Latest news with #Kabul
Al Jazeera
3 hours ago
- Politics
- Al Jazeera
At least 13 soldiers killed in suicide bombing in northwestern Pakistan
More than a dozen soldiers have been killed and dozens of people were wounded in a suicide attack in northwestern Pakistan's Khyber Pakhtunkhwa province, officials said. Saturday's attack was carried out in Khadi Market, Mir Ali, North Waziristan, according to a local media outlet, Khyber Chronicles, which quoted security sources. Security officials said the attacker detonated explosives near a bomb disposal unit vehicle, killing 13 people. At least 24 personnel, including 14 civilians, were also injured in the attack, the report said. 'A suicide bomber rammed an explosive-laden vehicle into a military convoy,' a local government official in North Waziristan district of Khyber Pakhtunkhwa province told the AFP news agency separately. Children among the injured 'The explosion also caused the roofs of two houses to collapse, injuring six children,' a police officer posted in the district told AFP. It was one of the deadliest single-day attacks on security forces in recent months in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa. There was no immediate comment from the Pakistani military. The attack was claimed by the Hafiz Gul Bahadur armed group, a faction of the Pakistan Taliban, or TPP. Pakistan has witnessed a sharp rise in violence in its regions bordering Afghanistan since the Taliban returned to power in Kabul in 2021, with Islamabad accusing its western neighbour of allowing its soil to be used for attacks against Pakistan – a claim the Taliban denies. About 290 people, mostly security officials, have been killed in attacks since the start of the year by armed groups fighting the government in both Khyber Pakhtunkhwa and Balochistan, according to an AFP tally.
CBC
a day ago
- Health
- CBC
Health-care workers who treat refugees plan message to Trump administration
Adeb Arianson fled his home in Kabul just days before the capital of Afghanistan fell to the Taliban in 2021, as Western nations were evacuating their citizens and panic seized the city. He crossed the border to Tajikistan, where he had to spend a few weeks in a hospital recovering from physical and mental shock. "The panic attacks, the thoughts that were coming on and all the pressure of what's going to happen? What am I going to do?" Arianson recalled in a recent interview. "It was constant panic attacks. It was fear, it was just shock." Arianson, now 23, eventually arrived in Canada as a government-assisted refugee in 2022. He will be a guest speaker at an international conference in Halifax this weekend, where hundreds of health-care workers are gathering to discuss refugee and migrant health. Last year the conference had more than 1,000 attendees, and about 75 per cent of them were from the United States. This year attendance has dropped to about 500. Many attendees didn't attend because they were afraid of having trouble re-entering the United States—particularly if they were not born there—in the wake of the Trump administration's immigration policies. As well, many agencies had their federal funding cut, said conference organizer Dr. Annalee Coakley. She said the conference attendees are planning to send a message about protection of vulnerable migrants by drafting a statement they are calling the "Halifax Declaration," which they will submit to a major medical journal. "Patients are very, very fearful if they come from a migrant background," said Coakley, a family doctor who works in Inverness, N.S. She is also the co-director of a research program on refugee health in Calgary. "Together we have a shared voice, and we share values and so we're hoping to put together a statement in support of refugee and migrant rights, and their right to health," she said. In January 2025, the Trump administration issued an executive order saying it would suspend the United States Refugee Admission Program for an indefinite period of time. President Donald Trump called on U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) to carry out mass deportations, and ended programs that allowed some migrants to live and work in the United States. Refugees go through a different process, which usually involves being referred for resettlement by the United Nations. In the days following the suspension of the refugee admission program, thousands of refugees who were cleared to travel to the U.S. had their plans halted, including Afghan refugees who helped American armed forces when they were based in that country. Arianson has been following the news from his home in Halifax, and felt it was important to speak out at the conference. "As a refugee myself, as someone who went through this journey, I have seen the gaps and the struggles that refugees go through," he said. "I saw the opportunity and I thought I have the chance to raise my voice." Arianson was 18 years old when he left Afghanistan, and fled alone because his immediate family was killed when he was a toddler after the family car struck an explosive device. As a queer person and proud member of Halifax's LGBTQ community, Arianson knew living in Afghanistan under the Taliban would be dangerous for him. "Refugees are people that are just looking for a spot, a place to just be able to be themselves and be alive," he said, adding that he thinks it is "inhumane" for the United States to close its doors to refugees. Dr. Katherine McKenzie is the director of the Yale Center for Asylum Medicine, and came to the Halifax conference from New Haven, Conn. "I am very worried and concerned, and really sad as well," said McKenzie, who cares for many resettled refugee families. "I am always concerned that the families will be split up, that maybe a mom or dad will be deported," she said. "What will happen with the children in that case?" McKenzie said she is seeing families come to her clinic filled with stress and anxiety. "Obviously I'm a doctor, I want people who I see as patients to be healthy—mentally healthy and physically healthy. And this scenario .... is absolutely interfering and having an effect on mental and physical health," she said. Coakley said in her first conference meeting, one attendee shared a story of a family who delayed bringing their child to an emergency department out of fear of being deported. "When they finally did present to the emergency department they had a ruptured appendix, and that's potentially life-threatening," she said. "That's a very precarious place to be, and it's unconscionable in a country with plenty," she said.
