and-white T-shirts gathered in a central park, many said there was little evidence politicians were listening to their pleas to work faster to cut emissions and curb climate risks.

“Young people have been speaking up for years now and there is a lot of impatience … We want to begin seeing governments taking rapid action,” said Elizabeth Wathuti, head of campaigns for the Wangari Maathai Foundation, a local environmental group.

“We’ve been speaking out about this, but our voices are not being heard,” she said, adding that “we’re the ones that have to live with the consequences of the inaction.”

Patricia Kombo, another activist, said one aim of the protest was to push politicians to commit to more aggressive action on climate change ahead of the upcoming international COP26 U.N. climate negotiations in Glasgow, starting Oct. 31.

“We’ve had a lot of climate talks but what we get is empty promises. We want real climate action at COP26 because we can’t wait any longer,” she said as activists waved signs saying, “Stand up for climate justice” and “Later is too late.”

Protesters gathered in Washington said they were pushing for a comprehensive $3.5 trillion national U.S. climate bill and an immediate transition to green energy, said Magnolia Mead, one of the organizers.

Jamie Minden, 18, a student at Washington’s American University, said the movement’s return to large-scale protests was crucial to keeping up pressure for climate action.

“It is so critical to get back out in the streets – it’s not the same online,” she said. Street protests “get a lot more attention.”

Activist Shelby Grace Tucker, 14, who had come to the protest from Baltimore, said getting back on the streets felt “really empowering” and was a way for younger people – who might not otherwise be able to garner attention, to “still make a difference.”

Merging movements

To weather the pandemic, Fridays for Future largely moved online, with education programs and other events, though small groups continued to protest on the streets.

But the group also used the time to try to broaden the movement and coordinate its work with social pushes on other issues including race.

Sasha Langeveldt, 24, a Black Fridays for Future activist now working for the Friends of the Earth nonprofit, said that as activists grew older the movement needed to focus more on turning protesters into voters.

Langeveldt said young people were increasingly taking climate action into their own hands as well, citing an online green jobs summit in London she is helping organize in October. “We want to show politicians things can actually change,” she said.

Rowan Riley, 29, a London architect at the protest, agreed, saying he was now part of the London Energy Transformation Initiative, working on changing building design and regulation with climate change and renewable energy in mind. “We have to find other ways to influence things. It’s not always about the numbers at protests,” he said.

Carrying a “Grandparents and Elders” flag at the London march, Pat Farrington, 78, said she wanted to see governments “take everything more seriously.”

That should include training more young people for green jobs like installing insulation or solar panels, and doing more to help the public understand the potential economic benefits of a climate-smart transition.

“Right now, people say, ‘I can’t afford a posh electric car,’ and they feel their pockets are being picked,” she said.

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Mozambicans Return to Uncertain Future After Islamists Pushed Back

Rwandan forces will help secure and rebuild areas of northern Mozambique destroyed by an Islamist insurgency, Rwanda’s President Paul Kagame said Friday, as Mozambican officials began encouraging civilians to return to the gas-rich region.

The United Nations has warned of a continuing militant threat in Cabo Delgado, where Rwandan forces are patrolling burnt-out streets once besieged by the militants.

Kagame told a joint news conference in Maputo with his Mozambican counterpart Filipe Nyusi that Rwandan troops would help secure and rebuild the areas destroyed by the insurgency.

“The mission of Rwandan troops in Mozambique continues,” he said. “The new action should be to guarantee security in the liberated areas until the reconstruction is finished.”

Kagame said the troops would stay as long as Mozambique requests.

Nyusi thanked Rwanda for helping fix what had been destroyed by “terrorists.”

Allied Rwandan-Mozambican troops moved in to recapture parts of northern Cabo Delgado — an area hosting $60 billion worth of gas projects that the militants have been attacking since 2017 — in July.

A day earlier, soldiers had laid out rifles and rocket launchers seized from the Islamist fighters, who Mozambique’s government has said are on the run.

Some local officials have encouraged civilians to return, according to media reports, and the Rwandan military’s spokesperson said 25,000 people had been brought home. “It is very safe for them to go back,” Ronald Rwivanga told Reuters on Thursday.

But United Nations officials are not so sure.

A document compiled in September for U.N. agencies and other aid groups, seen by Reuters, said it was not clear whether militant capabilities had been much reduced. “Fighting continues in certain locations and civilian authorities have not been re-established,” it added.

Children played in the streets of the town of Palma on Thursday and vendors sold goods from kiosks, six months after the militants attacked the settlement, killing dozens and forcing tens of thousands to flee.

