INSIDER
Freedom, defined as “the power or right to speak, act, and change as one wants without hindrance or restraint,” remained elusive for many in Afghanistan during years of conflict. For three Afghan women now living in the United States, freedom signifies a fresh start.
Thousands of people have attended the funeral of a Taliban government minister killed in an Islamic State suicide bombing the previous day.
Secretary of State Antony Blinken has appeared before the House Foreign Affairs Committee to face questions for the last time regarding some of the darkest moments of Joe Biden’s presidency: the U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan.
A suicide bombing in the Afghan capital has killed the Taliban refugee minister and two others in the most brazen attack on a member of the Taliban inner circle since they returned to power three years ago.
The lower house of Russia's parliament has given initial approval to a long-discussed bill that would clear the way for Moscow to remove the Taliban’s designation as a terrorist group.
The European Union has condemned the Taliban for violating human rights and women’s access to education after media reports that the Taliban’s leader has ordered private and public institutions to stop providing medical courses for women and girls in Afghanistan.
Officials say Pakistan has detected one more polio case in the restive northwest bordering Afghanistan, raising the country’s tally of the infectious disease to 50 cases this year.
Afghanistan’s first delegation at United Nations climate talks since the Taliban’s return to power in 2021 has arrived in Baku, Azerbaijan.
A Taliban government minister says Afghan women are forbidden from praying loudly or reciting the Quran in front of other women.
Pakistan has begun a nationwide vaccination campaign to protect 45 million children from polio after a surge in new cases.
Polio cases are rising ahead of a new vaccination campaign in Pakistan, where violence targeting health workers and the police protecting them has hampered years of efforts toward making the country polio-free.
A Taliban official says official media have stopped showing images of living beings in some Afghan provinces to comply with morality laws.
A U.S. Marine whose adoption of an Afghan war orphan has spurred a yearslong legal battle and raised alarms at the highest levels of government will stay in the Marine Corps.
House Republicans have voted to condemn President Joe Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris for the disastrous U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan.
Republicans on the House Foreign Affairs Committee have advanced contempt of Congress charges against Secretary of State Antony Blinken following a contentious back-and-forth with the Cabinet secretary over an appearance to testify on the chaotic U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan.
The Taliban say gunmen have killed 14 people in a Shiite-majority area in central Afghanistan.
Australia's Defense Minister Richard Marles says several serving and former military commanders have been stripped of medals over allegations of war crimes committed during the Afghanistan war.
House Speaker Mike Johnson has presented Congress’ highest honor — the Congressional Gold Medal — to 13 U.S. service members who were killed during the disastrous withdrawal from Afghanistan.
House Republicans have released a scathing report on their investigation into the U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan.
House Republicans have issued a subpoena for testimony from Secretary of State Antony Blinken as they finish their investigation into the chaotic U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan.
Vice President Kamala Harris says former President Donald Trump “disrespected sacred ground” in his recent appearance at Arlington National Cemetery, where the Republican nominee took and distributed images despite a federal prohibition on campaign activity on the grounds.
Three years ago, the U.S. military withdrew from Afghanistan when the last American plane departed Kabul.
A top UN official is warning that the Taliban’s new vice and virtue laws provide a distressing vision for Afghanistan’s future.
The Philippines has agreed to temporarily host a U.S. immigrant visa processing center for a limited number of Afghan nationals aspiring to resettle in America.
The Taliban have deliberately deprived at least 1.4 million Afghan girls of schooling through bans.
Taekwondo Paralympian Zakia Khudadadi says she is competing in the name of women in Afghanistan who have gradually been stripped of their rights over the past three years.
Relatives of some of the 13 American service members killed during the chaotic withdrawal from Afghanistan appeared on stage at the Republican National Convention.
Officials in Pakistan say security forces have killed all ten militants who attacked a military facility in the northwest, leaving eight soldiers dead.
Taliban officials say heavy rains in eastern Afghanistan have killed at least 40 people and injured nearly 350 others.
A Taliban official says that a storm that brought heavy rainfall to eastern Afghanistan has killed at least 35 people.
Afghan sprinter Kimia Yousofi is preparing to compete at her third Olympics after being selected for the Paris Games from her training base in Australia.
Thousands of jubilant Afghans are celebrating their country’s most iconic sporting moment after their men's national cricket team reached the Twenty20 World Cup semifinals for the first time.