CBC
2 days ago
- General
- CBC
Winnipeg teen from Afghanistan using art to advocate for women, girls back home
When Setayesh Khasheei, 13, and her family came to Winnipeg, fleeing their home in Kabul after the Taliban seized control, she was happy to be safe, but wanted to do more to help her classmates and family still in Afghanistan. After speaking with her father, she realized her love of painting could be a tool for advocacy.
Arab News
2 days ago
- Politics
- Arab News
‘Thrown out like trash' from Iran, Afghans return to land they hardly know
ISLAMABAD: Ghulam Ali begins his days in pain, his muscles aching from hauling grain on a rickety cart through the streets of Kabul, homesick for the country he called home for nearly four decades. Ali is among more than 1.2 million Afghans deported from neighboring Iran since March 2024, according to the International Organization for Migration (IOM), after Tehran pledged mass deportations to counter mounting local discontent over refugees. Thousands have also fled this month after Israeli and US airstrikes hit Iranian military targets. For Ali, 51, whose family left Afghanistan during the Soviet invasion in the 1980s when he was just 10, Iran was home. 'I grew up there, worked there, buried my parents there,' he said during a midday break from work in Kabul, sipping green tea with a simple lunch of naan bread. 'But in the end, they threw us out like trash. I lost everything — my home, my little savings in cash, my dignity,' he told the Thomson Reuters Foundation by video link. Like many others, he has returned to a homeland he barely knew and one that has changed drastically. Outsiders in their own country, many men struggle to support their family while women face severe restrictions on their daily life under the ruling Taliban. Since late 2023, an estimated 3 million Afghans have been forced out of Iran and Pakistan, where they had sought safety from decades of war and, since the Taliban's return to Kabul in 2021, from extremist rule. Unwelcome abroad, they have returned to a homeland facing economic collapse and international indifference. UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres, in his latest report on Afghanistan, called on countries hosting Afghan refugees to protect those in need and abide by international obligations to ensure any returns to Afghanistan are voluntary. 'Returnees face immense challenges... in particular securing housing, employment and access to basic services,' he said. Up to 10,000 Afghan women, men and children are taking the Islam Qala border crossing from Iran on a daily basis, according to the Taliban authorities. Inside Afghanistan, humanitarian aid agencies say conditions are dire, with inadequate shelter, food shortages and no road map for reintegration. 'They return to a homeland that is dramatically unprepared to receive them,' warned Arafat Jamal, the UNHCR representative in Afghanistan in a statement last month. The Taliban's deputy minister for border and refugees affairs, Abdul Zahir Rahmani, also told local media this week that Afghanistan had seen a sharp increase in refugee returns since this month's 12-day air war in Iran. Many said they had no say in the matter. Ali said he was arrested at a construction site in Mashhad, Iran's second-biggest city, lacking documentation during a crackdown on refugees by the Iranian police. He and his wife, six children, two daughters-in-law and five grandchildren were deported in March. 'We were treated like criminals,' he said. 'They didn't care how law-abiding or in need we were. They just wanted all Afghans out.' The extended family — 15 people aged 5 to 51 — is now packed into a two-room, mud-brick house on Kabul's western fringes. Ali said his Persian-accented Dari draws sneers from fellow laborers – another reminder he doesn't fit in. But he brushes off their mockery, saying his focus is on feeding his family. 'We can barely afford to eat properly,' his wife Shahla said by video as she sat cross-legged on a worn rug. 'Rent is 4,000 afghanis ($56) a month — but even that is a burden. One of my sons is visually impaired; the other returns home every day empty-handed.' For women and girls, their return can feel like a double displacement. They are subject to many of the Taliban's most repressive laws, including restrictions on their movement without a 'mahram,' or male companion, and curbs on education and employment. On Kabul's western edge, 38-year-old Safiya and her three daughters spend their days in a rented house packing candies for shops, earning just 50 afghanis for a day's work, below Afghanistan's poverty level of $1 a day. Safiya said they were deported from Iran in February. 