UAE vs Afghanistan 1st T20I Live Telecast Channel in India and Afghanistan: When and where to watch UAE vs AFG Abu Dhabi T20I? The Sportsrush
Originally posted here:
UAE vs Afghanistan 1st T20I Live Telecast Channel in India and Afghanistan: When and where to watch UAE vs AFG Abu Dhabi T20I? - The Sportsrush
Thanks for signing up!
Access your favorite topics in a personalized feed while you're on the go. download the app
Traffic, rent problems, scrolling Twitter all day, and talking to women it's all part of a strange new life for the men who conquered Kabul.
The Taliban captured their nation's capital and seized power in 2021. They had promised then to take a more progressive approach compared to when they ruled in the late 1990s, saying they would allow women more freedoms and treat its citizens fairly.
Instead, the fundamentalist regime has continually cut back on allowing women to attend schools and universities, and has been killing protestors over the last year. Under Taliban rule, conditions in Afghanistan have returned to what they were in 2001, before the US invaded, retired US General Jack Keane said.
Some Taliban soldiers have been installed into positions of privilege in the government. But, whisked away from their gun-toting, rural lives as holy warriors and now clocking in as mere pieces in the ruling machine, five Taliban solders say they've become jaded with city life, according to a report by Sabawoon Samim, an independent researcher.
Samim's late 2022 interviews with the five men a commander, a sniper, a deputy commander, and two fighters were published on February 2 by the non-profit organization Afghanistan Analysts Network, or AAN.
They portray how the five fighters, aged from 24 to 32, have gone from watching the skies for drone strikes to grappling with everyday urban battles like internet addiction and difficult bosses.
"The social influence of living in an urban context on these Taleban is noticeable," Samim wrote in his report.
"Rural and urban, fighters and civilians, madrassa and school-educated, victors and those they now rule, women outside in public with 'open' faces and men whose female relatives live in purdah are all now mixing," the researcher added.
"The Taliban used to be free of restrictions, but now we sit in one place, behind a desk and a computer 24 hours a day, seven days a week," Huzaifa, a 24-year-old sniper now working at a police district in Kabul, told Samim. "Life's become so wearisome; you do the same things every day."
Huzaifa, like his four brothers in arms, is married and has kids, according to the AAN report. All five were just children or weren't even born when US-led forces ousted the Taliban in 2001. Most had never seen Kabul until 2021.
They'd spent between six and 11 years fighting for the Taliban, joining when they were teenagers, Samim wrote.
Now working in the interior ministry, Kamran, 27, a deputy group commander, still misses "the time of jihad," he said, per the AAN report.
"Now, when someone's nominated for a government job, he first asks whether that position has a car or not," Kamran told Samim. "We used to live among the people. Many of us have now caged ourselves in our offices and palaces, abandoning that simple life."
Abdul Nafi, 25, a fighter now working as an executive director in the government, said he had to learn how to use a computer for his new job, per the AAN report.
Yet there isn't much work for him to do, and so he spends most of his time on Twitter, he told Samim.
"We're connected to speedy Wi-Fi and internet. Many mujaheddin, including me, are addicted to the internet, especially Twitter," he said.
According to Samim, another new source of worry for Abdul Nafi is speaking with women, who international watchdogs say have had their rights repeatedly crushed since the Taliban took power. The Taliban's strict interpretation of Islamic law means its leaders believe men and women should be segregated in public spaces.
Abdul Nafi described his astonishment at having a woman in the same computer class as him, and said he had been afraid to approach the local bazaar because of meeting women, per the report.
Huzaifa, the sniper working in the police, said he and his coworkers initially hid from women who approached them for help, because "never in our whole lives have we talked to strange women."
The Taliban authorities had to tell them that it was legal in Islamic law to speak with the women, because it was their job as law enforcement, Huzaifa told Samim.
For Omar Mansur, a 32-year-old commander thrust into a high-ranking government position, traffic and rent are two of his biggest gripes in Kabul.
"What I don't like about Kabul is its ever-increasing traffic holdups. Last year, it was tolerable but in the last few months, it's become more and more congested," he told Samim. Omar Mansur earns $180 a month, and said rent is too high for him to afford bringing his family to Kabul, even at his level of seniority.
Abdul Salam, 26, a farmer who fought for the Taliban several times, now mans road checkpoints, and complained that he felt the Taliban's treatment of fighters worsened because the soldiers were no longer precious manpower in peacetime, according to the AAN report.
"There is a proverb in our area that money is like a shackle. Now, if we complain, or don't come to work, or disobey the rules, they cut our salary," he told Samim.
Salam, along with several other Taliban fighters interviewed, felt the public had also stopped respecting them.