Afghanistan kept its Twenty20 World Cup semifinal hopes alive by stunning previously unbeaten Australia by 21 runs in a thrilling encounter.
The Supreme Court has rejected an appeal by a Canadian-born former Guantanamo detainee who was seeking to wipe away his war crimes convictions, including for killing a U.S. soldier in Afghanistan.
Taliban officials say flash floods from heavy seasonal rains have killed at least 68 people in Afghanistan, adding the death toll was based on preliminary reports.
Survivors of the devastating floods that struck northern Afghanistan last week are still searching for their missing loved ones and burying their dead.
Victims of the devastating floods in northern Afghanistan are burying the dead and looking for the loved ones still missing.
The U.N. food agency says more than 300 Afghans have died in flash floods that also destroyed more than 1,000 houses in the northern province of Baghlan.
A Taliban official says that flash floods from seasonal rains in Baghlan province in northern Afghanistan have killed at least 50 people.
Police say suspected militants bombed a girls school in a former stronghold of the Pakistani Taliban in the country’s volatile northwest, badly damaging the structure.
The Taliban are warning journalists and experts against working with Afghanistan International TV.
Lawyers for an American believed to be held by the Taliban for nearly two years are asking a United Nations human rights investigator to intervene, citing what they call cruel and inhumane treatment.
A new review says the suicide bombing at the Kabul airport that killed U.S. troops and Afghans in August 2021 was not preventable, and the “bald man in black” spotted by U.S. service members the morning of the attack was not the bomber.
Experts say messages by two influential Taliban leaders in Afghanistan this week showed tensions between hardliners and more moderate elements who want to scrap harsher policies and attract more outside support.
The former top military chief Gen. Mark Milley and former head of U.S. Central Command testified before Congress Tuesday on policy failures by the Biden administration to adequately plan for or direct an evacuation in time to avoid the chaotic final days of the U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan.
Senators from both major political parties are urging congressional leaders to ensure that more visas are made available to Afghans who worked alongside U.S. troops in America’s longest war.
The top U.S. general for the Middle East tells Congress that exploding regional violence fueled by Iran presents the most likely threat to the U.S. homeland.
The Taliban have publicly executed a man convicted of murder in northern Afghanistan as thousands watched at a sports stadium.
Afghanistan’s ruling Taliban have carried out a double public execution at a stadium in the southeast of the country.
The massive $118 billion Senate border bill not only includes once-in-a-decade border security legislation and wartime aid to Israel and Ukraine, but also offers a chance for the U.S. to keep its promise to Afghans who worked alongside U.S. soldiers in America’s longest war.
UNICEF says almost 100,000 children in Afghanistan direly need support, three months after earthquakes devastated the west of the country.
Survivors of a massive earthquake that struck Afghanistan's west on Oct. 7 say they're struggling to rebuild their lives, three months after the disaster.
A Taliban official says a minibus has exploded in a mostly Shiite Muslim neighborhood in Afghanistan’s capital of Kabul, killing at least two civilians and wounding 14 others.
A senior Taliban official says security forces in Afghanistan killed a number of Tajik and Pakistani nationals and arrested scores others involved in attacks against religious clerics, the public, and mosques in Afghanistan.
Afghan schoolgirls are weeping as they finish sixth grade, knowing their education is over.
A U.N. report says Taliban officials are sending Afghan women to prison to protect them from gender-based violence.
Myanmar, already wracked by a brutal civil war, has regained the unenviable title of world’s biggest opium producer.
A rights group says the Taliban’s education policies are harming boys as well as girls in Afghanistan.
Nobel Peace Prize laureate Malala Yousafzai says the world needs to recognize and confront the Taliban's “gender apartheid” against women and girls in Afghanistan.
Rights group Afghan Witness says online abuse and hate speech targeting politically active Afghan women significantly increased since the Taliban took over the country in August 2021.
About 1.3 million Afghans are expected to return to their country of origin from Pakistan, the U.N. health agency warned, weeks after authorities began expelling foreigners living in the country illegally.
Officials from Afghanistan’s ruling Taliban welcomed the resumption of FlyDubai flights to Kabul international airport.
Analysts say that Pakistan’s crackdown on undocumented migrants risks radicalizing Afghans who have been forced out of the country.
