Tag: Afghanistan

Al-Qaida’s power base in Afghanistan now ‘worse’ than before 9/11

WND Staff – July 12, 2022

When Joe Biden abruptly withdrew all American troops from Afghanistan last year, he left behind billions of dollars worth of American war machinery for the Taliban – the terror organization then taking over the country – to have and to use.

He also left behind hundreds of Americans, despite his promise that he would see to it that every one got out.

Further, there were thousands of nationals who had worked with the U.S. during its years-long presence there, and who were likely to face the wrath of the terrorists who took control of the nation, and installed themselves as the government.

The U.S., of course, originally had gone in because of the Islamic extremists who were threatening and killing people and destabilizing that part of the world. And carrying out 9/11.

Bill Roggio, senior fellow at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies and editor of the Long War Journal, said in a report at Just the News that now the Taliban controls all 34 provinces – as opposed to about three-quarters as of the 9/11 date when Muslim extremists commandeered four jets and created terror in Washington and New York, costing nearly 3,000 American residents their lives.

“The State Department’s policy essentially normalizes Taliban control of Afghanistan,” he explained. “This is absolutely insane. If the U.S. is unwilling to support the Afghan resistance, then it’s effectively ceding Taliban control to Afghanistan.”

https://www.wnd.com

Aftershock in Afghanistan as Quake Toll Rises to 1,150 Dead

Ebrahim Nooroozi – June 24, 2022

GAYAN, Afghanistan (AP) — An aftershock took more lives Friday and threatened to pile even more misery on an area of eastern Afghanistan reeling from a powerful earthquake that state media said killed 1,150 people this week.

Wednesday’s magnitude 6 quake struck a remote, mountainous region already grappling with staggering poverty at a time when the country as a whole is spiraling deeper into economic crisis after many countries pulled back critical financing and development aid in the wake of the Taliban’s takeover.

That aid had been keeping the country afloat, and its withdrawal left millions unable to afford food and further strained already struggling medical facilities. Nearly half the population of 38 million cannot meet their basic food needs, while some civil servants, like doctors, nurses, and teachers, weren’t paid for months because the Taliban government is unable to access frozen foreign reserves. Salary delays continue throughout the public sector.

Afghanistan’s international isolation is also complicating relief efforts since fewer aid organizations have a presence in the country, and many governments are wary of putting money in the Taliban’s hands.

Aid groups lament that means they have to pay local staff with bags of cash delivered by hand.

Aid organizations like the local Red Crescent and U.N. agencies like the World Food Program have sent food, tents, sleeping mats, and other essentials to families in Paktika province, the epicenter of the earthquake, and neighboring Khost province.

Still, residents appeared to be largely on their own to deal with the aftermath as their new Taliban-led government and the international aid community struggled to bring in help. The shoddy mountain roads leading to the affected areas were made worse by damage and rain.

Thousands of stone and mud-brick homes crumbled in the quake, which struck at night, often trapping whole families in the rubble. Many of those who survived spent the first night outside in a cold rain. Since then, villagers have been burying their dead and digging through the rubble by hand in search of survivors.

The Taliban director of the state-run Bakhtar News Agency said Friday the death toll from the first quake had risen to 1,150 people. Abdul Wahid Rayan said at least 1,600 people were injured.

https://www1.cbn.com

Desperate Afghan parents, unable to afford food, are selling their young girls

AFP and TOI staff – November 3, 2021

Nine-year-old Parwana dug her heels into the ground as she tried to resist being taken from her family home after she was sold into marriage with a 55-year-old man in northwest Afghanistan last week.

Village and displaced people’s camp leaders say the numbers of young girls getting betrothed started to rise during a 2018 famine and surged this year when the rains failed once more.

Parwana’s family has lived in poverty for years, but life has gotten harder for them since the Taliban takeover of the country earlier this year and as international aid has dried up.

Abdul Malik, Parwana’s father, told CNN ahead of the sale that he was “broken” with guilt and worry, but had no choice as the family is unable to afford food.

Several months ago he sold Parwana’s 12-year-old sister, and he already knows the money from the sale of Parwana won’t last long.

Ahead of the sale, Parwana said that she was sold because the family doesn’t have money for food.

“He has sold me to an old man,” said the girl, who had dreamed of becoming a teacher.

On October 24, a man named Qorban paid 200,000 Afghanis (approximately $2,200) and was given Parwana in a ceremony in the displacement camp on the outskirts of Qala-e-Naw, in Afghanistan’s Badghis province.

