A woman sits in a public space in Kabul. Under new Taliban laws, a wife who visits her relatives without her husband's permission faces up to three months in prison. Credit: Learning Together.

By External Source
KABUL, Apr 21 2026 (IPS)

The Taliban have announced new laws that effectively legalise domestic violence against women and children. Afghanistan’s supreme leader, Mullah Hibatullah Akhundzada, signed a decree introducing a new criminal code in January. It contains three parts, ten chapters, and 119 articles that legalise violence, codify social inequality, and introduce punitive measures widely condemned as a return to slavery.

“The laws are yet another attack on women and they blatantly violate human rights,” says Mitra (name changed for privacy), a women’s rights activist based in Afghanistan.

The laws, which were leaked to the public by various organizations and media outlets, have left people, especially women, in shock. Yet they are unable to act or even raise their voices. Under the new code, opposing or speaking negatively about Taliban rule is considered a crime and can lead to criminal punishment.

According to Article 32 of the Taliban’s penal code, husbands have the right to physically discipline their wives and children. As long as no bones are broken and no visible bleeding occurs, man’s actions are not considered a crime and carry no criminal punishment.

Even if it is proved in court that violence inflicted on a woman has caused visible injuries or broken bones, the man faces a maximum sentence of only 15 days in prison.

This Taliban law has effectively legalized domestic violence and blocked women’s access to justice.

According to Article 32 of the Taliban’s penal code, husbands have the right to physically discipline their wives and children. As long as no bones are broken and no visible bleeding occurs, man’s actions are not considered a crime and carry no criminal punishment

According to Article 34 of the Taliban’s penal code, if a woman repeatedly visits her father’s home or relatives without her husband’s permission and does not return to her husband’s house, this is considered a crime for both the woman and her family members. The punishment can be up to three months in prison.

A husband has the right to violently assault his wife if she disobeys, according to the new law.

This Taliban decree forces women to remain in their homes under all circumstances, even in the face of threats and domestic violence. Women can no longer seek protection or shelter in their own family homes.

According to documents from the human rights organization Rawadari, the Taliban’s penal code, was signed into law by Mullah Hibatullah Akhundzada on January 7, 2026, and subsequently distributed to provincial judicial institutions for implementation.

The decrees issued by the Taliban are usually kept secret within their judicial institutions and communicated to the public only through mosques and community elders. The public learns of them only when the media and rights organization gain access and publish them.

Taliban rule has effectively divided Afghan society into four classes, with punishment for a crime determined not by the nature of the crime but by the offender’s social status. At the top are religious scholars, who receive advice and caution rather than criminal punishment.

Next comes the elite, which includes those in the ruling class, such as village elders and wealthy merchants. They are subject to a lighter punishment scale and usually avoid prison sentences, for example.

The middle class faces more severe punishment. At the bottom of the ladder is the lower class whose punishment can include public flogging and harsh prison terms.

The new law also employs a term referring to slaves as distinct from free people. Slavery was officially abolished in Afghanistan in 1923. Under the new code, treating people as slaves is back to normal practice. For example, a master has the legal right to discipline his subordinate and a husband his wife. It effectively dismantles the principle of equality before the law.

Mitra says these Taliban laws are a clear attack on women and violate all their human rights. By enforcing these rules, the Taliban have confined women to the four walls of their homes, forcing them to endure any kind of abuse in silence.

“What the Taliban have stated in Articles 32 and 34 makes your hair stand on end. The Taliban see women only as sexual objects. These laws legitimise all forms of violence against women, and they cannot even seek justice or take refuge in their father’s or brother’s home. In effect, this officially imprisons women under the full weight of domestic violence,” she says.

All these provisions were drafted without discussion and have come into force with little discussion and no public input. Their existence only became known when the human rights organization Rawadari obtained the laws and published them on its Pashtun language website. Soon after being signed, they were immediately sent to the provinces to be processed by Taliban-run courts.

As Maryam, a resident of Ragh District in Badakhshan, points out, once the Taliban’s laws are announced in mosques by the local mullahs, they are immediately enforced in districts and villages, and all cases are judged under those rules.

“Most people in our village are illiterate, and even those who are educated or know about women’s rights cannot say anything out of fear. If they even utter one word, the local people turn against them, and trouble follows. Women are forced to accept whatever their husbands say because they have no other choice,” she says.

Since the Taliban took control of Afghanistan, they have been issuing and enforcing decrees and laws that have consistently violated human rights, confining women to the four walls of their homes. But this time, they have gone further, granting legal legitimacy to all forms of violence against women.

Mitra is calling on all human rights organizations and the international community to stand against the Taliban’s actions and not allow them to drag women into a system of slavery from the early centuries. She warns that if the world does not stand with Afghan women, they will be pushed toward destruction and face a major humanitarian catastrophe.

Excerpt:

Educated Afghan women in Kabul’s informal economy, working in retail as Taliban rules curb professional opportunities. Credit: Learning Together.

By External Source
KABUL, Jan 28 2026 (IPS)

Young women in Afghanistan’s capital, Kabul, are trying their hands at unfamiliar tasks in embroidery, tailoring and designing beads in market stalls. Many should instead have been sitting at desks writing computer software or reporting news, the fields they trained for.

Since the Taliban’s return to power in 2021, highly educated women have been removed from their official positions and shut out of much of the formal workforce, compelling them to take up jobs unrelated to their field of training to cope with economic hardship and to avoid the mental strain of unemployment.

Professional opportunities for women have been drastically limited. Almost all women are barred from working in offices, the media, and other fields related to their education.

Lida, (a pseudonym) a computer science graduate, previously earned a good salary as an IT officer at the Ministry of Economy, a job she held for more than six years. She now lives in southeastern Kabul, working as a tailor and running a small shop. Her late husband, who worked for the Ministry of Rural Development, was killed in a Kabul bombing ten years ago.

Lida now shares a house with the family of her brother along with her five children, and says she is in dire financial straits. To make ends meet, she has sent one of her sons to sell plastic bags on the streets. Her younger son is still at school. Her daughter’s education has been suspended following Taliban’s edicts.

“When the Taliban returned to power I was forced out of my job, says Lida, “and I have not been able to find any within my profession in the last four years and therefore, had no option but to work as a shop assistant”.

The Taliban do not directly grant work permits to women to operate the shops. Instead, either a male family member or another man must first obtain the work permit for the shop

Many women are flocking to Kabul’s informal sector, but it provides limited opportunities, crowding them into shops, which only sell women’s clothing and cosmetics, serving primarily female customers.

The Taliban do not directly grant work permits to women to operate the shops. Instead, either a male family member or another man must first obtain the work permit for the shop. Only then can women work in the shop as salespeople or assistants, receiving a salary or a commission based on an agreed arrangement.

“Working in a tailoring workshop is very difficult and frustrating”, Lida complains adding, “I wish I could at least work in a computer shop, which is related to my field of study”.

Mursal, (a pseudonym) 27, a journalism graduate, has faced a similar fate. She worked as a reporter for eight years in various media outlets and, before the Taliban returned, was employed in an advocacy organization for journalists, where she enjoyed a good income and benefits.

Mursal, like dozens of other educated women, has become a shopkeeper. Private media outlets do not have adequate capacity to absorb many women, so instead of reporting the news, she now sells traditional Afghan clothes and products geared towards women.

Voicing her frustrations Mursal said she initially felt “very undervalued”. “People used to cast strange glances at us and, apart from that, my family wasn’t very happy with the job I was engaged in”. It is uncommon for women to operate shops in Afghanistan,

Mursal sells women’s clothes in southwestern Kabul, where she lives with her parents, both former government employees who are now unemployed.

“I have six sisters and one brother”, says Mursal, adding, “I cannot get married until they are on their feet, because I am responsible for all of them”. Her brother is only ten years old. Mursal makes about ten thousands Afghanis (127 euros) a month selling in the shop, which is hardly sufficient for the family to get by.

Even so, the Taliban’s moral police do not give the women any breathing space under the increasing precarious job situation. According to Mursal, officials from the Ministry for the Promotion of Virtue and Prevention of Vice visit their shops three times a week to enforce an all-day rule requiring them to wear masks, which they find suffocating. They are also forced to conceal or remove pictures on women’s sleepwear.

“If the sleepwear is hidden, how would customers know which ones or what to buy?” she points out.

Defiance in the face of adversity

While the women agonize over the likelihood of years of academic effort going to waste, they have nevertheless turned their situation as shopkeepers into a form of resistance to Taliban’s violations of their rights.

Forced to run shops to support their families, they may be glad to earn a little income, but their deeper pain comes from knowing that their skills and dreams in their chosen professions remain unused.

Still, it is a testament to their resilience in the face of severe restrictions imposed by the Taliban that they have readily taken up often unwanted jobs in the informal sector simply to survive and support their families.

The shift is not just about earning a living; it is a silent resistance. By taking on these roles, Afghan women are sending a clear signal that they will not remain silent and be airbrushed from the society.

Even when doors are closed to them in their professions, they find ways to stay active, contribute, and make a difference. They demonstrate that even a small window of opportunity can be transformed into meaningful participation, proving that Afghan women will continue to fight for their rights in any way they can.

Their resilience is a reminder that Taliban restrictions may limit opportunities, but they cannot erase ambition or their determination to create change.

By taking up these jobs, they make sure their presence is felt in society and stand strong in the face of the Taliban, who are trying to erase them from public life. Afghan women refuse to stay silent. They make it clear Afghan women will not disappear, they insist on being seen, heard, and counted.

Excerpt:

“Like countless other women I am tied to domestic work.” Credit: Learning Together.

By External Source
BAMIYAN, Afghanistan, Dec 1 2025 (IPS)

I am an educated Afghan woman and a former government employee. I have long been active in women’s rights struggles, education, and community development. For me, living in Afghanistan is fraught with dangers and difficulties. In a context where women are denied the right to study, work, or participate in public life, my previous roles in government institutions and international organizations, and my advocacy for women’s rights, place me at particular risk.

With the fall of the previous government and the Taliban takeover, all my work in women’s rights and civil society issues has effectively turned into a target on my back; I am now being pursued by Taliban operatives and others equally opposed to women’s freedom. I have been repeatedly threatened, both directly and indirectly, by the Taliban and individuals associated with the group.

These threats are not only directed at me as a women’s rights activist, but my husband is also facing similar threats for having worked for the previous government. Thus, our entire family is facing an array of hostile forces; it makes it difficult to continue living in Afghanistan.

Under these circumstances, perhaps it is useful to describe what an average day looks like for me.

My day begins at five in the morning. There is no electricity because our solar panels are old and no longer capture and store enough energy, so the house is dark. I find my way to the kitchen using my phone’s flashlight to prepare breakfast. I ration our flour carefully. Prices are high and wasting food is unthinkable.

The writer is from Bamiyan province in central Afghanistan. Credit: Learning Together.

I also use gas sparingly, only to prepare rice because it is expensive. I heat water using a small makeshift stove that runs on wood and store it away in thermos flasks for tea and other daily needs.

My youngest daughter wakes up and cries. I breastfeed her, and she falls back asleep. Then I take my son to school. Sometimes he is reluctant to go because he is afraid. The road is unsafe, and he does not have pocket money and is increasingly under peer pressure. Despite this, we manage to persuade him.

He often returns from school hungry. Breakfast is usually tea with dry bread or tea with sugar, so he is often undernourished and weak.

After my son has left for school, the rest of the family would then sit down and have our breakfast.

My husband usually goes away to the mountains to meet friends and former work colleagues, so I am often left alone at home with my daughter. By 8 a.m., I have had most of the house chores done before the children’s snack time at 10 a.m.

After finishing with the chores, I feed my daughter and put her down for a nap. It is time to do the laundry, which I do by hand every other day because children’s clothes need frequent washing due to their playing habits in the dirt.

After all the running around, when I can still find a little time, I try to revisit my books. I try to go over my old books or review notes on psychology and education that I studied years ago. It saddens me, because I know that in today’s Afghanistan I cannot continue my education or return to work.

Some days I feel so exhausted and unwell that I lack the energy to do housework or even tend properly to my daughter. But because this innocent child had no choice in being born into this world, I force myself to look after her. On many days, life feels unbearable.

Before noon I return to the kitchen to prepare lunch before my son returns from school at 12.00 p.m. Lunch is usually boiled potatoes and bread, which has become too repetitive for my children’s liking but we have no alternatives. They often cry, but eventually they eat their meal. By 1:30 p.m., the children are done with lunch. After that, I put them down for a nap, wash the dishes and then perform my prayers.

Doing the laundry is part of her daily routine. Credit: Learning Together.

In the afternoons, I teach English and basic literacy to women in the neighbourhood. These lessons help me to stay in contact with the people around us and maintain awareness of their general situation. It also brings some peace to all of us. Most of our conversations revolve around daily struggles – rising prices, lack of money, and worries about our children’s future. None of us has much hope, but sharing our burdens lightens up the gloom engulfing our lives and lifts our spirits.

Our home is outside the city center, in a village where we are not well known. This distance from the provincial center means the Taliban rarely come prowling, which makes the prohibited teaching easier. The women also come in small groups and bring no books or pens that might raise suspicion and likely filter back to the Taliban. I work with them at home, and the literate women take photos of the lessons on their phones, while the others learn on the spot, since they have no further opportunity to study in their own homes.

The learning also involves practicing household skills such as sewing clothes, attaching headscarves, and other practical crafts to maintain their skills.

My husband returns home in the evening, usually tired, disillusioned and very depressed. I try to comfort him, even though I am deeply worried myself. My son struggles with his schoolwork, often showing frustration. I have to sit with him and go over his lessons.

For dinner, I usually cook whatever is immediately available, most often, local rice because it is more affordable.

After dinner, which is usually around 8 p.m., and all the dishes are washed and stacked away, I try to revisit my online psychology studies at the university. Psychology is the subject needed in today’s circumstances, and I am passionate about it. I am truly grateful to those who have supported me in this endeavor, and I thank them for their help. Many of my difficulties are eased, and it brings me happiness.

When everyone goes to sleep, I am left alone lost in thought. I worry about my daughter’s future, knowing she cannot go to school in Afghanistan. I think back to the days when I studied at university and had big dreams. Now, all I can do is pray that someday women will again have the opportunity to study, work, and live freely.

Most nights, these thoughts keep me awake. I lie in bed until morning, exhausted and hopeless. By dawn, I feel as though I have already worked so hard that I cannot even lift myself from the bed. I wake up dizzy, weak, and depressed, yet the day begins again.

It’s important to share that I live this same daily routine every single day. I am no longer a government employee, and like countless other women, I am confined to my home, with no time for rest, leisure, or even a moment of freedom. In the past, days off meant visiting friends or relatives, exploring the city, or enjoying simple outings. Transportation and the possibility of movement made it all possible.

Now, the Taliban have banned women from walking the streets, entering public spaces, or even leaving home for the simplest errands. Every step outside is forbidden, every opportunity to live fully taken away.

I am deeply grateful to those who read these words of mine. Through you, I hope my silenced voice can be heard. I hope it can reach the outside world, not just for me, but for hundreds of women whose lives are trapped under the same restrictions. Together, perhaps, a path can be found to reclaim life, dignity, and hope. Thank you from the bottom of my heart.

Excerpt:

Roya shares her story with our journalist in Parwan province, describing the fear and uncertainty she faces after being deported from Iran. Credit: Learning Together.

By External Source
PARWAN, Afghanistan, Nov 13 2025 (IPS)

When Roya, a former police officer under Afghanistan’s Republic government, left the country with her family, she felt a great sense of relief, having escaped from the horrors of Taliban rule. She never imagined that less than three years later she would be forced back into the same conditions, only worse.

She now spends sleepless nights, terrified of being identified as a former police officer, a label that carries dire consequences.

Roya, 52, is a mother of four. During the Republic years, she worked in the women’s search unit of Parwan province, earning enough to support her family.

When the government collapsed and the Taliban returned to power in 2021, she, like hundreds of other women in uniform, became the target of direct and indirect threats. Fear for her life and dignity pushed her onto the path of migration. She fled to Iran, where she and her six-member family spent a few years in relative safety.

“In Iran, I worked in a tomato paste factory”, she recalls. “We had a house, we ate well, and above all I had peace of mind because we lived in relative security”, says Roya.

Street life in Parwan provice, Afghanistan. Credit: Learning Together.

Her daughters also found work. “Zakia, 23, who had completed her first year at Kabul University prior to our departure, found a job in a large home appliances store as a salesclerk and computer operator. Setayesh, who turned 21 this year, threw herself enthusiastically into a job at a beauty salon, specializing in hair braiding. Everyone had something to do and earned an income.”

But that stability did not last. Escalating political tensions between Iran and Israel soon triggered harsh crackdowns on Afghan migrants in Iran.

“At two in the afternoon, Iranian officials entered our home without any warning”, says Roya. “We had no time to gather our belongings, and even much less to recover the lease for the house we were living in, she says.”

She and her daughters were forcibly deported back to Afghanistan while the men were still at work. A week later, one of her sons called from the Islam Qala border, and the family was finally reunited.

Roya now lives in Afghanistan under extremely difficult conditions. She has no job, no support, and carries a constant fear that her past work with the police could put her and her family in danger.

“Every night I go to sleep in fear, worried that my identity might be exposed. I don’t know what will happen if they find out I previously worked in the police service.”

A market scene in Parwan province, where women navigate restricted public spaces under Taliban rule. Credit: Learning Together.

She is one of several hundred women who were forcibly expelled from Iran, back into a country where women who had previously worked in the security forces are treated like criminals and where the memory of their uniform has become a nightmare of imprisonment.

Under Taliban rule, former military and civil service women are forced to hide their identities. Some have even burned their work documents. Others, like Roya, stay inside their homes, avoid social contact, and spend their nights haunted by the fear of being recognized.

“We decided to escape to Iran to rid ourselves of the strict laws of the Taliban. But now we are caught in the same restrictions again, this time, with empty hands and even more exhausted spirits,” Roya says.

Roya and her family now live temporarily in a relative’s home in Parwan province, facing an uncertain future.

The widespread deportation of Afghan migrants from Iran is particularly consequential for women whose situation has progressively worsened under Taliban rule. Job opportunities for them and participation in public life are shrinking by the day.

The Taliban have stripped women of the right to work, education, travel, and even the simple freedom to visit parks. Women who once served their government are now treated as second-class citizens in their own homes.

Roya’s story mirrors the life experience of hundreds of women – the repercussion of a combination of dysfunctional regional politics across the borders and domestic religious extremist government intolerant of women’s rights.

Roya also recounts the story of her neighbor, Mohammad Yousuf, a 34-year-old construction worker, who was violently beaten by Iranian officials. He was thrown into a vehicle without receiving his wages for several months or allowing him to collect his belongings from the small room where he had been living.

Meanwhile, the pace of deportations of Afghan migrants from Iran has accelerated sharply in 2025, according to several domestic and international media outlets, including Iran Time, Afghanistan International, and Iran International, as well as international organizations.

The International Organization for Migration has reported that since early May 2025, a wave of forced mass deportations has taken place, primarily affecting families unlike previous trends, which mostly involved single men.

In the first five months of 2025, more than 457,100 people returned from Iran. Of these, about 72% were deported forcibly, while the rest returned voluntarily.

In one year, over 1.2 million people were deported from the Islam Qala border into Afghanistan.

The deportation campaign’s peak coincided with a rise in Iran-Israel tensions in June this year. More than 500 000 people were deported in just 16 days between June 24 and July 9. In total, by early July 2025, over 1.1 million people had been forcibly returned. Daily deportation rates of up to 30,000 people were reported.

Iran has employed harsh and often violent methods to expel Afghan migrants. These measures include workplace inspections, nighttime arrests, home raids, and the destruction of legal documents, even passports and valid visas. Numerous cases of violence, mistreatment, and deprivation of basic services such as healthcare and food have been reported.

International humanitarian and human rights organizations have described these actions as violations of the principle of non-refoulement and a serious threat to refugees and have called for an immediate halt to forced deportations and respect for legal rights.

Reports from the United Nations and human rights organizations indicate that Afghan returnees especially women, minorities, and those who worked with the previous government face a high risk of arbitrary detention and torture.

Iran has stated that it intends to deport a total of 4 million Afghan migrants, of which around 1.2 million have already been sent back.