He told Samim he tried to hitch a ride back to his home province of Kandahar. When a car stopped along the road, he foundan elderly man who'd paused in his old Corolla to tell him he shouldn't need help because he was supposed to be running the nation, he said, per the AAN report.
Samim and the Afghan Analysts Network did not immediately respond to Insider's requests for comment.
See the rest here:
Some Taliban Fighters Sick of 9 to 5 Grind After 2021 Victory: Report
The United Nations apologized Friday for photos posted online of a senior delegation's security detail posing in front of the Taliban flag during a visit to Afghanistan this week. But U.N. deputy spokesman Farhan Haq told CBS News the photos "should never have been taken."
The awkward incident highlights the tightrope the international community is trying to walk as Afghans suffer through a harsh winter with their long-vital international aid lifeline all but severed due to the Taliban's draconian crackdown on human rights.
Neither the U.N. nor the vast majority of governments around the world have formally recognized the Taliban regime that retook power in the country with the U.S. military coalition's swift withdrawal in August 2021. Most governments, including that of the U.S., are loathe to provide any financial assistance that could bolster the hardline Islamic group's power, and they have frozen millions of dollars in Afghan government cash reserves held overseas.
But the lack of incoming aid is only half of the problem for Afghanistan this winter. Since taking back power, the Taliban has methodically erased virtually all of the basic human rights gained by Afghan women and girls during the two-decade U.S.-led war that drove them from power in the country. Women have been barred from attending universities and most high schools, and from working for non-governmental organizations.
After an international uproar, that edict was revised slightly to allow women to work in the health care industry, where there's an urgent need for female doctors and nurses. But the other bans on women and girls remain in place.
Losing such a huge portion of the workforce has crippled aid agencies, including the U.N.'s own, which for more than 20 years had propped up Afghanistan's weak economy and basic food and health infrastructures.
The Taliban has not wavered in the face of tremendous international pressure to ease its restrictions on women, dismissing the calls as a "politicization" of human rights. The group's leaders have repeatedly insisted that they will rule Afghanistan according to their harsh interpretation of Islamic law, without compromise.
In a bid to pressure the Taliban to ease its restrictions on women, the United Nations sent a delegation led by two of its most senior female and pointedly, Muslim leaders to the country this week.
Deputy Secretary General Amina Mohammed led the mission, along with Sima Bahous, the head of the U.N. Women agency. After visiting a number of other Muslim majority nations and meeting the leaders of Islamic organizations to build solidarity and present a united voice against the Taliban's anti-women policies which have been condemned for months as anti-Islamic the delegation arrived in Kabul in the middle of this week.
They were there to meet Taliban leaders and women's groups for discussions on "women's and girls' rights and coexistence," according to the U.N.
After the mission, Mohammed told BBC News on Friday that most of the senior Taliban officials she'd met appeared ready to engage in a discussion on women's rights, but she indicated no serious breakthroughs, or even major progress, on getting the country's rulers to back down on their policies.
"I think there are many voices we heard, which are progressive in the way that we would like to go," Mohammed told BBC. "But there are others that really are not."
"I think the pressure we put in, the support we give to those that are thinking more progressively, is a good thing," she said. "This visit, I think, gives them more voice and pressure to help the argument internally."
In a statement provided by the U.N. later Friday, Mohammed said the restrictions reintroduced by the Taliban "present Afghan women and girls with a future that confines them in their own homes, violating their rights and depriving the communities of their services Right now, Afghanistan is isolating itself, in the midst of a terrible humanitarian crisis and one of the most vulnerable nations on earth to climate change."
"We must do everything we can to bridge this gap," she said.
The U.N. leaders met with the Taliban deputy prime minister in Kabul, and a senior regional official in the group's heartland in the province of Kandahar, but it was not clear whether the prime minister had met the women, and a meeting with the Taliban's supreme leader, Hibatullah Akhundzada, was never on the cards.
"Afghan women left us no doubt of their courage and refusal to be erased from public life. They will continue to advocate and fight for their rights, and we are duty bound to support them in doing so," Bahous said in the statement from the U.N., calling the last year and a half in Afghanistan "a grave women's right crisis and a wakeup call for the international community. It shows how quickly decades of progress on womens rights can be reversed in a matter of days."
Haq, the U.N. deputy spokesman in New York, said the series of photos that emerged of the delegation's security detail smiling under the Taliban's white flag had been taken "while the Deputy Secretary-General was meeting the de facto leaders in Afghanistan."
"The photo should never have been taken. It was a mistake, and we apologize for it," said Haq.
In one of the photos, one of the security team is seen pointing at the Taliban flag on a wall behind the group. Similar versions of the same flag, a plain black or white banner with Arabic script reading: "There is no God but Allah, and Mohammed is his messenger," are used not only by the Taliban, but frequently in ISIS propaganda photos after one of the group's members carries out an attack or pledges allegiance.