“[Parwana] was cheap, and her father was very poor and he needs money,” Qorban told CNN. “She will be working in my home. I won’t beat her. I will treat her like a family member. I will be kind.”

Child marriage has been practiced in Afghanistan for centuries, but war and climate change-related poverty have driven many families to resort to striking deals earlier and earlier in girls’ lives.

Boys’ parents can drive a harder bargain and secure younger girls, spacing out the repayments.

The World Food Program warned last week that more than half the population of Afghanistan, around 22.8 million people, will face acute food insecurity from this month.

https://www.timesofisrael.com

Germany, 4 EU states launch military reaction force initiative — report

DW – October 21, 2021

Germany and four members of the European Union have launched an initiative to establish a bloc-wide rapid reaction force for future military crises, the German news agency dpa reported on Thursday.

The initiative, which also draws in Finland, the Netherlands, Portugal and Slovenia, aims to expand the existing EU battle groups, which are multinational military units of 1,500 personnel each on standby to respond to crises.

The new force is expected to include space and cyber capabilities, along with special forces and air transport.

The five countries said recent events in Afghanistan have shown that the EU must be able to act swiftly, according to a document cited by dpa.

To this end, the availability, readiness, deployability and competence of the forces had to be improved, the document added.

In order to provide greater flexibility, the five states also proposed using Article 44 of the EU Treaty, which has never been activated before.

The article allows coalitions of willing member states to carry out security activities with the permission of other non-participating countries.

The plan also calls on EU member states to utilize more regional cooperation arrangements. It does not, however, make any specific proposals on the size of the force in terms of personnel.

https://www.dw.com

Al-Qaeda Threatens U.S. With Attacks ‘More Painful Than 9/11’

Robert Spencer – October 15, 2021

“When people see a strong horse and a weak horse,” Osama bin Laden once famously quipped, “by nature they will like the strong horse.” America during the period in which Old Joe Biden continues to pretend to be president of the United States is decidedly a weak horse, and bin Laden’s old outfit has noticed. Last Wednesday, al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula (AQAP) released a video crowing over the Taliban’s takeover of Afghanistan and promising to inflict damage on the scale of 9/11 in America once again.

The video, according to the Middle East Media Research Institute (MEMRI), featured yet another jihadi who was once held at Guantanamo, Ibrahim Al-Qousi, and was entitled “A Message to the American People: You Have Yet to Understand the Lesson.” Al-Qousi showed that he himself has carefully absorbed the lessons of the recent past. He said that “the greatest loss America suffered, besides its material and human losses, is its reputation and prestige as a superpower and the most powerful country in the world.” Thanks, Joe!

The Taliban, Al-Qousi declared, had won a “magnificent” victory, for they “have understood the essence of this religion and the nature of the conflict … they are men whose hands — by the grace of Allah alone — buried a third empire in the soil of Afghanistan and restored the Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan to rule by the shari’a of Allah, even if America and its allies hate it.”

If there is anything that the State and Defense Departments did not or would not understand, it was the role that religion played in the conflict. Foreign policy experts for years dismissed statements akin to Al-Qousi’s declaration that victory was won in Afghanistan “by the grace of Allah alone” as mere boilerplate, not realizing that for the Taliban, it was the essence of the entire war. That’s why they’re in power today in Kabul, thumping their chests over having defeated the United States.

https://www.frontpagemag.com

The Collapse Of Afghanistan Has Brought Us A Lot Closer To A Chinese Invasion Of Taiwan

– August 17, 2021

The way that the Biden administration has handled the U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan is not going to bring peace.  Instead, I believe that it is going to result in more war.  For decades, the overwhelming strength of the United States restrained other major powers from becoming too adventurous.  But now the stunning defeat in Afghanistan has exposed how weak we have become.  At this point, the U.S. is like a rapidly aging boxer that is becoming even more feeble with each passing day.  At one time we may have been able to take on anyone, but now we are in an advanced state of decline and we have utterly incompetent leadership in the White House, in Congress and in the Pentagon.

As I discussed yesterday, the debacle that is currently playing out in Kabul is going to greatly embolden the enemies of the United States.

In particular, Chinese leaders are absolutely loving what they are seeing, and they can’t help but express their delight…

Chinese state media, meanwhile, reported on America’s “humiliation” in Afghanistan with relish, using scenes of the chaotic US evacuation and swift resurgence of the Taliban as proof of the superiority of China’s hands-off approach to other countries’ internal affairs.