Iranian officials have claimed that the deportations will be “dignified and gradual,” but evidence shows that pressure, threats, and arrests without consent have been widespread.

The health, social, and security consequences of these returns have placed a heavy burden on Afghanistan, overwhelming border crossings and reception camps. Many are enduring extreme heat of up to 50°C, without access to water or shelter.

According to a UN report published in July, 1.35 million Afghan refugees have been forced to leave Iran in recent months. Many were arrested and deported, while others returned voluntarily for fear of arbitrary arrest.

Excerpt:

In Faizabad, the capital of Badakhshan province, women move cautiously through public spaces under the watch of the Taliban’s “Promotion of Virtue and Prevention of Vice,” whose patrols have revived a climate of fear and control. Credit: Learning Together.

By External Source
FAIZABAD, Afghanistan, Nov 6 2025 (IPS)

The Promotion of Virtue and Prevention of Vice, is the name given by the Taliban to their religious police, tasked with enforcing strict Islamist rule on the people of Afghanistan. But for Afghan women, the name evokes only fear and terror, as they bear the harshest consequences of its actions.

Women and girls know too well that venturing intro streets risks artitrary arrest, humiliation, and even torture. The mere mention of the religious police makes them tremble and, fearing for their lives, try to hide wherever they can.

The story of Fahima in the city of Faizabad, the capital of Badakhshan province, show how easily women can become victims of this brutality.

Fahima was on her way to her aunt’s home to give Eid greetings and check in on her. On the way, she ran into her aunt’s young son who she casually greeted him, and as courtesy to a known relative, stopped for a brief chat. They had barely exchanged a few words when a white vehicle belonging to the Promotion of Virtue and Prevention of Vice, pulled up beside them. Inside were armed men with fierce expressions.

They jumped out of the vehicle, shouting insults and threats, and demanded to know Fahima’s relationship with the young man. She told them he was her cousin. Nevertheless, the armed Taliban, seized both of them and forced them into the vehicle before speeding away.

I was there and saw it happen, I later located Fahima’s family after the incident and asked what happened to her. Badakhshan is a small province and people talk about many things that easily upset the mind.

Fahima was detained from noon until eleven at night. Her father went to the station and managed to convince the Taliban of the true relationship between the cousins, and she was eventually released.

The ordeal left Fahima deeply traumatized. She struggles to sleep, wakes trembling with fear, and refuses to leave the house under any circumstance, not even to seek medical help.

Fahima’s case is far from unique. During Eid, dozens of girls and women in Badakhshan faced threats, insults, and beatings from Taliban gunmen patroling the roads. Such incidents are a grim routine for Afghan women, whether it is Eid or an ordinary day.

Women in Afghanistan do not have the right to go to entertainment venues, women do not have the right to go to parks, women do not have the right to go shopping for clothes alone, and they must be accompanied by a male family member. Women do not have the right to study and get an education, and women do not even have the right to go to a male doctor for treatment.

Since the Taliban regained power in August 2021, they have issued at least 118 decrees imposing restrictions on women, dictating how they dress, banning them from employment, education in specialized and technical fields, and even presence in the media.

The increasing pressures and restrictions have led many women in Afghanistan to experience various mental illnesses, including depression, anxiety, and psychological issues. Moreover, despair, poverty, and unemployment among women have contributed to a disproportionate rise in the suicide rate compared to previous times.

The Taliban do not admit it stems from their brutal attacks on women, and there are no official statistics available. But when people gather at weddings or funeral occasions, these issues very often come up in discussions. There is always someone who knows someone else, who has either had mental breakdown, or whose behavior has worryingly changed, or has been subjected to violence.

These pressures have had severe impact on the morale of women, many of whom live in challenging conditions at home. Under these circumstances, any attempt by women to protest these restrictions is always met with serious threats, of imprisonment, sexual assault in prison, and, in extreme cases, women can lose their life for protesting. Afghan women have lost even the ability to speak out or demand their rights.

Excerpt:

Though access is back, throttling and platform blocks persist, reflecting tightened internet restrictions nationwide. Credit: Learning Together.

By External Source
KABUL, Oct 14 2025 (IPS)

At the end of September, the Taliban abruptly severed Wi-Fi and fiber-optic internet in Afghanistan for 48 hours without any explanation. The disruption caused consternation and suffering among millions of Afghans, especially those who depend on the internet for education and online commerce.

Closing girls’ schools had not entirely stopped students from pursing education, as many found workarounds through online classes. They therefore, targeted Wi-Fi and fiber-optic internet to close off all those possibilities

Even though the internet blockage has been lifted, its speed is significantly lower than normal, and certain social media sites such as Instagram and Facebook appear to be intentionally restricted, according to foreign journalists reporting from the country.

Nilam, 23, recalls, how her online English language lesson was suddenly disconnected, leaving her desperate. “At that moment, my world went dark. I felt like I had lost everything and all my dreams were destroyed right in front of me”. She recounts the previous decrees issued by the Taliban that closed down schools and universities, “and how many times I was forced to stay home”.

Online English courses, she said, was the only available channel left to her to learn a language and find a job, or study abroad. And when it appeared that it was also blocked she was lost and in total despair.

As she colourfully puts it, “It was as if I were living in the century of carrier pigeons; the Taliban have cut us off from the flow of global progress”, she said.

The Taliban’s stated reason for yanking Afghans off the internet was to curb “immorality,” arguing that widespread access among young people to the internet, and the use of smartphones generate moral corruption.

However, media experts reject that explanation as a cover for the Taliban’s main objective, which is to deny girls’ access to education, the flagship policy of the Islamist group since it returned to power four years ago.

Many women in Afghanistan relied on online study; tightening internet restrictions now make it far more difficult. Credit: Learning Together.

They first began by shutting off wireless internet in the provinces of Balkh, Baghlan, Kandahar, and Paktia. This was extended to fifteen other provinces the next day, denying access to internet to millions of Afghans. Closing girls’ schools had not entirely stopped students from pursing education, as many found workarounds through online classes. They therefore, targeted Wi-Fi and fiber-optic internet to close off all those possibilities.

For many low-income households, Wi-Fi was the most affordable option because several family members could simultaneously use a single connection for study and work at a relatively cheaper cost compared to mobile data.

Nooria, in Mazar-i-Sharif, like many women who had lost jobs due to Taliban edicts, turned to online commerce to support her family.

“After the fall of the republic, I turned to online selling to cover living expenses. Through this work, I could meet my own needs and help support part of my family’s expenses. But now, with wireless internet cut off, continuing this work has become nearly impossible for me”, she complained bitterly.

As she explains, mobile data internet is prohibitively expensive. “By paying 2,000 Afghanis (about 26 Euros), our entire family could use wireless internet” she says. “My little sister would study, my brothers would work on their lessons, and I could continue my online work. But now, if we want to buy mobile data, we would have to pay separately for each person, a cost we simply cannot afford.”

Announcement posted at an internet provider notifying customers of an internet ban under new internet restrictions. Credit: Learning Together.

Ahmad, an internet service provider in Herat, emphasizes that limited access provides hardly meaningful internet use.

“Apart from simple messaging on WhatsApp, nothing else will be allowed. That means no education, no online work, no research, and no free connection with the outside world”, says Ahmad.

Last month’s outage was widely described by local users and providers as the most sweeping multi-province shutdown since the fall of the Afghan Republic on August 15, 2021.

At the beginning of 2025, 13.2 million – around 30.5 percent of the population – had access to the internet in Afghanistan, according to the specialist website DataReportal. Around 4.05 million people were using social media.

Experts believe the Taliban are attempting to completely isolate Afghan society from global communication, allowing only a small group of people connected to business or government to access the internet.

They warn that, if implemented, such restrictions would severely cripple the social, educational, and economic life of ordinary citizens. Analysts warn that this move will deal a severe blow to the education of Afghan women and girls, pushing society further into isolation.

Excerpt:

It is estimated that the Taliban have enforced over 5,000 forced marriages over the past four years. Thousands of girls have not only been stripped of their right to education but compelled into marriages over which they had no choice. Credit: Learning Together.

By External Source
KABUL, Oct 3 2025 (IPS)

After the Taliban returned to power in Afghanistan, they banned girls’ education beyond the sixth grade. Human rights groups say the policy is a major driver of the rise in underage and forced marriages involving Afghan girls.

Zarghona, 42, a widowed mother of four, says her three underage daughters were taken from her and forcibly married to former classmates. After schools and universities for girls were closed, all three daughters, who hoped to become nurses and midwives, were deprived of education and confined to their home.

“To prevent my daughters from becoming depressed, I sent them to a madrasa (religious school) near our house, on the advice of neighbors,” Zarghona says. They received religious education for a year, but things soon began to change.

“One day, a woman came to our house under the pretext of renting a room, and after that, the frequency of her visits increased. I gradually realized that she was targeting my daughters.”

One day a Taliban recruiter, a classmate of theirs at the madrassa, followed the girls to her house and demanded the two younger daughters as wives to his brothers.

“When I rejected their proposal, they told me, either I marry off my daughters to the older men or they would harm my son, they threatened”.

Under pressure, Zarghona says she was forced to consent to the marriages without her daughters’ approval.

“For me and my daughters, the wedding was not a celebration, it was a mourning ceremony” Zarghona lamented, adding, “I had no choice but to surrender.”

The wedding was not a formal Afghan ceremony, but rather a simple religious ceremony conducted by the Mullahs. Her oldest daughter was not forcibly married.

Afterwards, Zarghona was barred from seeing her daughters. She said money had to be secretly sent to them through prepaid mobile transfers. Life became even harder for the daughters.

“Each day came with more restrictions on how they dressed and where they could go. I couldn’t defend them, and my heart was never at peace, she said, sad and embittered.

The older of the two daughters is now 19. She already has one child and is expecting another. The younger daughter has not yet become pregnant and because of that she was permitted to see a doctor, which also enabled Zarghona to meet her secretly in the doctor’s reception area. She said both had lost weight and were shadows of their former selves. Both had bruises and looked scared.

After being forced to marriage many young girls in Afghanistan are not allowed to go out. Credit: Learning Together.

Zarghona decided to go to Iran for a while to ease herself from the painful reality of her daughters’ situation. But when she heard their cries over the phone, she returned to Afghanistan. She says, “Less than three days after I came back, they beat me up and my daughters and even locked us inside our home.”

Zarghona adds that she now has no contact with her daughters and believes their situation remains critical. “All doors for seeking help are closed to me. The government is patriarchal, and no organization supports women’s rights,” she says.

It is estimated that the Taliban have enforced over 5,000 forced marriages over the past four years. Thousands of girls have not only been stripped of their right to education but compelled into marriages over which they had no choice.

Human rights organizations and the United Nations have warned that the ban on girls’ education is fueling domestic violence, poverty, suicides, forced marriages, and Afghanistan’s political isolation.

According to recent assessments by UNICEF and the World Bank, more than one million girls have been denied the right to education since the Taliban took control of Afghanistan.

Excerpt:

A powerful 6.0-magnitude earthquake struck eastern Afghanistan late on 31 August 2025, with its epicenter near Jalalabad in Nangarhar province. A shortage of female doctors left women untreated as the quake’s toll mounted. Credit: UNICEF/Amin Meerzad

By External Source
KABUL, Sep 24 2025 (IPS)

In normal times, women in Afghanistan face dire living conditions relative to their counterparts in other parts of the world, given the iron grip of Taliban repression. However, the powerful 6.0-magnitude earthquake that struck the eastern Afghan provinces of Kunar, Nangarhar, and Laghman at the end of August was out of the ordinary.

It was the deadliest quake to hit earthquake-prone Afghanistan in decades, and humanitarian efforts to reach the most vulnerable – usually women, children, and the elderly – were overwhelmed.

In the affected areas, a serious shortage of female doctors led to a higher toll among women because male doctors did not have easy access to female victims due to gender segregation

Nearly 700,000 homes and 500 hectares of farmland were damaged in Kunar alone, according to Afghan authorities.

But the only factor that was not a force of nature is the gender-based restrictions instituted by the Taliban, which aggravated the crisis for Afghan women.

In the affected areas, a serious shortage of female doctors led to a higher toll among women because male doctors did not have easy access to female victims due to gender segregation.

“Taliban edicts bar women from moving freely without a male guardian, ban them from many forms of work and strictly limit access to healthcare,” according to a report by the UN Assistance Mission in Afghanistan.

In the aftermath of the deadly quake, residents from Kunar and Jalalabad told us that women in these areas faced shortages of safe shelter and drinking water, while also battling women’s health issues.

The condition of women and children in other areas such as Kunar, Nangarhar, and Laghman was equally poor.

The total death toll from the earthquake is estimated at 2,200 people. The exact number of women casualties remains unclear, but health workers in the affected areas have reported high death tolls among women and children.

Sharifa Aziz (a pseudonym), a member of the UNICEF relief team who spent three days in various parts of Kunar province, told us over the phone: “The situation is extremely dire. When we first arrived, women cried tears of joy at seeing us. They said, ‘God’s angels have come to us.’” Their jubilation was understandable.

There were insufficient female workers to serve women’s needs, stemming from the Taliban’s overall clampdown on women’s participation in the labour market. Their participation in international humanitarian organizations’ work is also strictly limited.

As the earthquake was still unfolding, Susan Ferguson, the UN Women Special Representative in Afghanistan, put out a statement: “Women and girls will again bear the brunt of this disaster, so we must ensure their needs are at the heart of the response and recovery,” she warned.

According to her, after the major earthquake that hit Herat in 2023, “nearly six out of 10 of those who lost their lives were women, and nearly two-thirds of those injured were women.”

After the quake struck, local news sources began reporting that the majority of the victims were women and children.

In some households, as many as five or six children lost their lives, and the death toll among women and the elderly was alarmingly high.

The Taliban eventually dispatched a team of mobile health workers to Kunar only after images from social media circulated on local television showing a shortage of female doctors in the affected area, according to Abdulqadeem Abrar, spokesperson for the Afghan Red Crescent Society.

However, residents say that with the rising number of injured people, they continue to face a shortage of female medical staff.

“After the severe earthquake in our area, we came to the hospital and brought in patients here. There is a serious shortage of female doctors. If there were more female doctors here, we would not have had to transfer our patients elsewhere,” complained Chenar Gul, a resident of Kunar.

As Tajudeen Oyewale, UNICEF’s representative in Afghanistan, pointed out in a posting on X, the role of female doctors is critical in responding to disasters such as earthquakes.

He added that female doctors treat children and women as well as men affected by the earthquake in these provinces. However, in humanitarian agencies without female staff, or where access is restricted, it is feared that women can be left untreated for several hours.

The growing concerns over the shortage of female doctors and healthcare workers—a contributory factor to the high toll exacted on women—should have brought home to the Taliban the negative impact of their policy. But in recent remarks, Zabihullah Mujahid, a Taliban leader, described the issue of girls’ education as “minor.”

For the fourth consecutive year, the Taliban have kept all universities, institutions, and medical training centers for girls and women closed, including specialized nursing and medical technology centers.

The scale of destruction caused by the 6.0-magnitude earthquake was exacerbated by poor infrastructure and a fragile healthcare system—a legacy of a country emerging from decades of military conflict—which explains the unacceptably high number of casualties.

However, it is within human capability to mitigate the severe impact of such recurring events on women. All it takes is for the international community to stand in solidarity with Afghan women by bringing relentless pressure on the Taliban government.

Excerpt:

IOM teams are assessing damage and delivering life-saving support to those in urgent need after a devastating earthquake in Afghanistan. Credit: IOM

By Jennifer Xin-Tsu Lin Levine
UNITED NATIONS, Sep 5 2025 (IPS)

United Nations aid organizations are rallying after a series of earthquakes and powerful aftershocks wreaked unprecedented havoc across eastern Afghanistan—particularly in the mountainous provinces of Kunar and Nangarhar.

Preliminary reports show that at least 1,400 people were killed and more than 3,100 injured. Widespread destruction of homes and critical infrastructure has displaced thousands more, while rockfalls and landslides have slowed rescue teams’ efforts to reach remote communities.

In response, the United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA) released 10 million US Dollars within hours of the earthquake to provide shelter, food, water, child protection, and healthcare.

Countries including the United Kingdom and South Korea have pledged money through the United Nations—the UK does not recognize the Taliban government. Working alongside OCHA, the UN Development Programme (UNDP) is working with local partners to link immediate humanitarian assistance with long-term recovery and resilience-building strategies. The United Nations is also preparing an emergency appeal, with an initial USD 5 million from the UN Central Emergency Response Fund (CERF) already released.

UNHCR’s partner, AREWO, assesses the needs of the population affected by the earthquake that hit the region on 31 August. Credit: UNHCR/ARWEO

Despite these rapid mobilizations, questions remain about whether the flow of aid can be sustained. Tom Fletcher, Under-Secretary-General for Humanitarian Affairs and Emergency Relief Coordinator, warned, “This is the latest crisis to expose the cost of shrinking resources on vital humanitarian work. Massive funding cuts have already brought essential health and nutrition services for millions to a halt, grounded aircraft, which are often the only lifeline to remote communities, and forced aid agencies to reduce their footprint.”

He urged donors to “once again” step up for the people of Afghanistan, rallying resources for those in need.

Against this backdrop of urgency and shrinking resources, UNDP officials have sought to outline a vision for recovery that extends beyond immediate survival.

Stephen Rodriguez, UNDP’s resident representative in Afghanistan, addresses a UN press conference via videolink on the impact of the earthquakes on the country and its people. Credit: Jennifer Xin-Tsu Lin Levine/IPS

Stephen Rodriguez, UNDP’s resident representative in Afghanistan, emphasized that the country is facing a “perfect economic storm.”

In a press briefing, he shared data from the UN’s 25 assessment teams showing that 84,000 people have been affected by the earthquake so far.

Rodriguez also detailed the UNDP’s initiative of “community-driven recovery,” which includes cash support for families clearing rubble and rebuilding homes. Pointing to the success of a similar community-oriented approach after the 2023 earthquake in Herat, he called on member states to join the initiative in “building back better,” improving infrastructure and uniting communities.

Both Rodriguez and other UN representatives also addressed the additional challenges created by restrictions on women and girls in Afghanistan and how they affect UN work.

Aid groups are barred from recruiting female aid workers, and as UN Women Afghanistan Special Representative Susan Ferguson said, “women and girls could miss out on lifesaving assistance or information in the days ahead.”

However, Rodriguez denied any organized effort to block women’s access to humanitarian services and medical aid. He described reports of women being prevented from getting emergency medical care as “isolated incidents… rather than a systematic restriction.”

Despite these concerns and the reluctance of some countries to channel funds through Afghanistan’s authorities, UN officials stressed that the humanitarian principles of humanity, impartiality, and independence remain central to their engagement with the Taliban.

Rodriguez recalled difficulties during the 2023 earthquake recovery that have since been resolved and stated that closer coordination has enabled aid to reach mountainous areas with the Taliban’s helicopters.

He called the “growth” in the relationship between the UN and the Taliban “exemplary,” citing their “full understanding that humanity comes first, tending to those most in need, irrespective of ethnicity, of gender, of anything else.”

For now, the focus remains on immediate survival—reaching those trapped beneath debris or isolated from aid, providing food and clean water, and preventing disease outbreaks. But UN officials emphasize that rebuilding shattered homes and livelihoods will require far more than emergency aid—it necessitates sustained support and long-term commitment.

IPS UN Bureau Report

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Excerpt:

A bustling Kabul street near the unmarked stairway down to the women-only restaurant—located in a basement to ensure no women can be seen from outside, since they are barred from working or dining in public with men. Credit: Learning Together.

By External Source
KABUL, Jun 25 2025 (IPS)

It was a sunny winter day in Kabul. I decided to step out and take a stroll around my surroundings. With my long dress and hijab on, I left the house. Since I was not too far from home, I did not need the company of a Mahram, a male guard, by my side – a strict restriction placed on Afghan women by the Taliban.

Life in the city was bustling, children selling plastic bags by the roadside while ordinary people went about in various ways.

As I walked, my eyes caught a sign that indicated a restaurant for women only, serving a variety of local and national dishes. I was intrigued, given that in a city filled with numerous hotels and restaurants, mostly run by men, this particular one was operated by women catering to only women customers.

I decided to pursue further. The sign took me fifteen stairs deep into the basement of a building, where the women working in the restaurant could not be seen from outside.