But 60 kilometers south in the port of Mocimboa da Praia — a hub needed for cargo deliveries for the gas projects — the streets were largely deserted, flanked by windowless, rubble-strewn buildings and overturned military vehicles.

Graffiti, using a local name for the militant group, read: “If you want to make Al-Shabaab laugh, threaten them with death.”

‘The war that remains is hunger’

Aside from the Rwandans, a contingent of forces from the regional bloc, the Southern African Development Community (SADC) is also patrolling northern Cabo Delgado.

Rwivanga said the Rwandans had been moving civilians back into the area they control around a $20 billion liquefied natural gas (LNG) project run by oil major TotalEnergies, which was forced to a halt by the Palma attack.

Yet security analysts say the Mozambican military deficiencies that allowed the insurgency to take hold in the north — including soldiers who are ill equipped, undisciplined and poorly paid — will not be easily reversed.

Even with other forces there, they say, security is uncertain outside of small, heavily guarded areas.

Returnees, meanwhile, are more preoccupied with where the next meal is coming from. The World Food Program said this week that the first shipment of aid had reached Palma since the March attack.

“Now the situation is calm, the war that remains is hunger and lack of jobs,” Ibrahimo Suleman, 60, a resident who works for a kitchen-fitting company said.

Many others remain too afraid or unwilling to return, with almost 750,000 people still displaced as of this month, according to the International Organization of Migration.
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Flights Scrapped as New Volcanic Eruptions Hit Canaries

Fresh volcanic eruptions in Spain’s Canary Islands prompted the cancellation of flights, airport authorities said Friday, the first since the Cumbre Vieja volcano came to life again.

New evacuations were also ordered as large explosions and new openings were reported at the volcano on La Palma island on Friday.

A large cloud of thick, black ash spewed into the air, forcing several airlines to call off flights.

La Palma had six inter-island flights scheduled for Friday operated by Binter, Canaryfly and Air Europa, while the national carrier Iberia had a single service from Madrid to the mainland. All were scrapped.

They were the first flights to be cancelled since the volcano erupted on Sunday.

“It is not yet possible to say when we can resume flights,” Spanish carrier Binter said on Twitter.

Authorities also ordered new evacuations, adding to the 6,100 people already forced to leave to area this week, including 400 tourists.

The compulsory evacuation order was issued in parts of El Paso town on La Palma island “given the increased risk for the population due to the current eruptive episode,” the regional government said.

According to the European Union’s Copernicus Earth Observation Program, the lava has so far destroyed 390 buildings and covered more than 180 hectares of land.

Video footage from the civil guard showed a garden in the area completely covered in thick ash.

Visiting the island, Prime Minister Pedro Sanchez announced La Palma would be declared a zone affected by a catastrophe” which opens financial aid to residents.

Toxic gas fears

The speed of the lava flowing from the mouth of the volcano has steadily slowed in recent days, and experts are hoping it will not reach the coast.

If the molten lava pours into the sea, experts fear it will generate clouds of toxic gas into the air, also affecting the marine environment.

Authorities set up a no-go zone this week to head off curious onlookers.

No casualties have been reported so far but the damage to land and property has been enormous, with the Canaries regional head Angel Victor Torres estimating the cost at well over $470 million.

The eruption on La Palma, home to 85,000 people, was the first in 50 years.

The last eruption on the island came in 1971 when another part of the same volcanic range — a vent known as Teneguia — erupted on the southern side of the island.

Two decades earlier, the Nambroque vent erupted in 1949.

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Pakistan PM Urges World to Support Taliban, Not Isolate It

09/25/2021 ITasLeave a comment

Pakistan’s prime minister is urging the international community to support the new Taliban leaders in Afghanistan instead of isolating them.

In a prerecorded message to the United Nations General Assembly on Friday, Imran Khan said the world community should stabilize the current leaders “for the sake of the people of Afghanistan.”

“If we neglect Afghanistan right now, according to the U.N., half the people of Afghanistan are already vulnerable, and by next year almost 90% of the people in Afghanistan will go below the poverty line,” Khan said.

He noted that the Taliban have promised to respect human rights, form an inclusive government and not allow their country to be used by terrorists.

“If the world community incentivizes them, encourages them to walk this talk, it will be a win-win situation for everyone,” he said.

On Thursday, Pakistani Foreign Minister Shah Mehmood Qureshi conveyed to the United States that while Afghanistan’s Taliban rulers should be held to their commitments, the world has “a moral obligation” to collectively work to help the Afghan people deal with a severe humanitarian and economic crisis in the war-ravaged country.