“The drastic change in Afghanistan’s situation is undoubtedly a heavy blow to the US. It declared the complete failure of US intent to reshape Afghanistan,” the state-run tabloid Global Times said in an editorial published late on Sunday night. “This defeat of the US is a clearer demonstration of US impotence than the Vietnam War — the US is indeed like a ‘paper tiger.’”

In this instance, the Chinese are 100 percent correct.

The United States really has become a “paper tiger”.

Our “woke military” has become a pathetic shadow of what it once was, and even if we had a competent military the brass in the Pentagon would have no idea how to use it because they are completely and utterly clueless.

And this is a huge problem for our friends in Taiwan, because the U.S. military has been the only thing holding the Chinese back from invading the island.

http://theeconomiccollapseblog.com

Al-Qaeda Threatens to Wage War Against US ‘on All Fronts’ in Rare Interview With Mainstream Media

– April 30, 2021

The US holds Al-Qaeda responsible for the deadliest act of terror ever and the killing of nearly 3,000 Americans on 11 September 2001. The terror group’s influence declined significantly after 2014 and the rise of Daesh (ISIS), with fighters pledging allegiance to the competing jihadist entities often battling it out in Syria.

Al-Qaeda will continue its war against the United States after Washington’s withdrawal from Afghanistan, two operatives said to be belong to the terrorist organization have told CNN.

Speaking to the network via an intermediary ahead of the ten-year anniversary of the 2011 SEAL team operation to kill Osama bin Laden, and following Joe Biden’s announcement that he would pull troops out of Afghanistan after nearly two decades of war, the terrorist group said that their “war against the US will be continuing on all other fronts unless they are expelled from the rest of the Islamic world.”

One of the spokesmen praised the Taliban for fighting the US over the past 19+ years, and suggested that “thanks to Afghans for the protection of comrades-in-arms, many such jihadi fronts have been successfully operating in different parts of the Islamic world for a long time.”

Sputnik has been unable to independently verify CNN’s claims that it spoke to the terror group, which almost never gives interviews to mainstream Western media and instead typically issues pronouncements via its own guerrilla networks or taped audio or video releases.

CNN took the operatives’ comments to mean that there are continued ties between al-Qaeda and the Taliban, despite the latter’s commitment under the 2020 US-Taliban peace deal to prevent al-Qaeda and other terrorists from using Afghan soil “to threaten the security of the United States and its allies.”

https://sputniknews.com

55 Million People Face Famine as COVID-Ravaged Economies Fail To Meet Funding Goals

Alan Macleod – October 14, 2020

More than 55 million people in seven countries are in desperate need of COVID-19-related famine relief. That is according to a new report from international charity Oxfam, entitled “Later will be too late.” The report details how 55.5 million people in seven countries — Yemen, Afghanistan, Nigeria, Burkina Faso, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, and Somalia — are living in severe-to-extreme levels of food insecurity or even famine conditions, thanks largely to the fallout from the coronavirus pandemic.

In March, the United Nations called for $10.3 billion in emergency funding to deal with the worldwide humanitarian impact the pandemic was expected to bring. Unfortunately, it has received barely a quarter of what it has asked for from donors. Every sector, including gender-based violence (58 percent funded), protection (27 percent), health (27 percent), and water, sanitation and hygiene (17 percent) are chronically under-funded. But the worst underwritten parts of its coronavirus response plan are food security (11 percent) and nutrition (3 percent). Indeed, in 5 of the 7 countries noted, the UN has received nothing at all to deal with the crisis. Oxfam called the international community’s response “dangerously inadequate.”

“The Committee for World Food Security must raise the alarm at the UN that famine is imminent on its watch and not enough is yet being done to stop it. We need a fairer and more sustainable food system that supports small scale producers. Years of neglect mean that millions upon millions of people remain unnecessarily vulnerable to shocks like COVID, climate change and conflict,” said Oxfam’s International interim Executive Director, Chema Vera.

Official estimates suggest that around 1.1 million people have died from COVID-19 globally since its emergence in China late last year. While the United States has seen the most cases and deaths overall, it is now countries in the global south that are the most intense hotbeds of the virus, with Brazil, Mexico, and India right behind the U.S. There are currently over 800,000 active cases in India alone.

https://www.mintpressnews.com