From Home-Kitchen Hustle to Full-Blown Restaurant

I was met by a woman who friendly welcomed me. As I sat in the restaurant, memories of the past flooded my mind. I had visited restaurants with my family and friends prior to the Taliban takeover of our country. There used to be laughter, we shared meals and enjoyed each other’s company without fear or restriction.

We could sit together, converse openly, and enjoy life, free from the oppressive atmosphere that now defines our current situation. Those days were full of joy and possibility, and the memories are among the happiest I have ever had; now they feel like a distant, almost unreachable past.

A waitress snapped me back to the present as she took my order. I was curious to know how the women had managed to set up a workplace outside home in the heart of Kabul.

One of the proprietors who wanted to remain anonymous narrated the story: “My daughter and I were driven by unemployment and poverty into preparing delicious food at home and selling it online at low price”.

“The business gradually flourished, even though initially we made many mistakes”, said the young woman, a law degree holder, forced by the Taliban to abandon further studies.

After saving 800,000 Afghanis, and an additional 100,000 European Union support, they decided to start their own restaurant. The rented place has a fully equipped kitchen and a large hall for customers.

Inside the beautifully decorated walls, girls are busy preparing dough for bolani, a thin-crusted flat bread widely consumed in Afghanistan often filled with potatoes, leeks, grated pumpkin, or chives.

Due to the Taliban crack down on women outside home, the restaurant has become a lifeline to most of the women working there, who recently lost their jobs.

Among them is Wahida, a young girl who said she lost her job as an office worker. “It has been over three years since my colleagues and I lost our jobs with the arrival of the Taliban,” she said, adding, “I was left wondering what to do”.

But now with the opening of the women-only restaurant by the two enterprising women, she and ten of her colleagues, have had a salaried job for the past one month.

And that was precisely one of the motivations for Farhard and her mother opening the restaurant – creating jobs and providing financial independence for women who had been thrown out of jobs by the Taliban.

“Women’s work outside the home has brought great hope to the women working in our restaurant, because they can support their families with their salaries”, said Farhard.

“Besides that”, she continued, “a restaurant is a good source of income and reintroduces the culture of cooking authentic Afghan food for people in the most beautiful way possible”.

They are licensed by the Ministry of Commerce and their customer base is steadily increasing. The proprietors provide training in catering and service to applicants before hiring them.

Navigating the Tightrope of Taliban Rules

Ever since the Taliban burst onto the political scene four years ago with indiscriminate ban on women from working outside home, Afghan women are exploring income-generating business options. Tailoring and custom-made dressmaking are among the most common, while the restaurant sector also provides a viable alternative for many others.

This women-only restaurant can only operate because it strictly follows all Taliban rules. It’s located in a basement to ensure that no women can be seen from outside, as women are not allowed to work outside or eat in public with men.

They pay monthly taxes to the Taliban, all staff are women, and they follow hijab and other religious regulations set by the Ministry for the Promotion of Virtue and Prevention of Vice.

Yet in spite of the great lengths, which women take to generate incomes, the Taliban are still looming not far behind.

“Officials from the so-called Ministry for the Promotion of Virtue and the Prevention of Vice conduct weekly inspection visits to our restaurant,” complains Wahida.

The inspections, she says, “ensure that all the women are wearing their hijabs properly, with their faces covered, and dressed in the appropriate long dress, as the regulations demand”.

Apart from that, they thoroughly check the entire restaurant to ensure no men are working there, since women are strictly forbidden to work in the same place as men.

To the women working in the restaurant, these inspections are undoubtedly viewed as unnecessary harassment. They feel scrutinized and yet powerless to fight against it.

However, Wahida has a message for the brave Afghan women: “Don’t despair, find the small niches the private sector allows, and keep moving forward.”

Excerpt:

Women from Afghanistan’s Purple Saturdays Movement continue to call for rights, justice, and freedom, despite mounting Taliban repression. Credit: Learning Together.

By External Source
KABUL, Apr 25 2025 (IPS)

“Even if our murals don’t change much, they will surely leave a mark – at least on the mind of one Taliban member who sees them.” These words from Afghan women activists reflect the bold and creative tactics they continue to use in their resistance against the Taliban’s oppressive regime.

In guerrilla-style operations, a group of young women choose a location together, spending hours surveilling it to ensure Taliban forces are not nearby. Once the location is deemed safe, they write their messages on the walls and immediately disperse in different directions, sometimes avoiding their homes for several hours to throw off any possible surveillance that might have been trailing them.

“Three core principles serve as the motivation in our remobilization, to rid us of tyranny”, declares the Purple Saturdays Movement, name of the group waging the secret campaign. They are encapsulated in a three-word slogan: Right, Justice and Freedom.

Undeterred by the risk of brutal torture or arrest, the movement continues its protests inside Afghanistan in confined places and in different forms.

“Women in Afghanistan have organized widespread protests and activities against the Taliban’s policies over the past three years,”, says Maryam Marouf Arwin, head of the Purple Saturdays Movement. “Their efforts have had a significant impact globally and regionally, preventing many countries from recognizing the Taliban’s self-proclaimed government.”

When barred from protesting in public, Afghan women continue their resistance behind closed doors. Credit: Learning Together.

Established on August 17, 2021, exactly two days after the Taliban took control of the country, Arwin says the Purple Saturday Movement, is the beginning of a new leap of hope at the height of despair. It has raised its voice against all Taliban orders and has held its protests, both on the streets and behind closed doors.

The movement is guided by the conviction that all Afghan people have been victims of the Taliban’s brutal regime. Therefore, their central goal is to achieve equal rights, justice and freedom for all Afghan citizens irrespective of gender, religious convictions and ethnic background.

In their latest street protests, the movement has demanded strong resistance against Taliban policies, and called for approval of the arrest warrant for the leader of the Taliban, Hibatullah Akhundzada and Abdul Hakim Haqqani, the head of the Taliban’s Supreme Court issued by the International Criminal Court.

Previously they have organized both individual and group protests in public and behind closed doors, speaking out against the Taliban’s decision to shut down educational institutions and all other repressive policies the brutal Islamist regime has targeted on women.

“We are committed to continue our struggle despite the Taliban’s brutal repression,” the group defiantly declares, “our goal is to end the Taliban’s rule and ensure social justice in the country”.

The movement contends that Sharia law is an excuse to eliminate women, and that the Taliban regressive rule is implemented under the guise of religion to oppress the people of Afghanistan. Nevertheless, they maintain that events in the past three years have proved that women of Afghanistan will not surrender and be isolated.

The Purple Saturdays Movement asserts that, “Considering the actions of the Taliban against the people of Afghanistan, particularly women, vulnerable ethnic groups, and religious minorities over the past 20 years, especially their conduct in the last three years, it is evident that the Taliban are neither susceptible to change nor flexibility.”

As outlined by Arwin, the movement’s activities include street protests, individual and collective demonstrations in confined spaces, wall inscriptions, social media hashtags, crafting declarations and resolutions, publishing reports, writing articles, and making appearances across various media.

She however, states that, “the standard for protests is not designated to take place only on the street. Protests have taken place in many countries for years, she points out, but they weren’t always on the roads, but nevertheless, the world has seen and welcomed such protests and recognized them. However, according to her, the protests of Afghan women have gone unnoticed whether held on the streets, in closed spaces, or on social media.”

The Taliban’s repression has become truly horrific. Recent reports make every family cringe when their daughter goes out to protest. Faced with arrest, rape, and sexual harassment by the Taliban, no one dares to let their daughters onto the streets. “For the safety of our members, we are forced to hold individual protests in closed settings and on social media,” Arwin says.

The women of Afghanistan stand firm: discrimination against women must not be tolerated. Credit: Learning Together.

In that regard, she is appealing for political and diplomatic support from governments of the European Union and the United Nations, to take a clear and decisive stance against crimes against humanity and oppression of Afghan women.

“We ask you to make our voices heard widely in the media and international forums.”

With the Taliban regaining control, the people of Afghanistan, especially women, religious minorities, and vulnerable ethnic groups, have once again returned to the dark and oppressive days in the past when Taliban made their first appearance as rulers in the country.

In the very first days of regaining control of Kabul in August 2021, the Taliban declared war on the women of the country. Since then they have issued dozens of decrees and orders, which have eviscerated all fundamental human rights from women throughout the country.

“From the first moment of oppression, our movement has fought against the darkness and will continue to fight until we achieve freedom,” Arwin concludes.

Excerpt:

Since the Taliban's return to Afghanistan in 2021, numerous women grapple with profound mental health challenges, often in silence, fearing repercussions for speaking out. Credit: Learning Together

By External Source
May 16 2024 (IPS)

Afghanistan is grappling with a growing crisis of mental illness, particularly among its women, as highlighted in a United Nations report. Officials from the mental health department at Herat regional hospital have observed a concerning uptick in the number of women afflicted by psychological disorders in the province.

According to these officials, nearly eighty percent of individuals seeking treatment for depression are women and girls. The medical center witnesses a daily influx of one hundred patients seeking assistance.

“Every day, 100 people come for treatment, and more than two-thirds of them are women”, according to one of the doctors of the Association of Clinical Psychologists in Herat, who did not want to be named in the report due to security issues.

Nearly 400 people have been sent to further treatment within one month and the numbers continue to increase daily. Most patients are given psychological counseling but those with severe illness are referred to the regional mental hospital in Herat.

Several factors contribute to the surge in mental illness among women. Economic hardships have intensified, while the oppressive rule of the Taliban has cast a shadow over their future prospects. Additionally, a widespread increase in domestic violence against women, coupled with restrictions on female education and employment, compounds the issue.

“I often experience sudden panic attacks,” shared Marjan, a patient at the hospital. “My heart feels weak, and I constantly battle lethargy. The ban on my education has plunged me into depression,” she lamented.

With tears in her eyes and pain in her voice, she complained how long she and other women would continue to be imprisoned within the four walls of their homes and live with uncertainty of the future.

Marjan continues, “I am the third wife of my husband, and I am always subjected to violence and beatings by my husband or my husband’s wives.”

In some regions, such as Herat, polygamous marriages are common, leading to intra-family conflicts where women bear the brunt of the repercussions.

Marjan, a victim of such a marriage, disclosed her failed suicide attempts and attributed her plight to the Taliban. Forced into marriage by her father during the Taliban regime, she was compelled to relinquish her role as a civil activist and former employee of a human rights organization under the previous government.

“Now, I am left with mere memories of a life that no longer exists,” she lamented bitterly.

Nafas Gul, a mother of five also in Herat Province narrates her story. Her daughter, sixteen-year-old Shirin Gul, is severely depressed, judging from her regular cries and calling her home prison, her mother explains. Shirin no longer attends school.

Memories have made most girls and women depressed. A large number of them have stayed at home, unable to work or acquire education.

In Afghanistan, many victims of domestic violence struggle to find assistance in overstretched healthcare systems. Credit: Learning Together

With the return of the Taliban in Afghanistan in 2021, women have been deprived of their rights, especially the right to work and education. The majority of women in Herat are against recognizing the legitimacy of the Taliban government, rather they say that recognition should be given in return for improving the status of women. 

Doctors caution that without intervention, the number of individuals suffering from depression, particularly in Herat province, will continue to escalate.

Excerpt:

Flashback: Women journalists in Kabul June 2019. Now they are calling for assistance after the Taliban takeover. Credit: UN Assistance Mission in Afghanistan (UNAMA)/Fardin Waezi

By Zofeen Ebrahim
KARACHI, Pakistan, Sep 3 2021 (IPS)

“If I fall into the hands of the Taliban, not only me but my family will be killed,” said AB, 23*, who worked as a broadcast journalist for the past seven years and is a well-known face on the television screen.

Speaking on WhatsApp from her hideout in a city close to the capital Kabul, she said the Taliban came looking for her and were asking about her whereabouts from her neighbours, who, in turn, warned her family.

“The Taliban have started house-to-house search and when they could not find me, left a warning with our neighbours to inform us that they will find me and deal with me accordingly,” said AB. Her life is in double jeopardy – firstly, being a woman writing against the Taliban. Secondly, she belongs to the ethnic Hazara community, whom the new rulers believe are infidels and need to be persecuted.

Her circumstances were confirmed by Kiran Nazish, founder and director of the New York-based Coalition for Women In Journalism (CFWIJ), a worldwide support organisation for female journalists.

“Our sources in Afghanistan have informed the Taliban are carrying out house-to-house searches for people on their hit list,” she said, adding: “Imagine the fear these women are living under in their own country.”

“The Taliban must cease searching the homes of journalists, commit to ending the use of violence against them, and allow them to operate freely and without interference,” said Steven Butler, Asia programme coordinator for the Committee to Protect Journalists.

Because of the grave danger, AB and her family have been in hiding now for the last several weeks.

Like AB, CD*, 26, editor of a weekly publication and a journalist working for a news agency for the past four years, is hiding with her family after her office was ransacked by the Taliban three weeks ago.
If found, she is sure she “will be stoned to death”.

“The world must help me,” she pleaded. “Please email one of the embassies, such as Canada or the United States, and tell them to get me out.”

Her fear of the Taliban was palpable, and she said she could not talk over the phone as they were monitoring the “telecommunications networks”.

Headlines tell of the targeting of women journalists in Afghanistan following the Taliban takeover.

If this continues and they cannot leave their hideouts soon, CD said they might die of “poverty and hunger” even before the Taliban locate them.

“We have no bread to eat at all, and we cannot go out to earn for fear of being discovered,” she said.
The Taliban leadership have said women will have the right to work, seek education and be mobile, but on the condition that it will have to be under Sharia [Islamic law] but have not elaborated what this would entail.

However, they have requested women to stay home as some from the Taliban have not been trained on how to behave with women.

“It’s a very temporary procedure,” defended the Taliban spokesman Zabihullah Mujahid.

Their proclamation of going soft on women has been met with scepticism by many Afghan women.

“I do not believe them, nor do I trust the Taliban, because they have a bad past,” said CD, adding: “They do not keep their word; women are not safe, and if they go outside, they will be flogged.”

She said she had heard reports of violence on women in other provinces.

“No Afghan woman believes their living condition will be good under the Taliban rule,” CD said. “By silencing the female journalists, the Taliban want to silence the voice of Afghan women.”

She said the Taliban had continued targeting and killing journalists and human rights activists for the last 20 years, even during Ashraf Ghani’s regime. “That is why we are afraid and feel so unsafe,” she emphasised.

“Their [Taliban] interviews are in complete contrast with what they are doing on the ground,” said Kiran.

“Shocking to see the huge effort being put into tracking down people when they [Taliban] should be spending the same in rebuilding the country, putting a government together and finding ways to reassure people that they are safe, especially the Afghan women,” she said in a WhatsApp interview from Vancouver, Canada, where she is currently based. She is working non-stop to help the women journalists find safety.

As soon as Kabul fell into the hands of the Taliban, the media outlets had asked all their women employees to stay home and not report for work. “I was told to stay home till further notice,” said AB.

CD said she could not work as her equipment had been looted when her office was ransacked.

According to a 2020 survey by the Centre for the Protection of Afghan Women Journalists (CPAWJ) and Reporters Without Borders (RSF), more than 1 700 women were working for media outlets in the three provinces of Kabul, Herat, and Balkh.

Kabul had 108 media outlets with a total of 4 940 employees in 2020. They included 1 080 female employees, of whom 700 were journalists. Of these 700 females, only 100 continue work and just a handful work from home in the other two provinces. Of the 510 women who worked for eight of the biggest media outlets and press groups, only 76 (including 39 journalists) are still working.

“…women journalists are in the process of disappearing from the capital,” states the RSF website.

AB said most of the journalists who are still working belong to the international media and are supported by their organisations.

“Local journalists are denied these privileges,” she pointed out. “As a journalist, I cannot continue to report if there are restrictions placed on me.”

“My dreams and aspirations and wishes have been destroyed. The Taliban not only took my city, but they also took my life too.”

Until recently, the young journalist did not have to cover her head at the office, “loved wearing fashionable clothes and wore make-up,” being born and educated in the “era of democracy”.

Today, she feared she might be resigned to shroud herself in the chadri [blue burqa] when venturing out of her home under the new Taliban regime.

“Stripping public media of prominent women news presenters is an ominous sign that Afghanistan’s Taliban rulers have no intention of living up their promise of respecting women’s rights, in the media or elsewhere,” The Guardian quoted CPJ’s Butler. “The Taliban should let women news anchors return to work and allow all journalists to work safely and without interference.”

But even before Afghanistan fell to the Taliban, it was not easy being a female journalist there, said Kiran.

The CFWIJ has been researching 92-countries documenting the threats women journalists face.
“Of the 92 countries we are documenting, Afghanistan has been among the top three where women journalists (among other vulnerable groups) have continued to face serious attacks and harassment from non-state actors, including the Taliban,” said Kiran talking about the findings of the past three years.

Over the last year and a half, the coalition has relocated many female journalists from different parts of Afghanistan and even out of Afghanistan.

It has doubled its efforts in drumming up support to get several hundred women evacuated out of Afghanistan.

“We have evacuated 90 for now from the several hundred women [including journalists, sportswomen, activists and academics] who requested our support. Still, there are 100 super-urgent ones who we fear are on Taliban’s hit lists and are being hunted.”

*Names withheld for their protection.

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Shkula Zadran, Afghanistan’s Youth Representative to the United Nations, addresses U.N. Security Council. She said her generation have been the main victims of the war in Afghanistan. “We are being killed, our dreams are being buried everyday,” she told the Security Council. Courtesy: UN Photo/Loey Felipe

By Nalisha Adams
BONN, Germany, Dec 18 2020 (IPS)

While Afghanistan ends a historic year, filled with the hope for peace as the government and Taliban sat down for almost three months of consecutive peace talks for the first time in 19 years, it was also a year filled with violence with provisional statistics by the United Nations showing casualties for this year being higher than 2019.

Yesterday, Dec. 17, in a virtual meeting of the U.N. Security Council, Deborah Lyons, the Special Representative of the Secretary-General for Afghanistan and head of the U.N. Assistance Mission in Afghanistan (UNAMA), praised the peace efforts on the close of “one of the most momentous years that Afghans have endured”, while also highlighting the causalities of the year.

She said that the Afghanistan government and the Taliban had “made incremental but genuine progress in their peace talks”. They agreed on a preliminary deal, reportedly the first written agreement after 19 years of conflict.

“These developments are an early but a positive sign that both sides are willing and able to compromise when needed,” Lyons said.

Talks continued uninterrupted in host country Qatar for almost three months, but are currently in a three week recess.

However, despite the talks, the Taliban has refused to a ceasefire and continued its war on the Afghanistan government.

It was, however, reported this week that a top U.S. general held recent talks with the Taliban in Doha, urging a reduction in violence as this risked the peace process. 

Lyons also raised the issue, stating that the “unrelenting violence remains a serious obstacle to peace and a threat to the region.” She added that one Afghan official had told her recently, “the sense and perception of violence and insecurity is higher now that ever”.

While UNAMA is still compiling this year’s data, Lyons provided some provisional statistic on the impact of the violence.

“In October and November, improvised explosive devices (IEDs) caused over 60 percent more civilian casualties than in the same period last year. In the third quarter of 2020, child casualties rose 25 percent over the previous three months; while attacks against schools in this same period increased fourfold.

“In the first 11 months of 2020, targeted killings by anti-government elements rose by nearly 40 percent compared to the same period in 2019,” she said, adding that it was no surprise that the Global Peace Index for 2020 listed Afghanistan as the least peaceful nation in the world for a second year in a row.

She highlighted some of the conflicts experienced over recent months — two separate rocket attacks in Kabul, an attack on Kabul University, and the increased conflict in some areas — and said these served to heighten fears around the emergence of new terrorists threats.

She called for all countries to continue to pressure all parities to the conflict to bring about a sustained reduction in violence. “I except this will be a top priority when the negotiations resume,” she said.

Meanwhile, Shkula Zadran, Afghanistan’s Youth Representative to the U.N. also briefed the Security Council.

She said that “while it is very difficult to represent a generation born and raised in violence and conflict,” she was honoured to speak on behalf of Afghan youth, including those who were killed in the terror attack on Kabul University and other education centres.