'In Tehran, I stitched clothes. My girls worked at a sweet shop,' said Safiya, who declined to give her last name. 'Life was tough, but we had our freedom, as well as hope … Here, there's no work, no school, no dignity. It's like we've come home only to be exiled again.' During their deportation, Safiya was separated from her youngest daughter for a week while the family was detained, a spat over documents that still gives the 16-year-old nightmares. In Iran, said Safiya, 'my daughters had inspiring dreams. Now they sit at home all day, waiting.' Afghans are also being forcibly deported from next-door Pakistan – more than 800,000 people have been expelled since October 2023, according to Amnesty International. Born in Pakistan to Afghan refugee parents, Nemat Ullah Rahimi had never lived in Afghanistan until last winter, when police barely gave him time to close his Peshawar grocery store before sending him over the Torkham border crossing. 'I wasn't allowed to sell anything. My wife and kids — all born in Pakistan — had no legal documents there so we had to leave,' said the 34-year-old. Rahimi now works long hours at a tire repair shop at a dusty intersection on the edge of Kabul as he tries to rebuild a life. 'I can't say it's easy. But I have no choice. We're restarting from zero,' he said.
Yahoo
2 days ago
- Politics
- Yahoo
Teen whose family fled the Taliban is using art to advocate for women and girls in Afghanistan
When Setayesh Khasheei goes to school, she's reminded of her classmates and family back home in Afghanistan who are unable to get an education, simply because of their gender. Khasheei, 13, and her family came to Winnipeg in 2021, fleeing their home in Kabul soon after the country's government collapsed and the Taliban seized control. Khasheei, who was in Grade 3 at the time, remembers how quickly everything changed. "It was … sad because I had to leave behind my family members, my friends, my classmates, [and] my home," she said. The Taliban have barred women from most areas of public life and stopped girls from going to school beyond Grade 6 as part of harsh measures they imposed after taking power in 2021 following the withdrawal of U.S. forces. According to 2023 data from the United Nations, at least 1.4 million Afghan girls have been banned from accessing secondary education since then, while more than 100,000 have been denied access to post-secondary education. "They're not allowed to go outside … to educate themselves … some of them are not even allowed to … leave the house … and some of them are married off at a young age," she said. "That could have been me." When Khasheei arrived in Canada she felt a mix of emotions — on one hand she was happy to be safe, but on the other hand she felt guilty she was not able to help those still in Afghanistan. At the time, because of a language barrier, her only way of expressing herself was through art. It was after a conversation with her father that she realized that's how she could help. "I want to break the silence because so many … people don't know their stories, they don't know what's going on." Her paintings portray the point of view of Afghan women and girls, inspired by the stories she hears from her friends back home. As the school year in Winnipeg comes to an end, Khasheei says she's reminded of how lucky she is. "So many people in Afghanistan, mostly girls, they don't have that chance," she said. She has displayed her art work at Canadian Museum for Human Rights and in Ottawa at an event for the Afghanistan Women's Parliamentarian and Leaders Network. "Half of the society in my home country is women, and if we want to grow the society, if we want to have a very, very good plan for the … country, without the woman and girl, we cannot," said Khasheei's mother, who CBC is not naming as she fears for the safety of her family still in the country. She describes Afghanistan as a prison, where she says most of the relatives she speaks to have lost hope. "They cannot do anything, they don't have rights," she said. When she thinks about what could have happened if her family were still in the country, she's brought to tears, thinking about her two daughters. "I am thinking, if they [couldn't] continue their education, if they [couldn't] go outside by themselves, if they [couldn't] do anything, they [couldn't] continue their life." Khasheei's mother says she is grateful they are able to continue their education, and that her eldest is using her voice to spread awareness, but she hopes to return home one day to see women and girls back in classrooms and in public spaces.