Qureshi delivered the message Thursday in his meeting with U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken, during which they discussed the way forward in Afghanistan, according to an official statement issued in Islamabad. The discussions took place in New York, on the sidelines of the General Assembly.

Qureshi “hoped that the world would not repeat the mistake of disengaging with Afghanistan,” according to the statement.

The U.S. State Department said Blinken stressed “the importance of coordinating our diplomatic engagement and facilitating the departure of those wishing to leave Afghanistan” in his talks with Qureshi.

The Taliban swept through Afghanistan in August, after Washington and Western allies withdrew their troops in line with U.S. President Joe Biden’s orders that there was no point in extending America’s longest war beyond 20 years.

The Islamist movement’s return to power prompted the Biden administration to swiftly block billions of dollars held in U.S. reserves for Kabul, while the World Bank and International Monetary Fund both halted Afghanistan’s access to crucial funding amid worries about the fate of Afghan basic human rights under Taliban rule.

Blinken told reporters Thursday the Afghan issue was the focus of his multilateral and bilateral meetings, including with counterparts from Russia and China. He said that the Taliban continue to seek legitimacy and international support for their rule in Kabul, and that the world is united on how to deal with Taliban-ruled Afghanistan.

“I think there is very strong unity of approach and unity of purpose. … Again, the Taliban says that it seeks legitimacy, that it seeks support from the international community. The relationship that it has with the international community is going to be defined by the actions it takes. That’s what we’re looking for,” Blinken stressed.

He reiterated U.S. priorities for the Islamist group, including allowing Afghans and foreign nationals to leave the country; respecting human rights, particularly for women, girls and minorities; preventing terrorist groups from using Afghanistan to threaten other countries; and forming a “genuinely inclusive government” that can reflect aspirations of the Afghan people.

The Taliban have dismissed criticism of their male-only interim Cabinet, saying it represents all Afghan ethnicities, and it promised to “very soon” bring women on board.

“The Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan (the Taliban) has writ all over the country and enjoy grassroots support. We truly represent the aspirations of the people of Afghanistan and are ready to engage with the world,” Suhail Shaheen, whom the Taliban have nominated as their permanent representative to the U.N., said Friday.

“The U.N. should listen to us to hear our side of the story. It is proved, policy of isolation is in the interest of none,” insisted Shaheen, who is based in Doha, Qatar, where the Taliban run their political office.

Pakistan, China and Russia have all moved to engage with the Taliban and have been urging the global community to engage with and help the new rulers in Kabul meet urgent humanitarian needs of Afghans.

They have demanded the unfreezing of Afghan assets and the removal of other economic sanctions on Kabul, but they also have linked recognition of the new Taliban government until it delivers on its stated commitments.

“Just as an overwhelming majority of countries around the world, we prefer to most closely watch what the Taliban have been doing in Afghanistan, what final shape the structure of power in that country will take, and how the given promises will be fulfilled. We are monitoring this very closely,” Russian media quoted presidential spokesperson Dmitry Peskov as saying Friday.

Chinese Foreign Minister Wang Yi, while addressing a virtual conference of G-20 foreign ministers on Thursday, also underscored the importance of the Taliban ensuring a broad and inclusive governance system in Kabul but slammed the freezing of Afghan assets by the U.S. and international lending institutions.

“Afghanistan’s foreign exchange reserves are its national assets and should be owned by and used for the people rather than being used as a bargaining chip to exert political pressure on Afghanistan,” he said.

Pakistan was among the only three countries, including Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates, that recognized the Taliban government from 1996-2001, after the movement emerged the winner from the then-Afghan civil war. The rest of the global community isolated Afghanistan, citing human rights abuses by the Taliban, including, among other things, its ban on women and girls from work and receiving an education.

However, Qureshi has recently stated Islamabad was not in a rush to extend diplomatic recognition to the Taliban’s new government, but it would keep sending humanitarian assistance to the neighboring country, with which Pakistan shares a nearly 2,600-kilometer border.

On Monday, the U.N. secretary-general received a letter from the Taliban notifying him that they want to replace Afghanistan Ambassador Ghulam Isaczai, who was appointed in July by the ousted Kabul government, with their own envoy. Acting Taliban Foreign Minister Amir Khan Muttaqi, in his letter, said they want to participate in the current UNGA debate.

Afghanistan is slated to speak last, on Sept. 27. Presumably that would be Isaczai, who is still the accredited representative.

A U.N. spokesperson said it will be up to a nine-member General Assembly credentials committee to decide who will represent Afghanistan at the United Nations. It is unlikely to meet before October, however, making it doubtful the Taliban could address the annual debate.

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8 Nigerian Troops Killed in Jihadist Attack, Military Sources Say