“I have met their families. Their pain is beyond our imagination. I have promised them that I will be their voice and I am fulfilling my promise,” Zadran, who spent her childhood as a refugee in Pakistan, told the Security Council.

“I’m representing a generation who have been the main victims of this proxy war. We are being killed, our dreams are being buried everyday.”

She called for the end to the daily killings of Afghan youth who are a majority of the country’s population as two thirds of citizens are under the age of 25.

“Terrorists are afraid of Afghan youth. And that is why they are targeting our education institutions.

“They know that an educated and informed generation will never allow terrorism and extremism to grown in their country,” Zadran said.

Zadran said that as an Afghan youth representative, her message to terrorists and their supporters was clear and obvious.

“You tried to bury us. You didn’t know that we were seeds.”

Zadran said that the youth supported the end of the conflict through the peace negotiations.

Lyons said Afghanistan’s youth were a key constituency, and were also the most educated generation of youth in the country’s history.

“Young Afghan’s have clear views on the future of their country, and we must do all we can to amplify their voices.”

“Through our youth-focused local, peace initiatives, which are conducted throughout Afghanistan, UNAMA has provided a platform for the youth of Afghanistan to have their say on peace,” Lyons noted.

“Most recently, in the rural province of Faryab, young participants issued their own declaration with strong recommendations, specifying an immediate ceasefire, setting out the role of Islam under Afghanistan’s constitution, identifying the all-important sustainable development goals and emphasising the need for transitional justice.

“These are the young people of Afghanistan, their voices deserve to be heard,” Lyons said, adding that cooperation throughout the region of Central and South Asia will be essential for enduring peace.

Lyons also noted an increasing commitment among regional players for peace in Afghanistan as this was linked to attaining peace within the region.

“Increased trade and connectivity will build the foundation for peace and regional prosperity,” Lyons said, adding it was important to support regional efforts, including the regional efforts on drug trafficking and transnational organised crime as these were considered two serious threats to peace.

Lyons said that any sustainable peace needed to be owned by Afghan’s diverse society. “This is only possible if the process is inclusive from the outset, with meaningful participation by all constituencies, including women, youth, minorities, victims of conflict, and religious leaders,” Lyons said.

She added that the ongoing security transition, with the international troop withdrawal, added to the anxiety of the Afghan population. She said in the coming months this larger security transition will become a central topic in the dialogue among Afghan officials, regional countries and the international community.

She, however, pointed out that the $3 billion raised in financial support for the country during a donor conference in Geneva was remarkable within the context of the current financial environment.

Lyons said that the full security transition, peace negotiations, the health and socio-economic challenges of COVID, the ongoing commitment of the international donors and the expected results of even more regional cooperation meant that Afghanistan would continue to move forward in this new year.

“By all accounts this was a big year. But a bigger year lies ahead,” she said.

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A new United Nations report on children and armed conflict in Afghanistan found that 12,599 youngsters had been confirmed killed or injured by fighting between 2015-2018 — 82 percent more than between 2011-2014. A mother and her children who live amid bomb rubble on Kabul's outskirts in this picture dated 2008. Credit: Anand Gopal/IPS

By James Reinl
UNITED NATIONS, Oct 4 2019 (IPS)

The United Nations has warned that the past four years were among the deadliest for children in Afghanistan since the United States-led invasion of 2001, with nearly 13,000 youngsters killed and injured in that period.

U.N. secretary-general António Guterres’ new report on children and armed conflict in Afghanistan found that 12,599 youngsters had been confirmed killed or injured by fighting between 2015-2018 — 82 percent more than between 2011-2014.

The report serves as a potent reminder that while peace talks between the U.S and the Taliban, a hardline Afghan militant group, have made fitful progress, life for ordinary Afghans remains blighted by violence and hardship.

Speaking with reporters on Thursday, U.N. spokesman Stephane Dujarric said Guterres was “deeply disturbed by the scale, severity and recurrence of grave violations endured by boys and girls” in Afghanistan over recent years.  

“The recruitment of children, mostly by armed groups, including the Taliban and Daesh, continued to be documented, as were over 800 attacks on schools and hospitals,” added Dujarric, using an alternate name for the Islamic State (IS) group. 

The 17-page study, which bore Guterres’ name but was compiled by his special envoy on children in wartime, Virginia Gamba, said that youngsters made up almost a third of all civilian casualties in Afghanistan. 

They were mostly killed or maimed by fighting on the ground, improvised explosive devices, airstrikes, suicide bomb blasts, and from unexploded weapons that detonated unexpectedly after they were deployed. 

“Children in Afghanistan have known nothing but heartbreaking realities as a result of violence and war,” Gamba said in a statement accompanying her report.

“The number of child casualties is appalling, and I urge all parties to immediately put an end to the suffering of children.” 

The U.N. blamed the Taliban, Afghanistan’s branch of IS, and other armed groups for most (43 percent) of the 3,450 children who were killed and 9,149 others who were maimed in the 18-year-old war.

Still, 30 percent of child casualties were blamed on Afghan security forces, pro-government forces, the U.S. and other international partners — a large increase on the previous four-year period.

Gamba noted the growing civilian death toll since the Afghan Air Force became capable of launching aerial attacks in 2015. Since the beginning of that year, some 1,049 children were killed or injured in attacks from the skies.

In one extreme case, Afghan Air Force helicopters in April 2018 fired rockets and heavy machine guns at an open-air graduation ceremony at a madrasa in Dasht-e Archi district of Kunduz Province, killing at least 30 children and injuring 51 others, the report said.

The Taliban, IS and Afghan security forces continue enlisting children as soldiers, the report said. Once they are released from service in militant groups, youngsters frequently end up in jail on national security charges.

“While the protection and well-being of children can only be reached through long-term peace, we must seize all available opportunities to improve right now the protection of boys and girls in Afghanistan,” added Gamba.

The report comes after U.S. and Taliban negotiators struck a draft peace deal last month aimed at leading to drawdowns of the 14,000 U.S. troops and thousands of NATO troops in the landlocked, South Asian country.

U.S. President Donald Trump broke off talks after Taliban militants carried out a Sept. 5 bomb attack in the capital Kabul that killed 12 people, including a U.S. soldier. Pakistan and the Taliban have since called for a fresh round of negotiations.

The Taliban currently controls more territory than it has since 2001, when the U.S invaded following the 9/11 attacks. The war has become deadlocked, with casualties rising among civilians and combatants despite fitful progress at peace talks in Qatar.

Journalists in Peshawar protest an attack on Dawn News near the Peshawar Press Club in November 2016. Credit: Ashfaq Yusufzai/IPS

By Ashfaq Yusufzai
PESHAWAR, Jan 30 2017 (IPS)

The Federally Administered Tribal Areas located on the Pakistan-Afghanistan border remain one of the most perilous places in the world to be a reporter, with journalists walking a razor’s edge of violence and censorship.

FATA has been a bastion of Taliban militants since they crossed over to Pakistan and took refuge when their government was toppled in neighbouring Afghanistan by the U.S.-led Coalition forces towards the end of 2001.“Most of the 200 reporters from FATA have migrated outside their districts and do their work from safer places. We are unsafe. There’s no protection at all.” --Muhammad Ghaffar

Militants have used the area as a base to target security forces as well as journalists whom they perceive as pro-government.

Muhammad Anwar, who represents FATA-based Tribal Union of Journalists (TUJ), said that excessive violence, threats and intimidation remain a fact of life.

“There are two options with FATA’s journalists: either to face death or stay silent over what is going on there,” he said.

Hayatullah Khan was the first journalist killed, in June 2006 after being kidnapped in December 2005 in Waziristan. Since then more than 20 journalists have been killed in the seven agencies of FATA, allegedly by Taliban militants who were unhappy over their reporting.

“Taliban militants set on fire a newspaper stall when they saw news highlighting their activities. They also warned the reporters to stay away from coverage of the Taliban’s punishments of local people,” Muhammad Shakoor, a journalist from North Waziristan, told IPS.

Shakoor, who now lives in Peshawar, the capital of Khyber Pakhtunkhwa (KP), one of Pakistan’s four provinces, recalls how militants’ threats have prompted many journalists to flee to other parts of the country.

The situation in Swat district in KP also turned sour for journalists during the unlawful rule of the Taliban from 2007 to 2009. “Taliban militants intimidated local journalists. At least three of them were killed because they were disliked by the Taliban militants or the Pakistan Army,” Muhammad Rafiq, a local journalist, told IPS.

Reporters fear for their lives and take extreme caution while filing their stories. “We are stuck between militants and the army. We don’t know about the killers of our colleagues who have fallen in the line of their duties,” Rafiq said.

The Taliban may have disappeared as a result of military operations, but they still have the capability to target journalists, he said.

“Most of the 200 reporters from FATA have migrated outside their districts and do their work from safer places. We are unsafe. There’s no protection at all,” Muhammad Ghaffar said.

Ghaffar, who works with an Urdu newspaper in Mohmand Agency, said that it’s not only insurgents. They also face threats from the local political administration who wants them to toe the line.

“It is almost impossible to do independent reporting due to lack of protection. Journalists are surrounded by a host of problems, due to which they have to remain careful,” he said.

Journalists in Pakistan are targeted from “all sides” even as the conditions for media in the country improved slightly.

“Journalists are targeted by extremist groups, militant organisations and state organisations,” says a new report on press freedom by Reporters Without Borders (RSF). The report, released early in January, showed that Pakistan had jumped 12 spots to 147 in RSF’s in 2016 World Press Freedom Index, up from 159 in 2015 and 158 in 2014.

Pakistan stands at number two in the international index of the most dangerous places for journalists, who face harassment, kidnappings and assassinations, RSF said. During the last 10 years, more than 100 journalists have been killed in Pakistan, with almost 98 per cent belonging to FATA, Khyber Pakhtunkhwa and Baluchistan province.

The Pakistan Federal Union of Journalists has demanded that the government file cases or reopen old investigations into dozens of murdered journalists but there has so far been no action.

Last year, the International Federation of Journalists reported that Pakistan was amongst the most dangerous countries in the world for journalists, with 102 journalists and media workers having lost their lives since 2005.

The IFJ’s report said that since 2010 alone, 73 journalists and media workers have been killed — almost one journalist every month. It termed Balochistan province a ‘Cemetery for Journalists’, where 31 journalists were killed since 2007.

“The armed insurgency and sectarian violence account for a number of these killings but many of them raise suspicions of the involvement of the state’s institutions,” it said.

The killers of journalists mostly walk free, as Pakistan has so far recorded only three convictions.

Mar. 16, 2016 marked a rare occasion for journalists in Pakistan to celebrate the third verdict convicting a murderer of journalist when a district court in KP sentenced a man named Aminullah to life imprisonment for the killing of journalist Ayub Khattak on Oct. 11, 2013 for his reporting on the drug trade, in which Aminullah was involved.

In March 2016, senior journalist Hamid Mir was targeted by unknown assailants who inflicted grievous injuries. The attackers were never found.

Mir, who later received the “Most Resilient Journalist” award by International Free Press in Holland in November, said he escaped the assassination attempt but wouldn’t leave Pakistan because people stood behind him. He dedicated his award to the people of Pakistan for showing bravery against militancy and terrorism.

“The award is recognition of my sacrifices for advancement of journalism, which encourages me,” he said.

This little boy, an Afghan refugee, eats a piece of candy outside his family’s makeshift tent. Credit: DVIDSHUB/CC-BY-2.0

By Kanya D'Almeida
UNITED NATIONS, Aug 18 2015 (IPS)

As the number of civilians impacted by the intensifying conflict in Afghanistan rises along with the fighting, humanitarian agencies are struggling to meet the needs of the wounded, hungry and displaced.

The first half of 2015 has seen “record high levels” of civilian casualties, the United Nations relief agency said Tuesday, with civilian deaths touching 1,592 and total non-combatant casualties standing at over 4,900 – a one-percent increase compared to the number of casualties in the same period in 2014.

Fresh fighting in the provinces of Helmand, Kunduz, Faryab and Nangarhar are indicative of the geographic spread of the conflict, while tensions and sporadic clashes all across the central regions are forcing huge numbers of civilians from their homes.

An estimated 103,000 people have been displaced by the conflict in 2015 alone, including from locations hitherto untouched by forced population movements including Badakshan, Sar-i-Pul, Baghlan, Takhar and Badgis, the U.N. Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA) said in its mid-year review released on Aug. 18.

Clashes between the Taliban and other armed opposition groups are becoming more frequent, and the fragmentation of these groups only means that both the complexity and geographic extent of the conflict will continue to worsen.

Having received only 195 million dollars, or 48 percent of its 406 million-dollar funding requirement as of July, the U.N.’s humanitarian response plan is faltering.

Funding for every single relief “cluster” identified by OCHA is failing to keep pace with civilians’ needs. So far, the U.N. has received only 3.5 million dollars of the required 40 million dollars for provision of emergency housing, while funding for food security and health are falling short by 56 million and 29 millions dollars respectively.

Far more refugees have returned to the country, primarily from Pakistan, in the first half of 2015 compared to the same period last year, with 43,695 returnees as of July 2015 compared to 9,323 in 2014.

OCHA noted, “Overall return and deportee rates of undocumented Afghans from Iran and Pakistan stand at 319,818 people. At the same time, over 73,000 undocumented Afghans returned from Pakistan, which is on average six times higher per day than in 2014.”

U.N. officials say they need at least 89 million dollars to adequately meet the needs of refugees, but so far only 22.5 million dollars have been pledged.

As is always the case, providing adequate water and sanitation facilities is one of the top priorities of the humanitarian plan in order to prevent the outbreak of disease, but though the U.N. has put forward a figure of 25 million dollars for this purpose, only 15 million dollars are currently available.

“An increase in people requiring humanitarian assistance coupled with insufficient funding for food security agencies, particularly WFP [the World Food Programme], means that programmes for conflict IDPs, vulnerable returnees, refugees and malnourished children are all seriously under-resourced and in some cases have been terminated,” the report revealed.

Data on affected populations are believed to be incomplete owing largely to inaccessibility of the most heavily embattled regions, prompting U.N. officials to warn that the real number of people in need of critical, lifesaving services and supplies could be even higher than current estimates.

Edited by Kitty Stapp

*CORRECTION: An earlier version of this story incorrectly stated that civilian casualties in the first six months of 2015 saw an increase of 43 percent compared to the same period in 2014.

Aid from the UK is supporting a network of orthopaedic centres across Afghanistan to assist those affected by mobility disabilities, including hundreds of mine victims. Credit: DFID – UK Department for International Development/CC-BY-2.0

By Kanya D'Almeida
UNITED NATIONS, Jun 29 2015 (IPS)

No one will deny that when a child – any child – is killed, it is a tragedy. Imagine, then, the extent of the tragedy in Afghanistan where, in just four years, 2,302 children have lost their lives as a result of ongoing fighting in this country of 30 million people.

According to his latest report on children and armed conflict in Afghanistan, United Nations Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon states that more kids were killed or maimed in 2014 than in any previous year under review.

During the reporting period from Sep. 1, 2010, to Dec. 31, 2014, an additional 5,047 young people were badly injured, leaving many crippled for life.

Ground engagements were reportedly the number one cause of child casualties, leaving 331 children dead and 920 injured in 2014; these figures represent a doubling of the number from the previous year.

Armed groups’ use of improvised explosive devices (IEDs) in populated areas resulted in 664 casualties, while suicide attacks took the lives of 214 children – an increase in 80 percent compared to 2013.

The report also stated that “explosive remnants of war killed or maimed 328 children”, while international military airstrikes left 38 kids either dead or injured – including eight from drone strikes alone.

The biggest culprits appear to have been the Taliban and the Hizb-e-Islami, followed closely by the Afghan National Securities Forces, who were responsible for 126 killings and 270 injuries.

Five kids were killed and 52 injured in cross-border shelling from Pakistan. The U.N. was unable to verify the cause of death in 163 cases, and chalks up a further 505 injuries to “crossfire”, without being able to attribute responsibility to any particular group.

“These tragically high casualty numbers show that children are bearing the brunt of the conflict, and unfortunately this trend continues with the deterioration of the security environment into 2015,” Leila Zerrougui, the Secretary-General’s special representative for children and armed conflict said in a press release last week.

Various actors, primarily the Taliban and similar armed groups, forcibly recruited an estimated 68 children into their ranks. In an even more troubling trend, kids continue to carry out suicide attacks for the Taliban and perform a range of dangerous or potentially life threatening tasks like planting IEDs or acting as spies.

Detention and torture of children is also a major cause of concern for rights activists, with the ministry of justice reporting 258 boys held in juvenile detention centres on charges relating to national security, including “association with armed groups”.

Between February 2013 and December 2014, the U.N. interviewed 105 child detainees, 44 of who claimed they had experienced ill-treatment or torture.

Another aspect of the conflict that directly impacts children here is the systematic and sustained attack on schools throughout the country.

U.N. researchers verified 163 incidents, including the placement of explosive devices within school premises, attacks on schools used as polling stations, threats against protected personnel or teachers, and the targeting of girls’ education by way of intimidation, propaganda, or physical attacks.

The U.N. believes that 469 Afghan schools are closed as a result of the shaky security situation, with an estimated 30,000 to 35,000 Taliban fighters reportedly active in most provinces around the country.

Children are also at risk of sexual assault – in the review period, eight boys and six girls were victims of sexual violence, with four of the verified cases traced back to the national police and one to a “pro-government militia commander.”

Furthermore, “Twenty-four boys and two girls were abducted in 17 separate incidents, resulting in the killing of at least four boys by the Taliban, the rape of two girls by the local police, and the rape of a boy by a pro-Government militia,” according to the U.N.

As a new government attempts to gain control over the situation, U.N. experts are hopeful that the deadly tide can be reversed.

“I look forward to working with the Government of Afghanistan even more intensively in the months ahead as we move towards fully implementing the country’s Action Plan for ending recruitment and use of children,” Zerrougui said at the report’s launch this past Thursday.

Edited by Kitty Stapp

Women human rights defenders in Afghanistan face mounting violence but are being abandoned by their own government – and the international community is doing far too little to ease their plight – despite the significant gains they have fought to achieve, says Amnesty International in a new report released Apr. 7.

The report titled ‘Their Lives On The Line’ documents how champions for the rights of women and girls, including doctors, teachers, lawyers, police and journalists as well as activists, have been targeted not just by the Taliban but by warlords and government officials as well.

Rights defenders have suffered car bombings, grenade attacks on homes, killing of family members and targeted assassinations. Many continue their work despite suffering multiple attacks, in the full knowledge that no action will be taken against the perpetrators.

“Women human rights defenders from all walks of life have fought bravely for some significant gains over the past 14 years – many have even paid with their lives. It’s outrageous that Afghan authorities are leaving them to fend for themselves, with their situation more dangerous than ever,” said Salil Shetty, Amnesty International’s Secretary General, in Kabul to launch the report.

“With the troop withdrawal nearly complete, too many in the international community seem happy to sweep Afghanistan under the carpet. We cannot simply abandon this country and those who put their lives on the line for human rights, including women’s rights.”

There has been significant international investment to support Afghan women, including efforts to strengthen women’s rights, but too much of it has been piecemeal and ad hoc and much of the aid money is drying up, says Amnesty International.

While Taliban are responsible for the majority of attacks against women defenders, government officials or powerful local commanders with the authorities’ backing are increasingly implicated in violence and threats against women.

As one woman defender explained: “The threats now come from all sides: it’s difficult to identify the enemies. They could be family, security agencies, Taliban, politicians.”

Based on interviews with more than 50 women defenders and their family members across the country, Amnesty International found a consistent pattern of authorities ignoring or refusing to take threats against women seriously.

No woman in public life is safe – those facing threats and violence range from rights activists, politicians, lawyers, journalists, teachers. Even women in the police force are under threat, where sexual harassment and bullying is rife and almost always goes unpunished.

Despite the existence of a legal framework to protect women in Afghanistan – much of it thanks to tireless campaigning by women’s rights activists themselves – laws are often badly enforced and remain mere paper promises. The landmark Elimination of Violence against Women (EVAW) Law, passed in 2009, remains unevenly enforced and has only led to a limited number of convictions.

“The Afghan government is turning a blind eye to the very real threat women human rights defenders are facing. These brave people – many of them simply doing their jobs – are the bulwark against the oppression and violence that is part of daily life for millions of women across the country. The government must ensure they are protected, not ignored,” said Horia Mosadiq, Amnesty International’s Afghanistan Researcher.

