Stories from Afghanistan and India
Fifteen Taliban members thought to be responsible for a spate of assassinations in Kabul and beyond were captured on Tuesday, Afghanistan’s primary intelligence organisation announced. The National Directorate of Security (NDS) said the men were tasked with carrying out assassinations […]
On the morning of Sept. 12, just hours ahead of a historic meeting between the Afghan government and the Taliban, a short note, written in Dari, was posted on the insurgent group’s website. It attempted to explain why, even after months of […]
A historic meeting between the Afghan government and the Taliban insurgency to negotiate the end of two decades of war in the country began on Saturday. After months of delays, the Afghan delegation, led by Dr Abdullah Abdullah, chairman of […]
“Mohammed Gul” insists he was never a member of the Afghan Taliban, even though he was one of 5,000 inmates released by the government as a condition to bring the insurgents to the negotiating table. But if the peace talks […]
Since he was a child, 60-year-old Nidan Singh Sachdeva has never missed a single Saavan mela, an annual religious gathering celebrated by the Sikh community in Afghanistan’s Paktya province to mark the monsoon season. The dry mountainous terrains of Afghanistan […]
Farahnaz Forotan was three when the Taliban had arrived in Kabul. It was 1996. “I have this memory of a snowy day, I was sitting on my mother’s lap, in a minibus, and she was crying. I didn’t understand why she was […]
An assembly of prominent Afghans on Sunday approved the release of hundreds of Taliban prisoners accused of serious crimes, a decision that clears the way for peace talks with the insurgent group but evokes mixed emotions among victims of their […]
When Afghan President Ashraf Ghani recommended the first-ever ceasefire with the Taliban in 2018, many Taliban fighters and Afghans did not know what to expect. Few seemed to know or remember what it was like to live in a peaceful Afghanistan in […]
KABUL, Afghanistan—There were few things that scared Fatima Khalil, a 24-year-old human rights activist who torpedoed her way across an increasingly volatile and patriarchal landscape of Afghanistan. One of them, Lima Ahmad, her older sister, told me in July, was […]
When Aziz Amir was deported from the UK back to his native Afghanistan in 2011, he faced a choice: defy the Taliban and risk being murdered, or join them. Mr Amir, not his real name, chose the latter, not just […]