Pakistan’s prime minister has sought to reassure at least 25,000 Afghans waiting in Pakistan for resettlement in the United States that they won’t be deported as part of his government’s widely criticized crackdown on undocumented migrants in the country.
Aid groups say Afghans fleeing a deportation drive in Pakistan lack shelter, food, and warmth once they cross the border.
A report from the U.N. drugs agency says Afghan farmers lost more than $1 billion of cash income from opium sales after the Taliban banned poppy cultivation.
Major international aid agencies are warning of chaotic and desperate scenes among Afghans who have returned from Pakistan, where security forces are detaining and deporting undocumented or unregistered foreigners.
Pakistani security forces have launched sweeps to arrest and deport Afghans who are in the country illegally, sending dozens back after a government-set deadline for them to leave expired.
Afghans are piling into trucks and buses and leaving Pakistan to avoid arrest and deportation.
A nonprofit organization in Afghanistan says the Taliban have freed an activist who campaigned for the education of girls.
A group of former U.S. diplomats and representatives of resettlement organizations has asked Pakistan not to deport thousands of Afghans who have been waiting for U.S. visas under an American program that relocates at-risk Afghan refugees fleeing Taliban rule.
The United Nations’ World Food Program is appealing for $19 million to provide emergency assistance to tens of thousands of people affected by a series of devastating earthquakes and aftershocks that has rocked western Afghanistan.
At a time when Americans are deeply divided along party lines, a new poll shows agreement on at least one issue: The United States' two-decade-long war in Afghanistan was not worth fighting.
Another 6.3 magnitude earthquake has struck part of western Afghanistan where thousands of people died and entire villages were flattened by devastating quakes a week earlier.
U.N. officials say more than 90% of the people killed by a 6.3-magnitude earthquake in western Afghanistan were women and children.
An independent inquiry has opened in the U.K. to examine claims that British special forces murdered dozens of Afghan men during counterinsurgency operations in Afghanistan a decade ago.
Men dug through rubble with their bare hands and shovels in western Afghanistan on Sunday in desperate attempts to pull victims from the wreckage of earthquakes that killed at least 2,000 people.
A Taliban government spokesperson says the death toll from strong earthquakes that shook western Afghanistan has jumped to more than 2,000.
Amnesty International is urging Pakistan to maintain its support for Afghan refugees by enabling them to live with dignity and be free from the fear of deportation to Afghanistan where they face persecution by the Taliban.
Pakistan has launched its second nationwide anti-polio campaign of the year Monday in an effort to inoculate 44 million children under the age of 5.
A Senate hearing on the nomination of the official to be the Pentagon’s top policy adviser was dominated by Republicans expressing their frustrations with the Biden administration’s foreign policies.
The U_N_’s most powerful body is being asked to support governments seeking to legally declare the crackdown by Afghanistan’s Taliban rulers on women and girls “gender apartheid."
In the first Asian Games since the Taliban regained control of Afghanistan, two teams of athletes are arriving in the Chinese city of Hangzhou, looking very different.
The United Nations says it has documented more than 1,600 cases of human rights violations committed by Afghanistan's Taliban authorities during arrests and detentions of people.
A joint report from three U.N. agencies says the mental health of Afghan women, who have suffered under harsh measures imposed by the Taliban since taking power two years ago, has deteriorated across the country.
The Pentagon’s Central Command has ordered interviews of roughly two dozen more service members who were at the Kabul airport when suicide bombers attacked during U.S. forces’ chaotic Afghanistan withdrawal, as criticism persists that the deadly assault could have been stopped.
The United Nations has released $125 million from its emergency relief fund to boost underfunded humanitarian operations in 14 countries around the world, saying needs are skyrocketing.
The U.N. food agency says it is forced to drop another 2 million hungry people from food assistance in Afghanistan in September due to a massive funding shortfall.
More than 840,000 Afghans and their families who applied for a resettlement program aimed at people who helped the U.S. war effort in Afghanistan are still there waiting.
Two years after the Taliban takeover of Afghanistan, the United States has begun easing rules that could allow commercial airlines to fly over the country in routes that cuts time and fuel consumption for East-West travel.
The U.N. special envoy for global education says the International Criminal Court should prosecute Taliban leaders for crimes against humanity for denying education and employment to Afghan girls and women.