“Afghanistan is facing an uncertain future, and is at arguably the most critical moment in its recent history. Now is not the time for international governments to walk away,” said Salil Shetty. “The international community must step up with continued engagement and the Afghan government cannot continue to ignore its human rights obligations.”

Edited by Phil Harris    

An elderly displaced man carries a sack of rations on his shoulder in northern Pakistan. Credit: Ashfaq Yusufzai/IPS

By Ashfaq Yusufzai
PESHAWAR, Mar 10 2015 (IPS)

A doctor shakes his head in despair as he examines a 10-year-old child at the Jalozai refugee camp, about 35 km by road from Peshawar, capital of Pakistan’s northern Khyber Pakhtunkhwa (KP) province.

“He is severely malnourished,” Dr. Zeeshan Khan tells IPS. “He is vulnerable to diseases like diarrhoea, and other infections.”

“Back home we had agricultural land, which produced enough food for us. We used to sell our surplus grain and vegetables for an income, but now we are becoming beggars." -- Shah Faisal, a refugee from Khyber Agency in northern Pakistan
Identifying the problem is about all the doctor can do. In this camp, there are too many refugees and too little food. Until that situation changes, kids like little Ahmed Ali will continue to feel the pangs of hunger, and the creeping fear of illnesses that his body is too weak to fight off.

Ali came to Jalozai with his family last year, when Operation Khyber-1, a government-led military offensive in their native Khyber Agency, part of the Federally Administered Tribal Areas (FATA), forced thousands to flee for their lives.

Ali, together with his parents and siblings, has now joined the ranks of some three million internally displaced persons (IDPs) in northern Pakistan, forced out of their towns and villages over the course of a decade: first by militant groups operating in this remote tribal belt that borders Afghanistan, and – more recently – by Pakistan’s armed forces, as they carry out a determined campaign against designated terrorist groups in the area.

One such offensive code-named Operation Zarb-e-Azab began last June, with the military focusing its firepower on the 11,585-square-km North Waziristan Agency where militants have operated with impunity since crossing over the Afghan border in 2001.

Launched in response to the deadly June 2014 terror attack on the Karachi International Airport, the operation has been hardest on civilians.

An estimated 900,000 people were displaced last year, nearly all of whom took refuge in Bannu, an ancient city of the KP province where ‘tent cities’ were erected to house some 90,000 families.

Each fresh wave of displacement has put more pressure on the Khyber Pakhtunkhwa government to feed, heal and shelter thousands of newly uprooted citizens, while simultaneously tending to some 2.1 million ‘permanent’ refugees who have fled the various agencies of FATA since the Taliban and other militant groups claimed the region as a base of operations in 2001.

Meeting the needs of such an enormous refugee population has put tremendous strain on the government.

Provincial Disaster Management Authority Spokesman Adil Khan says that each family receives a monthly allocation of 90 kg of wheat, one kg of tea leaves, five kg of sugar, two kg of rice and two litres of oil in order to alleviate extreme hunger.

But most households IPS spoke with, in camps across the northern province, say this isn’t enough for families comprised, on average, of 10 or more people.

In Bannu, for instance, there are still 454,000 displaced persons, despite robust efforts to relocate families or unite them with their relatives in the area. According to the director-general of health for the KP province, Pervez Kamal, more than 15 percent of the remaining IDPs were malnourished as of January 2015.

“The foodstuffs we get aren’t sufficient to feed my 10-member family,” says Darwaish Gul, a former resident of FATA’s Bajuar Agency, who now resides in a camp in Bannu.

“Back home, we were farmers, growing our own food,” the 60-year-old refugee tells IPS. “We always had enough grain, vegetables and fruits. Now, we have only one meal a day, and always go to sleep hungry.”

The government has refuted such claims, insisting that its emergency aid and food rations are sufficient to feed every hungry mouth in the camps.

But a United Nations report released in the summer of 2014 pointed out that 31 percent of IDPs didn’t receive relief supplies or food items since they lacked computerised national identity cards.

Army officers stand opposite displaced families as they collect their monthly allocation of food supplies in northern Pakistan. Credit: Ashfaq Yusufzai/IPS

Of the refugees who arrived from North Waziristan alone, over 15 percent did not qualify for food aid. These included displaced families who had no male members (seven percent), families headed by children (four percent) and families headed by people with disabilities, or elderly persons (five percent).

The situation was compounded by the fact that many of the displaced from North Waziristan trekked for miles in 45-degree Celsius heat to reach Bannu. Scores collapsed along the way, and those who made it safely were severely malnourished, dehydrated or otherwise weakened by the journey.

With limited food and medical supplies, thousands have not fully recovered from the ordeal. They are in need of specialised care, but only the most basic services exist to meet their many needs.

Iqbal Afridi, the FATA representative of the Pakistan Tehreek-e-Insaf (PTI), an opposition political party, tells IPS that the situation is “extremely precarious”, with scores of families either experiencing, or on the verge of, hunger.

He runs an association of affected people, and last November he led a contingent of IDPs from Bara, a township in the Khyber Agency, to the Peshawar Press Club to protest – among other things – the lack of medical supplies, inadequate food rations for the displaced, and miserable – if not non-existent – water and sanitation facilities, which has enabled the spread of diseases.

Others say they just want to expedite government clearance from the camps so they can return to their homes. Nearly every week, groups of IDPs protest in Peshawar, either through marches or sit-ins, always condemning the lack of resources allocated to their basic survival.

“We have been demanding early repatriation to our ancestral homes as our lives have become miserable,” Shah Faisal, a refugee from Khyber Agency now living in a camp in KP, tells IPS. “We left our home for the sake of peace but peace is still elusive.

“Back home, we had agricultural land, which produced enough food for us. We used to sell our surplus grain and vegetables for an income, but now we are becoming beggars,” he contends.

IDPs in northern Pakistan wait in line for rations at a refugee camp in the Khyber Pakhtunkhwa province. Credit: Ashfaq Yusufzai/IPS

Some experts say a health crisis is not far off. Jawadullah Khan, a doctor who has worked extensively with refugees in the Bannu and elsewhere, tells IPS that people here are badly in need of balanced diets, and clean water.

“We have been trying our level best to provide the best healthcare facilities to the displaced population as they are more vulnerable to diseases,” he says.

In Jalozai refugee camp, which houses families from five out of FATA’s seven tribal agencies, Ahmed Ali has finished with the doctor and is walking back to his tent. Until the government of Pakistan comes up with a national strategy to deal with its displaced population, this little boy will have no respite from hunger.

Edited by Kanya D’Almeida

The Pakistan Taliban has destroyed over 838 schools between 2009 and 2012. Credit: Kulsum Ebrahim/IPS

By Zofeen Ebrahim
KARACHI, Jan 21 2015 (IPS)

As a wave of outrage, crossing Pakistan’s national borders, continues a month after the Dec. 16 attack on a school in the northern Khyber Pakhtunkhwa province, some citizens are turning away from collective expressions of anger, and beginning the hard work of building grassroots alternatives to terrorism and militancy.

While many millions of people are lashing out at the Taliban for going on a bloody rampage in a school in the province’s capital, Peshawar, killing 141 people including 132 uniformed children in what is being billed as the group’s single deadliest attack to date, The Citizens Foundation (TFC), a local non-profit, has reacted quite differently.

"With the formidable challenges facing the nation, we passionately believe that only education has the power to enlighten minds, instil citizenship and unleash the potential of every Pakistani." -- Syed Asaad Ayub Ahmad, CEO of The Citizens Foundation (TCF)
Rather than join the chorus calling for stiff penalties for the attackers, it busied itself with a pledge to build 141 Schools for Peace, one in the name of each person who lost their life on that terrible day.

“We dedicate this effort to the children of Pakistan, their right to education and their dreams of a peaceful future,” Syed Asaad Ayub Ahmad, CEO of TCF, said in an email launching the campaign.

“With the formidable challenges facing the nation, we passionately believe that only education has the power to enlighten minds, instil citizenship and unleash the potential of every Pakistani,” he added.

In their war against western, secular education, which the group has denounced as “un-Islamic”, the Pakistan Taliban have destroyed over 838 schools between 2009 and 2012, claimed responsibility for the near-fatal shooting of teenaged education advocate Malala Yousafzai and issued numerous edicts against the right of women and girls to receive proper schooling.

In their latest assault on education, nine militants went on an eight-hour-long killing spree, throwing hand grenades into the teeming school premises and firing indiscriminately at any moving target. They claim the attack was a response to the military operation aimed at rooting out the Taliban currently underway in North Waziristan, a tribal region bordering Afghanistan.

While armed groups and government forces answer violence with more of the same, the active citizens who comprise TCF want to shift focus away from bloodshed and onto longer-term solutions for the future of this deeply troubled country.

The charity, which began in 1995, has completed 1,000 school ‘units’, typically a primary or secondary institution capable of accommodating up to 180 pupils, all built from scratch in the most impoverished areas of some 100 towns and cities across Pakistan.

The 7,700 teachers employed by the NGO go through a rigorous training programme before placement, and the organisation maintains a strict 50:50 male-female ratio for the 145,000 students who are now benefitting from a free education, according to TCF Vice President Zia Akhter Abbas.

In a country where 25.02 million school-aged children – of which 13.7 million (55 percent) are girls – do not receive any form of education, experts say TCF’s initiative may well act as a game changer in the years to come, especially given that the government spends just 2.1 percent of its GDP on education.

“Our job is to ensure that wherever we have our schools, there are no out-of-school children, especially girls,” Abbas told IPS. “We believe the change in society will come automatically once these educated and enlightened children grow up into responsible adults.”

Of the 25.02 million school-aged children who are not receiving a proper education, 13.7 million, or 55 percent, are girls. Credit: Zofeen Ebrahim/IPS

He added that the schools are designed to “serve as a beacon of light restricting the advance of extremism in our society.”

The project has received widespread support from a broad spectrum of Pakistani society. Twenty-four-year-old Usman Riaz, a student at the Berklee College of Music in Boston who recently donated the proceeds of his jam-packed concerts in Karachi to TCF’s efforts, says the Schools for Peace are a “wonderful way to honor the innocent victims”.

But it will take more than one-off charitable donations to make the scheme a reality. It costs about 15 million rupees (148,000 dollars) to build and equip each new school, so the total bill for all 141 institutions stands at some 21 million dollars.

With a track record of building 40-50 schools a year, however, the NGO is confident that it will honor its pledge within three years.

Combating extremism

Besides immortalizing the victims of the Taliban’s attack, experts here say that shifting the focus away from terrorism and onto education will help combat a growing pulse of religious extremism.

The prominent Pakistani educationist and rights activist A.H. Nayyar told IPS that it is crucial for the country to begin educating children who would otherwise be turned into “fodder for extremists”.

In fact, part of the government’s 20-point National Action Plan – agreed upon by all political parties dedicated to completely eradicating terrorism – includes plans to register and regulate all seminaries, known here as madrassas, in a bid to combat extremism at its root.

With thousands of such religious institutions springing up across the country to fill a void in the school systems, policy-makers are concerned about the indoctrination of children at a young age, with distorted interpretations of religious texts and the teaching of intolerance playing a major role in these schools.

Some sources say that between two and three million students are enrolled at the nearly 20,000 madrassas spread across Pakistan; others say this is a conservative estimate.

While there is some talk about bringing these institutions under the umbrella of the public school system, experts like Nayyar believe this will do little to combat the “forcible teaching of […] false and distorted history, excessive emphasis on Islamic teachings to the extent of including them in textbooks of all the subjects, explicit teaching of jihad and militancy, hate material against other nations, peoples of other faiths, etc, [and] excessive glorification of the military and wars.”

Nayyar and other independent scholars have been at the forefront of calling for an overhaul of the public school curriculum, which they believe is at odds with the goals of a modern, progressive nation.

But until policy-makers and politicians jump on the bandwagon, independent efforts like the work of TCF will lead the way.

Edited by Kanya D’Almeida

Afghan widows and orphans in Pakistan have few livelihood options, but a women’s charity is teaching them basic embroidery and sewing to help them start home-based businesses. Credit: Najibullah Musafer/Killid

By Ashfaq Yusufzai
PESHAWAR, Pakistan, Jan 12 2015 (IPS)

At 46, Naseema Nashad is starting her life over, not out of choice but out of necessity. The Afghan woman was just 25 years old when Taliban militants stormed Kabul and her family was forced to flee to neighbouring Pakistan to escape what they knew would be a brutal regime.

“My father stayed back to run his small business there and he would send us money on a monthly basis,” she told IPS. “We used it to feed our seven-member family, and pay rent on our house in Peshawar [capital of Pakistan’s northern Khyber Pakhtunkwa province].”

“The worst victims of the three-decade-long conflict are women, who have lost their fathers, husbands and male family members [and] are finding it hard to earn a living." -- Ahmed Rasool, professor of international relations at Kabul University
But in 1999, “for no reason” she says, the Taliban killed Nashad’s father. Since then, it has been a daily struggle for the family to survive. Aged 12, 14 and 15, her three brothers quickly found work in local hotels, though they were paid paltry salaries for their labour.

Nashad, on the other hand, could never land anything but odd jobs, which barely gave her enough to survive. What she needed was something fulltime, ideally work she could do from home, that would bring her a regular income.

It was a pipe dream at first, but thanks to the efforts of a vocational centre established by the Afghan Women Organisation, an NGO based in this border city, she is close to making it a reality.

“Now, I have learnt stitching and embroidery and will open a home-based shop very soon. Some of the women who have previously been trained at the centre are helping me,” she added.

She is one of thousands of women, all from war-affected families, who have acquired embroidery and sewing skills over the past five years.

Each woman has her own unique story. Fourteen-year-old Gul Pari, for instance, migrated to Peshawar from Afghanistan seven years ago. As a daily wage-labourer, her father could scarcely make ends meet. There was little choice but for his young daughters to go out in search of work.

Today, Gul and her younger sister Jamila are the owners of a small home-based business, where they take on clients who need garments stitched or altered. They still in a simple mud hut, but at least they now make enough money to comfortably feed the entire family.

Safoora Stanikzai, who heads the Afghan Women Organisation, says she has imparted skills to about 4,000 women since establishing the centre in 2010.

“A majority of the trained women were either widows or orphaned children who had lost their male family members in Afghanistan and were facing severe economic problems here,” Stanikzai tells IPS.

The organisation lacks space and sufficient resources but soldiers on with the little it has. After the women complete their training, they even receive a sewing machine from the centre to facilitate home-based enterprises.

Stanikzai also recruits women found begging on the streets and in marketplaces, and offers them the chance to start their lives afresh – a rare opportunity in this war-torn region, where civilians are often caught between militants and the military, and a massive number of internally displaced persons (IDPs) jostle for space with a resident population already battling a scarcity of homes, jobs and food.

Female Afghan refugees face double-dependency

According to the U.N. Refugee Agency, Pakistan is home to 1.6 million ‘legal’ Afghan residents, while an estimated two to three million undocumented refugees are also believed to have crossed the 2,700-km-long border since the 1979 Soviet invasion.

Passing easily through various unguarded or unchecked entry points in the mountains that form a rocky border between the two nations, Afghans fleeing the war were once welcomed by their brethren in the Federally Administered Tribal Areas (FATA) and what was formerly known as the North-West Frontier Province, now called KP.

But when the U.S.-invasion of Afghanistan pushed former Taliban militants into the mountains, leading to a rise in armed groups operating with impunity in the tribal belt, the hand of friendship was snatched away and many Afghans now live on the margins, blamed for the rise in militancy and soaring crime in Pakistan’s northern regions.

According to Ahmed Rasool, a professor of international relations at Kabul University, poverty-stricken Afghan refugees have no choice but to remain in Pakistan since they have little to no economic opportunity back home.

“The worst victims of the three-decade-long conflict are women, who have lost their fathers, husbands and male family members [and] are finding it hard to earn a living,” he told IPS.

Some of these widows and orphans are new arrivals, joining the wave that fled Afghanistan in 2001. Others have lived here much longer, and consider Pakistan their home.

But aid that was once was abundant has dwindled. International NGOs and aid agencies followed closely on the heels of departing foreign troops, leaving Afghan refugees in the lurch.

Barely able to meet the needs of its own impoverished population in the north, the Pakistan government has offered little assistance to visitors who are now being told they have outstayed their welcome.

So initiatives like Stanikzai’s vocational centre represent a welcome oasis in an increasingly hostile desert.

Some Afghan women earn as much as 150 dollars per month by altering or stitching women’s garments. Credit: Ashfaq Yusufzai/IPS

Women like 49-year-old Shamin Ara, who received training at the centre five years ago, is just one of the organisation’s many success stories.

She arrived in Pakistan in 1992, and lost her father to tuberculosis six years ago. His death left the family no choice but to seek alms from their rich relatives, she tells IPS.

Now she earns about 150 dollars a month by practicing the skills she learned at the centre. It is a decent wage in a country where the average annual income is 1,250 dollars.

She says she has not yet been able to find a husband, since she still lives in abject poverty. But at least now she can feed her four siblings, and harbours dreams of expanding her business further.

Already she has helped five other Afghan women set up their own shops, and hopes to do more for those like herself, who just need a helping hand.

Edited by Kanya D’Almeida

Afghan refugees in Pakistan number some three million. Most crossed the border in 1979 during the Soviet invasion and have lived in Pakistan for generations. Credit: Ashfaq Yusufzai/IPS

By Ashfaq Yusufzai
PESHAWAR, Pakistan, Jan 1 2015 (IPS)

They number between two and three million; some have lived in makeshift shelters for just a few months, while others have roots that stretch much further back into history. Most fled to escape war, others simply ran away from joblessness.

Whatever their reasons for being here, Afghan refugees in Pakistan all now face a similar plight: of being caught up in the dragnet that is sweeping through the country with the stated goal of removing ‘illegal’ residents from this South Asian nation of 180 million people.

According to the United Nations Refugee Agency (UNHCR), some 1.6 million Afghans are legally residing in Pakistan, having been granted proof of registration (PoR) by the U.N. body. Twice that number is believed to be unlawfully dwelling here, primarily in the northern, tribal belt that borders Afghanistan.

“Forced repatriation will expose us to many problems." -- Gul Jamal, an elderly Afghan refugee in Peshawar, Pakistan
Most arrived during the Soviet invasion of 1979, the chaos of war squeezing millions of Afghans out of their embattled nation and over the mountainous border that stretches for some 2,700 km along rocky terrain.

The Federally Administered Tribal Areas (FATA) and what was then known as the North-West Frontier Province, now called Khyber Pakhtunkhwa (KP), offered an easy point of assimilation, the shared language of Pashto bridging the divide between ethnic Pashtun Afghans and the majority Punjabi population.

But what began as a warm welcome has turned progressively sour over the decades, as Afghans are increasingly blamed for rising crime, unemployment and persistent militancy in the region.

The Dec. 16 terrorist attack on a school in the KP’s capital Peshawar – which killed 132 children – has only added fuel to a fiery debate on the status of Afghan refugees, who are accused of swelling the ranks of the Pakistani Taliban and affiliated militant groups operating with impunity in the tribal areas.

Three days after the massacre, on Dec. 19, KP Chief Minister Pervez Khattak convened an emergency cabinet meeting to demand the immediate removal of all Afghan refugees, claiming that the grisly attack on the Army Public School was planned in Afghanistan.

His call for repatriation joined a chorus that has been growing steadily louder in northern Pakistan as the average citizen struggles to come to terms with an era of terrorism that has resulted in over 50,000 deaths since 2001, when the U.S. occupation of Afghanistan prompted a second wave of immigration into Pakistan.

A heated national debate eventually resulted in a decision to allow lawful Afghan residents to remain in the country until the end of 2015, at which point plans would be made for their safe return.

A previous plan, which followed on the heels of a Peshawar High Court order to repatriate Afghan refugees by the end of 2013, did not see the light of day, largely as it would have entailed over a billion dollars in international assistance.

Afghans own 10,000 of the 20,000 shops in Peshawar, capital of Pakistan’s northern Khyber Pakhtunkhwa province, and also run a range of informal businesses, such as street stalls where they hawk goods. Credit: Ashfaq Yusufzai/IPS

Tired of waiting for government action, however, local authorities have taken the law into their own hands by embarking on a major crackdown on Afghan refugees.