"Foreign men with UN badges pose in photos in front of Taliban's flag as they smile. Under this same flag, women are erased and the people of Afghanistan are starved and deprived of basic rights and dignity," said one of the many critics of the photos, which were shared widely on social media, on Twitter. "Well done UN."
Here is the original post:
Top U.N. women's visit to pressure Afghanistan's Taliban on rights ...
Islamabad
Taliban authorities in Afghanistan have arrested five men, including two Chinese nationals, for allegedly trying to smuggle an estimated 1,000 metric tons of lithium-bearing rocks out of the country.
The arrests and the seizure of the rocks were made in the eastern Afghan border city of Jalalabad.
The Chinese nationals and their Afghan collaborators were planning to illegally transport the precious stones to China via Pakistan, said Taliban intelligence officials in comments aired Sunday by Afghan television channels.
Mohammad Rasool Aqab, a senior official at the Afghan Ministry of Mines and Petroleum, estimated the rocks contained up to 30% of lithium. They were secretly extracted from Nuristan and Kunar, two of the several Afghan provinces along the border with Pakistan, he added.
The Islamist rulers have banned extraction and sale of lithium since reclaiming power in Afghanistan in August 2021 after all U.S. and NATO troops withdrew from the country.
Afghanistan reportedly sits on an estimated $1 trillion worth of rare earth minerals, including huge deposits of lithium, but decades of war have prevented the development of Afghan mining.
Lithium is a key component in rechargeable batteries and it is used in clean technologies to tackle climate change, pushing global demand for the metal to soaring levels.
The Taliban government has not yet been formally recognized by the world over human rights concerns, particularly its restrictions on womens access to work and education.
The United States and the Western nations at large imposed economic sanctions on Afghanistan immediately after the Taliban took control.
The Islamist group has increased coal exports to Pakistan in recent months, helping them generate much-needed revenues to fund Afghan budgetary needs and pay public sector employee salaries.
Follow this link:
Taliban Arrest Chinese Nationals for Allegedly Smuggling Afghan Lithium
Deputy Secretary-General Amina Mohammed
A top UN official believes progress is being made towards reversing bans on women taking part in public life in Afghanistan.
Deputy Secretary-General Amina Mohammed has been in Kabul for a four-day visit to urge the Taliban to reconsider.
Last month, the country's Islamist rulers banned all women from working for non-governmental organisations (NGOs).
The move caused several aid agencies to suspend operations.
Speaking to the BBC at the end of her trip, Ms Mohammed said most senior Taliban officials she met had been ready to engage over the rights of girls and women.
However, she described the talks as tough and cautioned that it would be a very long journey before the leadership took the fundamental steps required for international recognition of their rule.
"I think there are many voices we heard, which are progressive in the way that we would like to go," Ms Mohammed said. "But there are others that really are not."
"I think the pressure we put in the support we give to those that are thinking more progressively is a good thing. So this visit, I think, gives them more voice and pressure to help the argument internally."
Ms Mohammed also criticised the international community, including other Islamic states, for not doing enough to engage on the issue.
Since seizing back control of the country last year, the Taliban has steadily restricted women's rights - despite promising its rule would be softer than the regime seen in the 1990s.
As well as the ban on female university students - now being enforced by armed guards - secondary schools for girls remain closed in most provinces.
Women have also been prevented from entering parks and gyms, among other public places.
It justified the move to ban Afghan women from working for NGOs by claiming female staff had broken dress codes by not wearing hijabs.
Ms Mohammed's comments come as Afghanistan suffers its harshest winter in many years.
The Taliban leadership blames sanctions and the refusal of the international community to recognise their rule for the country's deepening crisis.
Story continues
Ms Mohammed said her message to Afghanistan's rulers was that they must first demonstrate their commitment to internationally recognised norms and that humanitarian aid cannot be provided if Afghan women are not allowed to help.
"They're discriminating against women there. for want of a better word, they become invisible, they're waiting them out, and that can't happen," she said.
But she said the Taliban's stance was that the UN and aid organisations were "politicising humanitarian aid".
"They believe that... the law applies to anyone anywhere and their sovereign rights should be respected," she said.
The Taliban health ministry has clarified that women can work in the health sector, where female doctors and nurses are essential, but Ms Mohammed said this was not enough.
"There are many other services that we didn't get to do with access to food and other livelihood items that that will allow us to see millions of women and their families survive a harsh winter, be part of growth and prosperity, peace," she said.
This visit by the most senior woman at the UN also sends a message that women can and should play roles at all levels of society.
Excerpt from:
Afghanistan: Some Taliban open to women's rights talks - top UN official