“About 80 percent of crimes in KP are committed by Afghans,” alleged KP Information Minister Mushtaq Ghani.

“They are involved in murders and kidnapping for ransom, but they disappear after committing these crimes and we cannot trace them,” he told IPS.

“Therefore we demand that those having PoR be restricted to camps, and those without [their papers] sent home,” added the official, whose province is home to an estimated one million Afghans.

Police Officer Khalid Khan says his force is arresting roughly 100 people each day. “Every house is searched,” he told IPS, adding that even those who live in “posh localities” are being investigated as possible unlawful residents.

Terror and crime are not the only problems for which Afghans are being blamed. Trade and industry experts here claim that illegal ventures established by refugee communities have destroyed local businesses.

According to Ghulam Nabi, vice president of the KP Chamber of Commerce and Industries, Afghans run 10,000 of the estimated 20,000 shops in Peshawar; but since they are not registered residents, they are not subject to the same taxes as Pakistani shop-owners.

He told IPS his department has been “urging” the federal government to repatriate Afghans so locals can continue to do their trade. He also alleged that refugees’ demand for housing has pushed rents to unaffordable prices.

Besides hosting hundreds of thousands of Afghan refugees, the KP is also saddled with scores of displaced Pakistanis, the most recent influx arriving in the midst of a government military campaign in North Waziristan Agency aimed at rooting out insurgents from their stronghold.

Abdullah Khan, a professor at the University of Peshawar, told IPS that two million displaced Pakistanis from adjacent provinces are now residing in KP, many of them in makeshift ‘tent cities’ erected in the Bannu district.

According to Khan, Afghanistan’s gradual return to democracy has paved the way for safe return for refugees. He, along with other experts and officials, see no further reason for Pakistan to continue to host such a massive international population within its borders – especially with so many domestic issues clamouring to be dealt with.

Former cricket legend Imran Khan, whose Pakistan Tehreek-e Insaf (Pakistan Movement for Justice) party rules the KP province, has also echoed the demand.

“The government issues 500 Pakistani visas to Afghans at the Torkham border [a major crossing point connecting Afghanistan’s Nangarhar province with FATA] everyday but an estimated 15,000 to 20,000 people cross the border daily,” he said on Dec. 18.

“The illegal movement takes place because we don’t have a system to track these people and their activities here,” he added.

In a bid to rectify gaps in the system, police in KP are now blocking cell phones belonging to Afghans and taking steps to regulate the movements of refugees who may be in violation of their visa status.

But many Afghan residents claim the allegations are unfounded, while those who have lived here for generations consider Pakistan their home. Others are simply afraid of what will be waiting for them if they do go back.

Gul Jamal, an Afghan elder, told IPS that while his family was eager to return, the situation back home was “extremely precarious”.

“There are no education or health facilities, and no electricity,” he claimed, adding that job opportunities too are few and far between in Afghanistan.

He hopes the Pakistan government will “take pity” on his people. “Forced repatriation will expose us to many problems,” he explained.

In an interview with IPS on Dec. 22, Federal Minister for States and Frontier Regions Abdul Qadir Baloch categorically stated that legal refugees would stay on until the end of 2015 as per the government’s agreement with UNHCR.

“The registered Afghan refugees have never been found to be involved in terrorism-related incidents in the country and they won’t be sent back against their will,” Baloch stressed.

“The government will protect legal Afghan [immigrants] against forced repatriation,” he asserted.

Edited by Kanya D’Almeida

Balochistan Liberation Army commander Baloch Khan checks his rifle alongside his three escorts, somewhere in the Sarlat Mountains on the Afghan-Pakistani border. Credit: Karlos Zurutuza/IPS

By Karlos Zurutuza
SARLAT MOUNTAINS, Afghanistan-Pakistan border, Dec 24 2014 (IPS)

The media tend to portray Balochistan as “troubled”, or “restive”, but it would be more accurate to say that there´s actually a war going on in this part of the world.

Balochistan is the land of the Baloch, who today see their land divided by the borders of Iran, Pakistan and Afghanistan. It is a vast swathe of land the size of France which boasts enormous deposits of gas, gold and copper, untapped sources of oil and uranium, as well as a thousand-kilometre coastline near the entrance to the Strait of Hormuz.

In August 1947, the Baloch from Pakistan declared independence, but nine months later the Pakistani army marched into Balochistan and annexed it, sparking an insurgency that has lasted, intermittently, to this day.

Now senior Baloch rebel commanders say that Islamabad is training Islamic State (IS) fighters in Pakistan´s southern province of Balochistan.

IPS met Baloch fighters at an undisclosed location in the Sarlat Mountains, a rocky massif, right on the border between Afghanistan and Pakistan, and equidistant from two Taliban strongholds: Kandahar in south-eastern Afghanistan and Quetta in southwest Pakistan."Today we speak of seven Baloch armed movements fighting for freedom but all share a common goal: independence for Balochistan" – Baloch Khan, commander of the Balochistan Liberation Army

The fighters claimed to have marched for twelve hours from their camp to meet this IPS reporter.

They are four: Baloch Khan, commander of the Balochistan Liberation Army (BLA), and Mama, Hayder and Mohamed, his three escorts, who do not want to disclose their full names.

“This is an area of ​​high Taliban presence but they use their own routes and we stick to ours so we hardly ever come across them,” explains commander Khan, adding that he wants to make it clear from the beginning that the Baloch liberation movement is “at the antipodes of fundamentalism”.

“Today we speak of seven Baloch armed movements fighting for freedom but all share a common goal: independence for Balochistan,” says Khan. At 41, he has spent half of his life as a guerrilla fighter. “I joined as a student,” he recalls.

The senior commander refuses to disclose the number of fighters in the BLA’s ranks but he does say that they are deployed in 25 camps throughout “East Balochistan [under the control of Pakistan]”.

Khan admits parallelisms between his group and the Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK), also a “secular group fighting for their national rights,” as he puts it

“We feel very close to the Kurds. One could say they are our cousins, and their land is also stolen by their neighbours,” says the commander, referring to the common origin of Baloch and Kurds, and the division of the latter into four states: Iran, Iraq, Syria and Turkey.

Historically a nomadic people, the Baloch have had a moderate vision of Islam. However, Khan accuses Islamabad of pushing the conflict into a sectarian one.

The Baloch insurgent groups in Pakistan are markedly secular and share a common agenda focusing on the independence of Balochistan. Credit: Karlos Zurutuza/IPS

“Until 2000 not a single Shia was killed in Balochistan. Today Pakistan is funnelling all sorts of fundamentalist groups, many of them linked to the Taliban, into Balochistan, to quell the Baloch liberation movement,” claims the guerrilla fighter, adding that target killings and enforced disappearances are a common currency in his homeland.

The Voice for Baloch Missing Persons, a group advocating peaceful protest founded by some of the families of the disappeared, puts the number of people from Balochistan since 2000 at more than 19,000, although exact figures are impossible to verify because no independent investigation has yet been conducted.

However, in August this year, the International Commission of Jurists, Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch called on Pakistan’s government “to stop the deplorable practice of state agencies abducting hundreds of people throughout the country without providing information about their fate or whereabouts.”

Baloch insurgent groups, however, have also been accused of murdering civilians. In August 2013, the BLA took responsibility for the killing of 13 people after the two buses they were travelling in were stopped by fighters in Mach area, about 50km (31 miles) south-east of the provincial capital, Quetta.

Pakistani officials said they were civilians returning home to Punjab to celebrate the end of Ramadan. Commander Khan shares another version:

“There were 40 people in two buses. We arrested and investigated 25 of them and we finally executed 13, all of whom belonged to the Pakistani Security Forces,” assures Khan, lamenting that a majority of the foreign media “relies solely on Pakistani government official sources.”

Could an independence referendum like the one held in Scotland possibly help to unlock the Baloch conflict? Khan looks sceptical:

“Before such a step, we´d need to settle down both the national and geographic borders as many parts of our land lie in Sindh and Punjab – the neighbouring provinces. Besides, there´s a growing number of settlers and the army is in full control of the country, election processes included,” the commander claims bluntly.

Instead of a consultation, the rebel fighter openly asks for a full intervention, “not just moral support but also a military and economic intervention.”

“The civilised world should support us, not Pakistan. Why help a country that is struggling to feed fundamentalist groups across the world?” asks the guerrilla commander before he and his men resume the long way back to their base.

Balochistan and beyond

The meeting with the BLA leader was only possible via Afghanistan, because Pakistan’s south-western province remains a “no go” area due to a veto enforced by Islamabad.

“The province has the worst record in Pakistan for journalists being killed so local journalists usually censor themselves to avoid being harassed, jailed or worse. Meanwhile, foreigner journalists are deported if they try to access the area,” Ahmed Rashid, a best-selling Pakistani writer and renowned Central Asia commentator, who was an activist on behalf of Balochistan in his youth, told IPS.

The visa ban over this reporter after working undercover in the region was no hurdle to get the viewpoint of Allah Nazar, commander in chief of the Baloch Liberation Front (BLF).

Through a satellite phone, this former medical doctor from Quetta corroborates commander Khan´s statements on a “common goal for the entire Baloch insurgency movement”. He also endorses the BLA commander´s analysis of Islamabad’s alleged backing of fundamentalist groups.

“Pakistan is breeding fundamentalists to counter the Baloch nationalist movement but it has entirely failed. Now they are trying to use the instrument of religion in order to distract attention from the Baloch freedom movement,” Nazar explains from an unspecified location in Makran – southern Balochistan province – where the BLF has its strongholds.

According to the movement´s leader, such threat could well transcend the boundaries of this inhospitable region. Commander Nazar gave the coordinates of “at least four training camps” where members of the Islamic State would reportedly be receiving instruction before being transferred to the Middle East:

“There´s one is in Makran, and another one in Wadh, 990 and 315 km south of Quetta respectively,” says the guerrilla fighter. “A third one is in the Mishk area of Zehri – 200 km south of Quetta – and there are more than 100 armed men there: Arabs, Pashtuns, Punjabis and others who are based there with the help of Sardar Sanaullah Zehri [a local tribal leader]. The fourth camp is near Chiltan, in Quetta.”

Nazar adds that Pakistan’s ISI (Inter-Services Intelligence) is “both activating and patronising the Islamic State.”

“The Islamic State is overwhelmingly present among us. They even throw pamphlets in our streets to advocate their view of Islam and get new recruits,” denounces Nazar.

In October 2014, six key Pakistani Taliban commanders, including the spokesman of Tehrik-e-Taliban – a Pakistan conglomerate of several Pakistani insurgent groups – announced their allegiance to the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria.

“IS is simply an upgraded version of the Talibans and finds sympathy with the ruling establishment in Pakistan,” human rights activist Mir Mohammad Ali Talpur told IPS.

Talpur, who has been challenged and attacked repeatedly for writing about such uncomfortable issues for Islamabad, claims that creating the Taliban is “the core of state policy which has not yet given up on this megalomaniacal scheme of Islam ruling the world.”

Despite repeated calls and e-mails, Pakistani officials refused to talk to IPS. However, the issue is seemingly a well-known secret after the Minister of Interior himself, Nisar Ali Khan, recently told Parliament that even in the naval base in Karachi –Pakistan´s main port and commercial city – there is support for the activities of radical religious groups.

(Edited by Phil Harris)

Funeral ceremony being held for victims of the Dec. 16 attack on the Army Public School and College in Peshawar. Credit: Ashfaq Yusufzai/IPS

By Ashfaq Yusufzai
PESHAWAR, Pakistan, Dec 21 2014 (IPS)

As Pakistan lifts its moratorium on executions in response to this week’s attack on a school in  Peshawar, human rights groups say that resuming the death penalty will not combat terrorism in Pakistan.

Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif announced that Pakistan had reinstated the death penalty the day after an attack on the Army Public School and College here that killed 150 people – mostly children – on Dec. 16.

A resolution unanimously adopted by an All Parties Conference in Peshawar on Dec. 17 said that with Pakistan facing increasing terrorism, it cannot afford to show any mercy to those involved in acts of militancy and killing of innocent people.“This [reinstatement of the death penalty] is a cynical reaction from the government. It masks a failure to deal with the core issue highlighted by the Peshawar attack, namely the lack of effective protection for civilians in north-west Pakistan“ – David Griffiths, Amnesty International

“I announce the lifting of the moratorium on the death penalty today … The nation is fully behind us,” Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif told the conference categorically.

Since then, four people have been hanged in Punjab province for their involvement in attacks on former President General Pervez Musharraf in December 2003 and the Pakistan Army’s General Headquarters in October 2009, but Amnesty International says that the resumption of executions after they were stopped in 2008 will not break the vicious cycle of terrorism.

“This is a cynical reaction from the government. It masks a failure to deal with the core issue highlighted by the Peshawar attack, namely the lack of effective protection for civilians in north-west Pakistan,“ Amnesty International’s Deputy Director for Asia-Pacific David Griffiths said in a statement.

The death penalty violates the right to life and we are deeply concerned at the multiple violations of international law the authorities are about to commit by going ahead with their execution plan, he added.

Amnesty International also says that many death sentences are handed down in Pakistan after trials that do not meet international fair trial standards.

The government, which is under tremendous pressure to deal with terrorism, claims that it had no choice but to reinstate executions, and religious groups and political parties have welcomed the hanging of terrorists, saying that it is fulfilment of the country’s law.

Activists of the Pakistan People’s Party light candles to pay homage to the victims of the Dec. 16 Taliban attack on the Army Public School and College in Peshawar. Credit: Ashfaq Yusufzai/IPS

Former president Gen. Pervez Musharraf said that the hanging of two terrorists on Dec. 19 was a victory for the law. “The government has finally done justice with the terrorists,” he told IPS, adding that all Taliban militants should be given same punishment because they deserve to be brought to justice. “The hanging of terrorists has fulfilled the requirement of the law of the land,” said Musharraf.

Sunni Chief Tehreek Sarwat Ijaz Qadri welcomed the hanging of terrorists and said that ultimately law had taken its course and this would go a long way towards establishing peace in the country. “It is a first step towards peace and the people have taken a sigh of relief,” he told IPS.

Jamaat-i-Islami Secretary-General Liaquat Baloch said murderers, terrorists and enemies of humanity do not deserve any concession and the law of the land calls for the execution of their death sentence after completion of trial and other legal formalities. Implementation of the death sentence will create a sense of respect and sanctity of law in society, he added.

Mian Iftikhar Husain, leader of the Awami National Party (ANP) also welcomed the hanging of terrorists and termed it a victory of the people. “The government should hang all terrorists without a distinction of bad and good Taliban,” he said, adding that the ANP believes in non-violence and is staunchly opposed to terrorism.

Muttahida Quami Movement (MQM) leader Farooq Sattar said that terrorists deserve no mercy because they are killers of humanity. “The people welcome their hanging as these terrorists are responsible for creating lawlessness,” he said, pointing out that the MQM has always been at the forefront in condemning terrorists and will support any move aimed at eliminating terrorism.

Pakistan has 8000 condemned prisoners who have been awaiting the death penalty since 2008. Seventeen of them, mostly terrorists, will be executed in the next seven days.

Three convicted terrorists from the extremist group Lashkar-i-Jhangvi (LeJ) were handed down death sentences in 2004 and the executions were scheduled for Aug. 20, 21 and 22, 2013, but were deferred at the last moment.

Attaullah Khan was given the death sentence in six cases by an anti-terrorism court in Karachi on Jul. 6, 2004, while Mohammad Azam received the death sentence in four cases from the same court on Aug. 21. Another militant, Jalal Shah, was given the death sentence for related offences.

However, the executions were not carried out due to fear of the Taliban who had warned the government that there would be severe repercussions if it went ahead with execution of its men.

Meanwhile, Griffiths of Amnesty International warned that “the sheer number of people whose lives are at risk and the current atmosphere in Pakistan makes the situation even more alarming. The government must immediately halt any plans to carry out further executions and reinstate a moratorium on the death penalty.”

(Edited by Phil Harris)

Over 2,000 paraplegic women have received treatment and training at the Paraplegic Centre of Peshawar, in northern Pakistan, enabling them to earn a living despite being confined to a wheelchair. Credit: Ashfaq Yusufzai/IPS

By Ashfaq Yusufzai
PESHAWAR, Pakistan , Nov 24 2014 (IPS)

When a stray bullet fired by Taliban militants became lodged in her spine last August, 22-year-old Shakira Bibi gave up all hopes of ever leading a normal life.

Though her family rushed her to the Hayatabad Medical Complex in Peshawar, capital city of Pakistan’s northern-most Khyber Pakhtunkhwa (KP) province, doctors told the young girl that she would be forever bed-ridden.

Bibi fell into a deep depression, convinced that her family would cast her aside due to her disability. Worse, she feared that she would not be able to care for her daughter, particularly since her husband had succumbed to tuberculosis in 2012, making her the sole breadwinner for her family.

“All credit goes to the Paraplegic Centre of Peshawar (PPC), which enabled me to become a working man. Otherwise, my family would have starved to death." -- 40-year-old Muhammad Shahid, a victim of spinal damage
In the end, however, all her worries were for naught.

Today Bibi, a resident of the war-torn North Waziristan Agency, part of Pakistan’s Federally Administered Tribal Areas (FATA), is a successful seamstress and embroiderer, and is skillfully managing the affairs of her small family.

She says it is all thanks to the Paraplegic Centre of Peshawar (PPC), the only one of its kind in Pakistan, where she is currently undergoing intensive physiotherapy. Already Bibi is showing signs of recovery, but this is not the only thing that is making her happy.

“Her real joy is her craft, which she learned here at the Centre,” Bibi’s mother, Zar Lakhta, tells IPS. “We are no longer concerned about her future.”

According to PPC’s chief executive officer, Syed Muhammad Ilyas, the majority of those who suffer injury to their spinal cords remain immobile for life, unable to work and fated to be a burden on loved ones.

“Breaking a bone or two is one thing,” Ilyas tells IPS. “Breaking one’s back or neck is another story altogether.

“Unlike any other bone in our body, the spine, or back bone, not only keeps our body straight and tall, it also protects the delicate nervous tissue called the spinal cord, which serves as a link between our body and the brain,” he asserts.

If this link is severed, a person can literally become a prisoner in their own body, losing bowel and bladder control, as well as the use of their legs. The physical aspect of such an injury alone is enough to plunge a patient into the deepest despair; but there is yet another tragic twist to the story.

“Believe it or not about 80 percent of our patients are the only bread winners of their respective families,” Ilyas explains, “while more then 90 percent live below the poverty line [of less than two dollars a day].”

As a result, finding employment for paraplegics is just as vital as offering physical therapy that might help them regain the use of their lower bodies.

“This is why we have employed experts who teach tailoring, computer sills, dress-making, glass painting and embroidery to our patients,” Ilyas says.

Most families travel between 100 and 400 km to reach the Centre, but their efforts are always rewarded. In addition to skills training, the PPC offers individual and group counseling sessions, all part of a holistic treatment programme aimed at helping patients find dignity and self-worth, to be able to function on their own after being discharged from the PPC.

This has certainly been the case for 40-year-old Muhammad Shahid, who suffered a backbone injury in the Swat district of the Khyber Pakhtunkhwa province back in 2008.

“I was sent to the PPC, after surgery in a government-run hospital, where I learnt embroidery,” he tells IPS. “Now I am working in my home and earn about 300 dollars a month, which I use to educate and feed my two sons and daughter.”

“All credit goes to the PPC, which enabled me to become a working man. Otherwise, my family would have starved to death,” he tells IPS over the phone from his hometown in the Swat Valley.

The PPC was established in 1979 by the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) to provide free treatment to those wounded in the 1979-1989 Soviet War in Afghanistan. Later, the KP government took control of the facility, opening it up to locals in the tribal areas.

The Centre has been a godsend for the thousands who have sustained injuries in crossfire between militants and government forces, who since 2001 have been battling for control of Pakistan’s mountainous regions that border Afghanistan.

Director-general of health services for Khyber Pakhtunkhwa, Dr. Waheed Burki, says more than 40,000 people, including 5,000 security personnel and 3,500 civilians, have been killed since 2005 alone. A further 10,000 have been injured.

Burki says about 90 percent of those who frequent the PPC were injured in war-related incidents.

But Amirzeb Khan, a physiotherapist at the Centre, says that the patients are not all victims of violence. Some have sustained injuries from road traffic accidents and small firearms, while others suffered spinal cord damage as a result of falls from rooftops, trees and electricity poles.

“The majority of the patients are between 20 and 30 years old, which means they fall into the ‘most productive’ age-group,” Khan tells IPS.

Many of these young people come to the Centre fearing the worst; yet almost all leave as productive members of society, armed with the skills necessary to make a living despite being confined to a wheelchair.

Those with minor injuries have even learned how to walk again.

“About 3,000 of our patients are now prospering,” Khan adds. “Of these, roughly 2,000 are women.”

In a country where the average annual income is 1,250 dollars, according to government data, the cost of treating spinal injuries is far greater than most families can afford. In places like the United States and Europe, experts tell IPS, rehabilitating such a patient could run up a bill touching a million dollars.

By offering their services for free, and developing low-cost technologies and equipment, the PPC has closed a yawning health divide in a vastly unequal country, at least for paraplegics.

An administrator named Ziaur Rehman tells IPS that plans are afoot to turn the PPC into a ‘Centre of Excellence’ for patients with spinal cord injuries from all over the country and the region over the next five years.

The hope is to create a multiplier effect, whereby those who receive training here will take their newly acquired skills and pass them on to their respective communities.

A living example of this is 24-year-old Shaheen Begum, who now runs her own embroidery centre in the Hangu district of KP. Immobilised by a back injury in 2011, she underwent rigorous physical therapy at the Centre, while also learning computer skills and fabric painting.

“Now I am imparting these skills to women in my neighbourhood and my children are in good schools,” she tells IPS happily.

Edited by Kanya D’Almeida

Sikhs in northern Pakistan are fleeing the Federally Administered Tribal Areas (FATA), where threats, intimidation and attacks are making life impossible for the religious minority. Credit: Ashfaq Yusufzai/IPS

By Ashfaq Yusufzai
PESHAWAR, Pakistan , Nov 20 2014 (IPS)

Balwan Singh, an 84-year-old shopkeeper living in Pakistan’s northern Khyber Pakhtunkhwa province, is well past retirement age, but any illusions he may have had about living out his golden years in peace and security have long since been dashed.

The elderly man is a member of Pakistan’s 40,000-member Sikh community, which has a long history in this South Asian nation of 182 million people.

“The constitution limits the political rights of Pakistan’s non-Muslims." -- Javid Shah, a Lahore-based lawyer
Though constituting only a tiny minority, Sikhs feel a strong pull towards the country, believed to be the birthplace of Guru Nanak, the founder of Sikhism.

Sikhs have lived on the Afghan-Pakistan border among Pashto-speaking tribes since the 17^th century, but in the last decade the Federally Administered Tribal Areas (FATA) – once a cradle of safety for Sikhs fleeing religious persecution – have become a hostile, violent, and sometimes deadly place for the religious community.

For many, the situation now is a veritable return to the dark ages of religious persecution.

Today, Balwan is just one of many Sikhs who have abandoned their homes and businesses in FATA and taken refuge in the neighbouring Khyber Pakhtunkhwa (KP) province.

“We are extremely concerned over the safety of our belongings, including properties back home,” Balwan, who now runs a grocery store in KP’s capital, Peshawar, tells IPS.

Balwan is registered here as an Internally Displaced Person (IDP), along with 200,000 others who have left FATA in waves since militant groups began exerting their control over the region in 2001.

Calling Sikhs ‘infidels’, the Taliban and other armed groups set off a wave of hostility towards the community. Shops have been destroyed and several people have been kidnapped. Others have been threatened and forced to pay a tax levied on “non-Muslims” by Islamic groups in the area.

According to police records, eight Sikhs have been killed in the past year and a half alone. When Balwan arrived here in Peshawar, he was one of just 5,000 people seeking safety.

“We want to go back,” he explains, “but the threats from militants hamper our plans.”

Karan Singh, another Sikh originally hailing from Khyber Agency, one of seven agencies that comprise FATA, says that requests to the government to assist with their safe return have fallen on deaf ears.

“Maybe the government doesn’t grant us permission to go back because it doesn’t want to enrage the Taliban,” speculates Karan, also an IDP now living in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa.

The 51-year-old, who now runs a medical store in Peshawar, is worried about the slow pace of business. “We earned a good amount from the sale of medicines in Khyber Agency, but we have exhausted all our cash since being displaced.”

Indeed, many Sikhs were business owners, contributing greatly to the economy of northern Pakistan.

Now, hundreds of shops lie abandoned, slowly accumulating a layer of dust and grime from neglect, and scores of Sikhs are reliant on government aid. The average family needs about 500 dollars a month to survive, a far greater sum than the 200-dollar assistance package that currently comes their way.

The situation took a turn for the worse in June of this year, when a government-sponsored offensive in North Waziristan Agency, aimed at rooting out militants once and for all from their stronghold, forced scores of people to flee their homes amidst bombs and shelling.

Some 500 Sikh families were among those escaping to Peshawar. Now, they are living in makeshift camps, unable to earn a living, access medical supplies and facilities or send their children to school.

Male children in particular are vulnerable, easily identifiable by their traditional headdress.

While some families are being moved out and resettled, Sikhs say they are consistently overlooked.

“We have been visiting registration points established by the government to facilitate our repatriation, to no avail,” Karan laments.

Dr. Nazir S Bhatti, president of the Pakistan Christian Congress, says, “About 65 Christian families, 15 Hindu families and 20 Sikh families are yet to be registered at the checkpoint after leaving North Waziristan Agency, which has deprived them of [the chance to access] relief assistance.”

Such discrimination, experts say, is not conducive to a pluralistic society.

According to Muhammad Rafiq, a professor with the history department at the University of Peshawar, Sikhs are the largest religious minority in Pakistan after Hindus and Christians.

Thus the current situation bodes badly for “religious harmony and peaceful coexistence in the country”, he tells IPS.

He says that minorities have to contend not only with the Taliban but also Islamic fundamentalists who regard any non-Muslim as a threat to their religion. By this same logic, Hindus and Christians have faced similar problems: threats, evictions and, sometimes, violent intimidation.

Kidnapping for ransom has also emerged as a major issue, with some 10 Sikhs being kidnapped in the past year alone, prompting many to pack up their belongings and head for cities like Peshawar, says Lahore-based Sardar Bishon Singh, former president of the Pakistan Sikh Gurdwara Parbandhak Committee (PSGPC).

Bishon’s shop in Lahore, capital of the Punjab province, was looted in September 2013, but he says the police didn’t even register his report.

“Thieves broke into my shop and took away 80,000 dollars [about eight million rupees] but the Lahore police were reluctant to register a case,” Bishon recalls.

He says the police are afraid, “because the Taliban are involved and the police cannot take action against them [Taliban].”

Some experts say the problem runs deeper than religious persecution in Pakistan’s troubled tribal areas, extending into the very roots of Pakistan’s political system.

“The constitution limits the political rights of Pakistan’s non-Muslims,” says Javid Shah, a Lahore-based lawyer.

“Only Muslims are allowed to become the president or the prime minister. Only Muslims are allowed to serve as judges in the Federal Shariat Court, which has the power to strike down any law deemed un-Islamic.”

He believes these clauses in the constitution have “emboldened” the people of Pakistan to treat minorities as second-class citizens.

This mindset was visible on Aug. 6 when a Sikh trader, Jagmohan Singh, was killed and two others injured in an attack on a marketplace in Peshawar.

“We have no enmity with anyone,” says Pram Singh, who sustained injuries in the attack. “This is all just part of the Taliban’s campaign to eliminate us.”

He alleges that the gunmen, who arrived on a motorbike, did not face any resistance when they rode in to the marketplace. “Police arrived after the gunmen had left the scene,” he adds.

On Mar. 14 this year, two Sikhs were killed in the Charsadda district in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa but their killers are yet to be identified, Pram says.

While eyewitness accounts point to negligence on the part of the authorities, some believe that the government is doing its best to address the situation.

Sardar Sooran Singh, a lawmaker in KP, insists that the government is providing security to members of the Sikh community, who he says enjoy equal rights as Muslims citizens.

Peshawar Police Chief Najibullah Khan tells IPS that they have been patrolling markets in the city where Sikh-owned shops might be vulnerable to attack.

“We have also suggested that they avoid venturing out at night, and inform the police about any threat [to their safety],” he says.

Edited by Kanya D’Almeida

More and more tents are coming up to house displaced people in northern Pakistan. Credit: Ashfaq Yusufzai/IPS

By Ashfaq Yusufzai
PESHAWAR, Pakistan , Nov 6 2014 (IPS)

Residents of the Khyber Agency, one of seven administrative districts that comprise northern Pakistan’s Federally Administered Tribal Areas (FATA), are in the worst possible predicament: either course of action they choose now, they say, could result in death.

As Pakistan’s military offensive against the Tehreek-e-Taliban Pakistan (TTP) expands slowly from North Waziristan Agency to the restive Khyber Province, civilians must decide whether or not to defy a Taliban ban on travel.

If they stay, they risk becoming victims of army shelling and gunfire, aimed at rooting out terrorists from the Afghan-Pakistan border regions where they have operated with impunity since 2001. If residents attempt to flee, they will face the wrath of militants who rely on the civilian population to provide cover against a wholesale military bombardment of the region.

“The people fear the Taliban because they destroyed the houses of 50 tribesmen who left the area last year. We are stuck between them and the army. The only way is to migrate to safer places.” -- Zahir Afridi, a former resident of the Tirah locality in Khyber Agency
At the end of October, members of the TTP issued a warning to local residents that their houses would be blown up if they followed the army’s evacuation orders, which came in the form of pamphlets dropped from helicopters ahead of a three-day deadline to militants to lay down their arms or face a major offensive.

Literally caught between the devil and the deep blue sea, some residents have chosen to heed the Taliban’s threat, while others are risking life and limb to escape the embattled zone and find refuge in safer areas.

Zahir Afridi, a resident of the Tirah locality in Khyber Agency, recently escaped to the Jallozai refugee camp located 35 km southeast of FATA’s capital, Peshawar, by pretending that his two-year-old daughter had fallen ill and was in urgent need of medical treatment.

“The Taliban allowed us [to leave] on the condition that we would return after Begum [his daughter]’s recovery, but actually we cannot return for fear of our lives,” he tells IPS.

“The people fear the Taliban because they destroyed the houses of 50 tribesmen who left the area last year,” he says. “We are stuck between them and the army. The only way is to migrate to safer places.”

Experts say that civilians act as a kind of “human shield” for the militants, who would otherwise be isolated and vulnerable to attack. Dr. Khadim Hussain, chairman of the Bacha Khan Trust Education Foundation (BKTEF), an organisation that promotes peace, democracy and human rights, tells IPS that keeping civilians trapped in a war zone is a “well established and successful strategy employed by militants” to escape the full force of military campaigns.

An authority on terrorism in Pakistan, Hussain is unsurprised by the Taliban’s migration ban in the Jamrud and Bara localities. He says militants employ “various tactics” to maintain their position of power, including “kidnapping for ransom, extortions, and killings.”

The use of human shields is nothing new either.

Shams Rehman, a political analyst at the Government College, Peshawar, tells IPS that militants successfully used local residents as human shields in the Swat district of the northern Khyber Pakhtunkhwa (KP) province, which they ruled from 2007 to 2009.

“Though the army started operations in Swat in 2009 [they] couldn’t get the desired results because the Taliban was using residents” to protect them from an all-out offensive, he says.

It was not until early 2010 that the government decided to issue a mass evacuation alert to the population – warning them to take shelter in camps in the nearby Mardan district – before launching a major military operation.

In this way, “the government isolated the militants and defeated them,” Rehman explains.

It is this same model that the government is now following in North Waziristan, where, over the last 10 years, members of the TPP and Al Qaeda have established a robust base from which to plan and execute their activities.

For many years the government could do nothing about the presence of this unofficial ‘headquarters’ due to the large civilian population living amongst the terrorists.

Mushtaq Khan of the Jamaat-e-Islami party says that now, with nearly 18.9 percent of land in North Waziristan cleared of all residents, the government is doing what it could not for the past decade: inundate the area with firepower in a bid to completely flush out all the militants.

The campaign, which began on Jun. 15, has so far resulted in the displacement of over 500,000 residents, who are now living in camps in the neighbouring KP province.

The journey to the sprawling ‘tent cities’ erected for IDPs in towns like Bannu was not easy. Some died along the way, after trudging for hours in a summer heat wave that at times touched 45 degrees Celsius.

Many were separated from their families en route. Those who made it safely to Bannu might have been considered the lucky ones – that is, until it became evident that the living conditions in the camps were abysmal, with food shortages, a near-total absence of clean water sources and sanitation facilities, and limited medical personnel and supplies.

Now, residents of the Khyber Agency are facing a similar plight.

Muhammad Shad, who recently reached Peshawar along with his 12-member family, claims he and his clan walked for five hours before finding a vehicle that would carry them safely to the capital.

“The situation was extremely bad; all of us felt threatened,” the 55-year-old daily wage labourer tells IPS from the Jallozai camp, where he now lives, adding that scores of his friends and neighbours are still being “held hostage” by the Taliban.

He explains that threats from militants are not empty words. To prove this, the TTP set 20 houses in Khyber Agency ablaze on Aug. 14; they belonged to former militants who had handed their weapons over to the army.

Despite these terror tactics, residents continue to flee en masse – with some 95,000 making it out of Khyber Agency – willing to risk retribution for a chance to live free of the militants’ control.

“Life under the Taliban was not easy,” says Shahabuddin Khan, a resident of South Waziristan Agency, who migrated to Peshawar two months ago along with his family, after having faced violence, threats and intimidation by militants.

He considers himself lucky to have escaped, explaining, “Those who can afford to rent houses outside their native areas [do so], while the poor ones are destined to stay back and face a life of perpetual uncertainty.”

In total, over a million people have been uprooted from their homes in northern Pakistan, forced to flee from one province to another in search of a normal life.

Military spokesman Asim Bajwa tells IPS that “decisive action” on the part of the government has enabled them to clear certain areas of militants, thus allowing people to live peacefully.

“The people should cooperate with the army so they [the militants] are defeated forever,” he asserts.

Edited by Kanya D’Almeida

A Pakistani child receives a dose of the oral polio vaccine (OPV). According to the WHO, Pakistan is responsible for 80 percent of polio cases worldwide. Credit: Ashfaq Yusufzai/IPS

By IPS Correspondents
KATHMANDU/PESHAWAR, Pakistan, Oct 24 2014 (IPS)

The goal is an ambitious one – to deliver a polio-free world by 2018. Towards this end, the multi-sector Global Polio Eradication Initiative (GPEI) is bringing out the big guns, sparing no expense to ensure that “every last child” is immunised against the crippling disease.

Home to 1.8 billion people, roughly a quarter of the world’s population, Southeast Asia was declared polio-free earlier this year, its 11 countries – Bangladesh, Bhutan, Democratic People’s Republic of Korea, India, Indonesia, Maldives, Myanmar, Nepal, Sri Lanka, Thailand and Timor-Leste – joining the ranks of those nations that live without the polio burden.

United in the goal of eradicating polio, an infectious viral disease that invades the nervous system and can result in paralysis within hours, governments across the region worked hand in hand with community workers, NGOs and advocates to make the dream a reality.

“Pakistan has the highest [number of polio cases] among the three endemic countries worldwide." -- Elias Durry, emergency coordinator for polio eradication with the WHO in Pakistan
According to GPEI, immunisation drives reached some 7.5 billion children over the course of 17 years, not just in city centres but also in remote rural outposts. During that time, the region witnessed some 189 nationwide campaigns that delivered over 13 billion doses of the oral polio vaccine (OPV).

High-performing countries like Sri Lanka, the Maldives and Bhutan eradicated polio a decade-and-a-half ago while India, once considered a stubborn hotbed for the disease, clocked its last case in January 2011, thus bringing about the much-awaited regional ‘polio-free’ tag.

But further north, dark clouds in the shapes of Afghanistan and Pakistan blight Asia’s happy tale. Together with Nigeria, these two nations are blocking global efforts to mark 2018 as polio’s last year on this planet.

Celebrating success from Nepal to the Philippines

For countries like Nepal, home to 27 million people, the prevalence of polio in other nations in the Asian region threatens its hard-won gains in stamping out the disease.

“There’s always fear that polio may see a resurgence as the disease hasn’t been eradicated everywhere,” said Shyam Raj Upreti, chief of the immunisation section of Nepal’s child health division (CDH).

Anxious to hold on to the coveted polio-free status, Nepal recently introduced the inactivated injectable polio vaccine (IPV) into its routine immunisation programme, the first country in South Asia to do so.

“While the oral polio vaccine has been the primary tool in polio eradication efforts, new evidence shows that adding one dose of IPV – given to children of 14 weeks by intramuscular injection – to the OPV [schedule], will maximise immunity to poliovirus,” Upreti explained.

He credits his country’s success to a high degree of social acceptance of the importance of child health in overall national development. “Female health volunteers play a key role in making the community understand why immunisation is important,” he said, adding that these volunteers provide services to some of the poorest segments of the population.

Between 1984 and 2011, Nepal’s immunisation coverage more than doubled from 44 to 90 percent. Ashish KC, child health specialist at UNICEF-Nepal, said that immunisation programmes didn’t stop even during the ‘people’s war’, a brutal conflict between the Maoists and the Nepali state that lasted a decade and killed 13,000 people.

“We understood that [we] needed a multi-sector approach, so service delivery was decentralised, and access was made easier,” KC told IPS. “Immunisation went beyond health, it became a part of [our] development plans.”

Such a mindset is also apparent in the Philippines, where the government recently decided to include the IPV into its national health plan, making it the largest developing country to do so.

According to a press release by Sanofi Pasteur, the multinational pharmaceutical company working closely with the Philippine government on its eradication initiatives, many Filipinos feel deeply about polio, having had a prime minister who was a survivor of the disease and lived with lifelong disabilities as a result.

“What’s striking about the Philippines is how strong a partnership there is around vaccinations,” said Mike Watson, vice president of vaccinations and advocacy at Sanofi Pasteur, referring to the unprecedented support shown by government officials and civil society at an event in Manila earlier this month that ended with several children receiving the IPV, the first of some two million children who will now be vaccinated every year.

“Getting the vaccine out to distribution centres on the smaller islands obviously poses a logistical challenge, but the Philippines has proven it’s really good at that,” Watson told IPS.

He added that strong networks of community health workers have enabled the Philippines to move into the “endgame”, the last stage in global eradication efforts that will require the 120 countries that aren’t currently using the IPV to introduce it by the end of 2016, representing one of the biggest and fastest vaccine introductions in history.

Over 5,700 km away from the Philippines, however, lives the lingering threat of polio, with thousands of children still at risk, and hundreds suffering from the debilitating results of the disease.

Pakistan’s polio troubles

This past June, the World Health Organisation (WHO) recommended a travel ban on all those leaving Pakistan without proof of immunisation, in a bid to prevent the spread of polio outside the country’s troubled borders.

But absent swift political action, travel bans alone will not staunch the epidemic.

A 2012 Taliban-imposed ban on the OPV has effectively prevented over 800,000 children from being immunised in two years, health officials told IPS.

In 2014 alone, Pakistan has recorded 206 cases of paralysis due to wild poliovirus, the most savage strain of the disease. Last week, 19 new cases of this strain were brought to the attention of the authorities.

“Pakistan has the highest [number of cases] among the three endemic countries worldwide,” Elias Durry, emergency coordinator for polio eradication with the WHO in Pakistan, told IPS.

The situation is most severe in the northern tribal areas, where the Taliban has used both violence and terror to spread the message that OPV is a ploy by Western governments to sterilise the Muslim population.

“The militancy-racked Federally Administered Tribal Areas (FATA) accounts for 138 cases, while the adjacent Khyber Pakhtunkhwa (KP) province has 43 cases,” Pervez Kamal, director of health in FATA, told IPS.

North Waziristan Agency has registered 69 cases, while the Khyber Agency and South Waziristan Agency are struggling with 49 and 17 cases respectively.

In a tragic development, an 18-month-old baby girl named Shakira Bibi has become the latest in a long line of polio victims. Her father, Shoiab Shah, told IPS that “Taliban militants” were responsible for depriving his daughter of the OPV.

In an unexpected twist, a military offensive aimed at breaking the Taliban’s hold over northern Pakistan has given health officials rare access to hundreds of thousands of residents in the tribal areas.

With close to a million people from North Waziristan Agency fleeing airstrikes and taking refuge in the neighbouring KP province, community health workers have been delivering the vaccine to residents of displacement camps in cities like Bannu and Lakki Marwat.

Still, this is only a tiny step towards overcoming the crisis.

Altaf Bosan, head of Pakistan’s national vaccination programme, said 34 million children under the age of five are in need of the vaccine but in 2014 alone “about 500,000 children missed their doses due to refusals by parents to [defy] the Taliban’s ban.”

The government has now elicited support from religious leaders to convince parents to submit to the OPV programme.

“Islamic scholars from Pakistan, Saudi Arabia, Egypt [and] Afghanistan have issued a fatwa [edict], reminding parents that it is their Islamic duty to protect their children against disease,” Maulana Israr ul Haq, one of the signatories, told IPS.

According to the WHO, Pakistan is responsible for nearly 80 percent of polio cases reported globally, posing a massive threat to worldwide eradication efforts.

Excerpt:

The Taliban have damaged over a thousand schools in northern Pakistan since crossing over from Afghanistan in 2001, preventing scores of children, especially young girls, from receiving an education. Credit: Ashfaq Yusufzai/IPS

By Ashfaq Yusufzai
PESHAWAR, Pakistan, Oct 12 2014 (IPS)

For girls living in northern Pakistan’s sprawling tribal regions, the struggle for education began long before that fateful day when members of the Taliban shot a 15-year-old schoolgirl in the head, and will undoubtedly continue for many years to come.

Still, the news that Malala Yousafzai – a former resident of the Swat Valley in the northern Khyber Pakhtunkhwa (KP) province – had received the Nobel Peace Prize on Oct. 10, brought renewed vigor to those battling the Taliban’s hard-line attitude towards girls’ education.

Residents here told IPS that when she survived an attempt on her life on Oct. 9, 2012, Yousafzai became an icon, a representative of the state of terror that has become a part of everyday existence here.

“We appeal to Malala to spend funds to promote education in FATA." -- Yasmeen Bibi, a 13-year-old refugee who is not attending school.
By awarding her the world’s most prestigious peace prize, experts say, the Nobel Committee is sending a strong message to all who remain trapped in zones where the sanctity of education has been subordinated to the perils of conflict.

Muhammad Shafique, a professor at the University of Peshawar, the KP province’s capital, told IPS that Yousafzai’s prize has turned a “spotlight onto the importance of education.”

“It will be a motivational force for parents to send their daughters back to school,” he added.

Since militants began crossing the Afghan-Pakistan border in 2001, following the U.S. invasion and occupation of Afghanistan, residents of these mountainous areas have endured the full force of extremist campaigns to impose strict Islamic rule over the population.

At the height of the Taliban’s rule over the Swat Valley, between 2007 and 2009, approximately 224 schools were destroyed, stripping over 100,000 children of a decent education.

It was during this period that Yousafzai, just 12 years old at the time, began recording the hardships she faced as a young girl in search of an education, writing regular reports for the Urdu service of the BBC from her hometown of Swat.

Schoolgirls in Peshawar pray for Malala Yousafzai. Credit: Ashfaq Yusufzai/IPS

Her struggle found echo all around northern Pakistan, where hundreds of thousands of young people like herself were living in constant fear of reprisals for daring to pursue their studies.

In the Federally Administered Tribal Areas (FATA), for instance, Taliban edicts banning secular schools as a “ploy” by the West to undermine Islam have kept 50 percent of school aged children out of the classroom.

Since the decade beginning in 2004, the Taliban have damaged some 750 schools, 422 of them dedicated exclusively to girls, according to a source within the FATA directorate for education.

FATA has one of the lowest enrollment rates in the country, with just 33 percent of school-aged children receiving an education. In total, about 518,000 children in FATA are sitting idle, as per government records.

The dropout rate touched 73 percent between 2007 and 2013, as families fled from one district to another to escape the Taliban. The latest wave of displacement has seen close to one million people from North Waziristan Agency evacuating their homes since Jun. 15 and taking refuge in Bannu, an ancient city in KP.

Schoolgirls at a demonstration in Peshawar in support of Malala Yousafzai. Credit: Ashfaq Yusufzai/IPS.

A rapid assessment report released by the United Nations in August found that 98.7 percent of displaced girls and 97.9 percent of the boys were not receiving any kind of education in the camps.

Already nursing a miserable primary school enrollment rate of 37 percent, Bannu is on the verge of a full-blown educational crisis, with 80 percent of its school buildings now occupied by refugees.

Thus the honour bestowed upon Yousafzai has touched many thousands of people, and breathed new life into the campaign for the right to education. Since October 2012, enrollment in the Swat Valley has increased by two percent, according to Swat Education Officer Maskeen Khan.

“Now, we are expecting a huge boost after the award,” the official told IPS.

Naila Ahmed, a 10^th-grader originally hailing from North Waziristan Agency who now lives in a refugee camp in Bannu, feels her generation has been “unlucky”, forced to grow up without an education.

The situation is so dire that she views her displacement as a “blessing in disguise”, since the move to Bannu has enabled her to enroll in a private school for the first time in many years.

She is one of the fortunate ones; few parents in this militancy-infested region can afford the cost of private schooling, she says.

Thirteen-year-old Yasmeen Bibi is one of those whose parents cannot shoulder the bill for an education. “We hope that the government will make arrangements for our education,” she told IPS from her makeshift home in a refugee camp in Bannu, adding, “We appeal to Malala to spend funds to promote education in FATA.”

Her words hearken back to the time immediately following Yousafzai’s decision to flee the country, when many from the Swat Valley and its surrounding provinces felt let down by the rising star, left behind to face the Taliban’s wrath stemming from the teenager’s newfound fame.

Some agreed with the Taliban’s claim that she had “abandoned Islam for secularism” by accepting an offer to live and study in the UK.

In the last few days, however, any ill feeling towards Yousafzai, now the world’s youngest Nobel laureate, appears to have dissipated, replaced by a kind of collective euphoria at the global acknowledgement of her courage.

All throughout Swat, girls’ schools distributed free sweets on Oct. 10 and celebrated in the streets.

Yousafzai’s former classmate, Mushatari Bibi, explained that the news has been like “a ray of hope” to other girls, who take a big risk each time they leave their homes to head to school.

Some even say that the Nobel Prize, and the hope it has instilled in the population, represents a challenge to the very foundations of the Taliban’s power, since more people now feel compelled to stand up to the militants that have plagued the lives of millions for well over a decade.

Edited by Kanya D’Almeida

A doctor examines a woman in an IDP camp in Bannu, a city in Pakistan’s northern Khyber Pakhtunkhwa (KP) province, where over 40,000 pregnant women are at risk due to a lack of maternal health services. Credit: Ashfaq Yusufzai/IPS

By Ashfaq Yusufzai
PESHAWAR, Pakistan, Oct 8 2014 (IPS)

Imagine traveling for almost an entire day in the blistering sun, carrying all your possessions with you. Imagine fleeing in the middle of the night as airstrikes reduce your village to rubble. Imagine arriving in a makeshift refugee camp where there is no running water, no bathrooms and hardly any food. Now imagine making that journey as a pregnant woman.

In northern Pakistan, a military campaign aimed at ridding the Federally Administered Tribal Areas (FATA) of Taliban militants has led to a humanitarian crisis for hundreds of thousands of civilians.

When the army began conducting air raids on the 11,585-square-km North Waziristan Agency on Jun. 15, residents were forced to flee – most of them on foot – to the neighbouring Khyber Pakhtunkhwa (KP) province, where they have now taken refuge in sprawling IDP camps.

“In Pakistan, 350 women die per 100,000 live births from pregnancy-related complications. In FATA, the situation is extremely bad, with 500 women dying for every 100,000 live births. The situation warrants urgent attention.” -- Fayyaz Ali, a public health expert in Pakistan's Khyber Pakhtunkhwa province
Officials estimate the number of displaced at just over 580,000, of which half are women.

In the ancient city of Bannu, which now houses the largest number of refugees, some 40,000 pregnant women are facing up to their ultimate fear: a lack of hospitals, doctors and basic medical supplies.

For 30-year-old Tajdara Bibi, a mother of three, these fears became a reality in June, when she had to flee her home in North Waziristan and trudge the 55 km to KP along with her fellow villagers.

The journey wore her down, and by the time she was admitted to the maternity hospital in Bannu, the doctors were too late: she delivered a stillborn baby a few hours later.

Muhammad Sarwar, who attended to Bibi, told IPS that an extreme shortage of female doctors has put pregnant women on a knife’s edge.

“At least four women died of pregnancy-related complications on the way to Bannu, while 20 others had miscarriages at the hospital,” he said.

“We have only four female doctors in the whole district, who are required to provide treatment to all the women,” he added.

With thousands of women now clamouring for care, the province’s limited healthcare services are falling short, sometimes with disastrous consequences.

Gul Rehman, a 44-year-old shopkeeper, is still reeling from a recent tragedy. He told IPS his wife went into labour prematurely during the arduous journey to Bannu.

“We could not find transport so we had to walk. When we finally reached the hospital, we were kept waiting… there were no doctors readily available.

“After 10 hours, they finally operated on my wife – but the baby was already dead,” he explained. Aside from the trauma of losing their child, the couple is also struggling to cope with the wife’s health condition, which has deteriorated rapidly after the stillbirth.

According to Fawad Khan, Health Cluster and Emergency Coordinator for the World Health Organisation (WHO) in Pakistan, existing health facilities are not equipped to deal with the wave of arrivals from North Waziristan.

The WHO is currently assisting the KP health department to “prevent unnecessary deaths”, the official told IPS, adding that 73 percent of displaced women and children in Bannu are in “desperate need of care.”

Some 30 percent of pregnant women among IDPs are at risk of delivery-related complications, a situation that could easily be addressed by upgrading existing facilities. There is also an urgent need for gynaecologists to provide antenatal and postnatal care, he stated.

Twelve health centres have already been established to tackle malnutrition among women and children in the camps. Without proper nourishment, officials fear pregnant women will face additional complications during birth, and low birth-weight among newborns could create additional challenges for health workers.

“Four percent of the total displaced women are pregnant and need immediate attention,” Abdul Waheed, KP’s director-general of health, told IPS, adding that some 20 basic health units have already been strengthened to take on those most in need.

Still, the crisis has reached proportions that even seasoned officials are scarcely able to comprehend. Waheed explained that Bannu has never before had to host such a large population of homeless people, and is struggling to cope.

Prior to the recent wave of refugees from North Waziristan, the KP province had already welcomed over 1.5 million people from FATA. This latest influx brings the number of displaced since 2001 to over 2.5 million.

“We are sending doctors from teaching hospitals in Peshawar [capital of KP] on a rotational basis to meet the situation,” he asserted.

The United Nations Children’s Fund (UNICEF) and the U.N. Population Fund (UNFPA) have joined the WHO in supporting the Pakistan government’s push for improved health services. Some 65 doctors from the Pakistan Institute of Medical Sciences (PIMS) in Islamabad have joined NGO workers in Bannu to provide urgent care.

Part of the problem, according to Ali Ahmed, KP’s focal person for IDPs, is that few medical professionals are keen to take up posts in the militancy-infested region. For years the Taliban have operated with impunity in these federal areas, hiding out along the mountainous border with Afghanistan that stretches for some 2,400 km.

The military’s counter-insurgency programme was launched in a bid to finally wipe out extremist elements that fled Afghanistan during the U.S. invasion in 2001 and took root along the porous border.

But until the region regains a sense of normalcy, it will be hard to lure professionals here, officials say. Despite being offered lucrative packages, doctors have refused to take up posts, even temporarily, in Bannu.

The government is looking to fill this gap by appointing 10 doctors, including five female doctors, to the newly renovated Women and Children Hospital, which remains understaffed and ill equipped.

The city’s other two category ‘B’ hospitals, the Khalifa Gul Nawaz Teaching Hospital (KGTH) and the District Headquarters Teaching Hospital, suffer similar setbacks, while the arrival of the IDPs has more than tripled the number of patients demanding services, Ahmed said.

Three rural health centres in close proximity to the refugee camps, as well as 34 basic health units, have received an injection of funds and resources, and 20 assistant nutritional officers have been deployed to cater to the needs of 41 percent of affected children, he told IPS.

But far greater efforts will be needed to tackle the crisis, which is compounding an already bleak picture of maternal health in Pakistan.

Fayyaz Ali, a public health expert here in KP, told IPS, “In Pakistan, 350 women die per 100,000 live births from pregnancy-related complications. In FATA, the situation is extremely bad, with 500 dying for every 100,000 live births. The situation warrants urgent attention.”

Edited by Kanya D’Almeida

By Emile Nakhleh
WASHINGTON, Sep 5 2014 (IPS)

Millions of words have been written about the rise, conquests, and savagery of the Islamic State (ISIS) in Iraq and Syria, and Boko Haram in Nigeria. Both have declared an “Islamic State” in their areas although Boko Haram has not claimed the mantle of a successor to the Prophet Muhammad as ISIS leader Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi has done in Greater Syria. The two groups are the latest in a string of terrorist organisations in the past two decades.

American and other Western media have raised the ISIS terror threat to unprecedented levels, and the press have extolled the group’s military prowess, financial acumen, and command of social media propaganda.

The beheadings of U.S. journalists James Foley and Steven Sotloff are the latest horrible manifestations of the group’s brutality. ISIS is now seen as a serious threat to the U.S. and British homelands and new measures are being taken in both countries to combat the dangers it poses.

The Sunni regimes’ benign neglect of the rapidly spreading Sunni violent ideology and its divisive sectarian policies has allowed ISIS to spread. This does not augur well for its survival. The Saudi brand of intolerant, narrow-minded Wahhabi-Salafi Sunni Islam is not much different from al-Baghdadi’s modern day caliphate.
Although surprised at the rapid growth of ISIS, Western policymakers should not be bewildered by the rise of yet another terrorist group. In the past 20 years, the world has witnessed the emergence of al-Qaeda as a global jihadist group, Jama’a Islamiyya in Southeast Asia, al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula, al-Qaeda in North Africa, al-Qaeda in Iraq, Boko Haram in Nigeria, the Islamic Fighting Group in Libya, al-Shabab in Somalia, the Taliban in Afghanistan and Pakistan, and a few more localised bands of terrorists across the greater Middle East.

In every case, Western countries described the groups as a “gathering threat” and mobilised friendly countries, including autocratic rulers, against the perceived dangers.

Policy and intelligence analysts spent untold hours and travelled thousands of miles tracking the movements of these groups and their leaders, and writing briefs and reports about the nature of the threat.

Most of these analytic reports have focused on “current” issues. Only a meagre effort has been expended on long-term strategic analysis of the context of radical and terrorist groups and their root causes. It’s as if we are doomed to fight yesterday’s wars with no time to look into the context that gives rise to these groups. President Barack Obama’s recent statement that his administration had no strategy to fight the ISIS menace in Syria epitomises this analytical paralysis.

Regional problem

ISIS is primarily a threat to Arab countries, not to the United States and other Western countries. The more Sunni Arab states remain silent in the face of this pseudo-religious vulgarity, the sooner terrorism would be at their door. Arab society under the yoke of extremist Islamism must be addressed from within the region, not by American airstrikes or Western military intervention.

If the Islamic State expands beyond the Levant, it will plunge Arab societies into militancy, bloody conflicts, and depravity devoid of free thought, creativity, and economic prosperity.

The threat that Western societies could potentially face would come not from ISIS but from the hundreds of their young citizens who joined ISIS. These young jihadists, who hail from the U.S., Canada, Britain, France, Italy, Australia, and other countries, have joined ISIS either as “walk-in” volunteers or as a result of ISIS’ sophisticated social media recruiting campaign. They left their seemingly comfortable lives for all kinds of political, psychological, religious, or ideological reasons to fight for a “cause” they are not terribly clear about.

If they survive the fighting, they would return home having been brainwashed against the perceived decadence of Western Christian societies and the imagined “purity” of their faith. Their imported emotional contradictions would drive some of them to relive their jihadist experience in the Levant by committing acts of violence and terrorism against their fellow citizens.

The so-called caliphate, whether in the Levant or West Africa, is a backward perversion of Sunni Islam that opposes modernity in all of its manifestation – interfaith dialogue, women’s education, minority rights, tolerance, and reason. A self-proclaimed successor to the Prophet Muhammad, al-Baghdadi’s Islamic State in the Syrian Desert is violating every principle of Muhammad’s Islamic State in Medina in the 7th century.

Some Bush-era neo-cons and Republican hawks in the Senate who are clamouring for U.S. military intervention in Syria seem to have forgotten the lessons they should have learned from their disastrous invasion of Iraq over a decade ago. Military action cannot save a society when it’s regressing on a warped trajectory of the Divine – ISIS’ proclaimed goal.

As long as Arab governments are repressive, illegitimate, sectarian, and incompetent, they will be unable to halt the ISIS offensive. In fact, many of these regimes have themselves to blame for the appeal of ISIS. They have cynically exploited religious sectarianism to stay in power.

If it is true that a young man is not radicalised and does not become a terrorist overnight and if it is true that a terrorist group does not develop in a vacuum, then it’s time to stand back and take a strategic look at the factors that drive ISIS and similar Sunni terrorist groups in the Arab world.

1. Intolerant Doctrine. Some Arab Sunni regimes, including Saudi Arabia and Bahrain, continue to preach an intolerant religious Sunni ideology that denigrates not only other faiths but also Shia Islam. Christian religious places and educational institutions cannot operate freely in places like Saudi Arabia.

Much of the anger that has characterised the Islamisation of Muslim societies in recent years has been directed against these institutions. This type of harassment is felt across the region, from Palestine to Saudi Arabia. What makes this reality especially sad is the fact that Christian institutions have been at the forefront of Arab educational renaissance since the 19th century.

The Sunni regimes’ benign neglect of the rapidly spreading Sunni violent ideology and its divisive sectarian policies has allowed ISIS to spread. This does not augur well for its survival. The Saudi brand of intolerant, narrow-minded Wahhabi-Salafi Sunni Islam is not much different from al-Baghdadi’s modern day caliphate.

The Saudis oppose ISIS because of its perceived threat to the regime, but they cannot disavow their theological worldview, which rejects Shia Islam, Christianity, and Judaism and denies women their rightful place as equal citizens. The rapidly spreading ISIS doctrine is making it a bit late for the Saudis and other Sunni regimes to act. Nor will the West be able to bail them out.

2. Arab Autocracy. Sunni Arab dictators have refused their peoples freedoms of speech, organisation, political activism, innovation, and creativity. The three “deficits” of freedom, education, and women’s rights that Arab intellectuals identified in the Arab Human Development Report in 2002 are yet to be meaningfully addressed.

Politics is controlled by the powerful with no room for reason or compromise among the different stakeholders and centres of power in society. Those on top commit all kinds of dastardly deeds to stay in power, and those at the bottom are doomed to remain stuck in the proverbial “bottom one billion.” Regimes do not allow the meaningful separation of powers, checks and balances, and independent judiciaries to properly function. Control, fear, and co-optation remain the preferred tools of Arab dictators.

3. Hypocrisy of “Values.” President Obama has often invoked American values of liberty, human rights, equality, justice, and fairness as the underpinnings of U.S. democracy and of “what makes us who we are.” Yet when Arab publics see Washington steadfastly supporting Arab dictators, who are the antithesis of American “values,” the United States comes across as hypocritical and untrustworthy.

The debates within Islam over whether the faith should return to its 7th century roots, as ISIS’s ruthlessness has shown, or leap into the 21st century modern world, as Turkey has demonstrated, should primarily concern Muslims. They and they alone are the ones to resolve this quandary. ISIS is a violent symptom of this tug of war between intolerant traditionalists and forward-looking reformists. The West should stay out of the debate.

Western security and law enforcement agencies should focus on their own citizens and track their would-be jihadists, but Western military aircraft should stay out of the skies of the Levant.

Edited by Ronald Joshua

The views expressed in this article are those of the author and do not necessarily represent the views of, and should not be attributed to, IPS-Inter Press Service.

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