Hazara Nation

ANC News

More than 2,000 mainly ethnic Hazaras, many of them livestock farmers, marched through the Afghan capital Kabul Sunday to demand authorities stop nomads from using their grazing lands.

The demonstrators, some of whom travelled to the city from poverty-hit central Afghanistan, alleged that ethnic Pashtun nomads, called Kuchi, are using their pastures for animals to graze on.

"We're demonstrating to demand our rights. We want the government to stop Kuchis grabbing our pastures," a protester named Ahmad Kamal Natiqi told AFP as others shouted "Down with Kuchi."

The Kuchi, estimated to number 2.4 million, move around Afghanistan in search of pastures for the animals on which they depend.

The nomads - leading caravans of camels, sheep and donkeys - are due to arrive in central Afghanistan in coming weeks, moving up from the warmer south in a centuries-old migration.

They are mainly from Pashtun tribes that dominate southern and eastern Afghanistan and sometimes clash with other ethnic groups as they travel.

Armed clashes between the Kuchis and settled Hazaras reportedly left several people dead in central Wardak province last year.

There are fears that low levels of rain and snow over winter will mean drought this year, which would put extra pressure on Afghanistan's farmers. Read the full story

3,28, 2008
Julie Crawford
Surrey Now

The Kite Runner

Directed by Marc Forster. Starring Khalid Abdalla, Homayoun Ershadi, Zekeria Ebrahimi, Ahmad Khan Mahmidzada and Shaun Toub
8 (out of 10)
What most of us know about Afghanistan has been culled from grim, minute-long sound bytes from TV news. Of course, a book and a movie can't claim to give a complete picture either, but Marc Forster's The Kite Runner, based on Khaled Hosseini's best-selling novel, does widen our view of the country.

The book is about human capacity for shocking violence, loyalty and forgiveness. Forester (Monster's Ball, Finding Neverland) remains faithful to its themes, and pushed for the decision to have the actors speak in their native tongues.

It's the 1970s in Kabul and young Amir (Zekeria Ebrahimi) lives in luxury with his widower father (Iran's Homayoun Ershadi). Amir's best friend is Hassan (Ahmad Khan Mahmidzada), the servant's son. Amir is a Pashtun but Hassan is a Hazara, which means that they are friends but they are not equals.

This inequality results in a dramatic act of violence, which breaks the boys' friendship forever. The Soviet invasion of 1979 hastens their separation, and guarantees the two lose touch for good.

Flash forward to 2000 where a grown Amir (United 93's Khalid Abdalla) gets a call from his father's close friend Rahim Khan (Shaun Toub), who insists Amir must return to Afghanistan, saying: "There is a way to be good again."

Amir returns to a brutal Afghanistan he doesn't recognize: even kite-flying, the boyhood pastime of Hassan and Amir, has been banned by the Taliban.

Fine performances by actors young and old result in a powerful emotional connection to the film, and Forster does an excellent job of creating an authentic sense of time and place. It's a moving rendering of Hosseini's work.

Special features include a commentary with the director, writer Khaled Hosseini and producer David Benioff. A Words From The Kite Runner segment features a discussion with the author, and what made the practising physician turn to writing full-time. The Images From The Kite Runner featurette focuses on the complex shooting and casting processes, and we learn of the struggles Marc Forster had in trying to make the film as authentic an experience as possible. Read the full story

AFP

Even Mother Nature was cruel on the day 15 years ago when rampaging thugs chopped off Marzia's fingers for a gold ring and shot dead her nine-year-old son when he cried out to object.

It was a bone-chillingly cold morning, she recalls, when militia loyal to Pashtun warlord Abdul Rab-Rasoul Sayyaf -- now a parliamentarian -- captured her village, west of Kabul and dominated by ethnic Hazaras.

Poverty-stricken Afshar, a complex of mudbrick houses at the foot of a barren and rocky mountain, was crushed in the orgy of murder, rape and looting.

In a post-assault attack on the village, gunmen smashed into her simple house, says the illiterate housewife in her 40s. They demanded a gold ring she was wearing.

"I couldn't take it off. One of them stepped forward with a bayonet and said 'I will take it off,' and chopped my fingers," she says, holding up a hand missing the thumb, fore and middle fingers.

Her son Samad cried out. "When he chopped my fingers, my son jumped towards me and wailed 'Oh, nanai (mother)'. Another man turned his gun and fired at him," she says, her lips quivering.

"My son died in my arms," she says, wiping away tears with the palm of her butchered hand.

The number of dead in what has become known as the Afshar Massacre is not clear: a United Nations report says 300 civilians, almost all ethnic Hazara Shiites, were killed but villagers say even more were slaughtered, some decapitated.

Hundreds of Hazara men were rounded up and corralled into forced labour -- or just disappeared. Villagers claim 1,200 men were taken away.

One was Marzia's husband, Sayed Mohammad.

Sitting near his wife in their one-room home, he says he was accused of being a combatant, beaten, and forced to dig trenches and wash dishes for his captors for six months before he was freed, half-paralysed and mentally ill.

The February 1993 Afshar campaign was one of the worst episodes of the 1992-1996 civil war that erupted when internationally supported militias that had driven out the Soviet occupiers turned on each other.

The ethnic-based factional fighting -- in which all sides are accused of atrocities, including the Hazara -- killed around 80,000 civilians in Kabul alone, according to rights groups.

An almost daily barrage of rocket and artillery fire reduced large parts of the attractive capital to rubble.

The conflict was ended when the Taliban Islamic militia took power in 1996, initially welcomed for restoring calm after the chaos. But they too brought terror before being ousted in a US-led invasion late in 2001.

"The Afshar Massacre is one of the worst brutalities of the civil war," says Horia Musadeq from the Afghanistan Independent Human Rights Commission.

"It is just one example of hundreds of incidents Afghans suffered. Hundreds of civilians were killed, women were raped and many men were captured, held and tortured," he said.

A 2005 Human Rights Watch report implicates Sayyaf -- now an ally of President Hamid Karzai -- and other figures such as Burhanduddin Rabbani, president at the time and now also in parliament.

"The Afshar campaign was marked by widespread and serious violations of international humanitarian law," it says, and calls for "justice-seeking mechanisms to sideline past abusers from political power".

Karzai in late 2006 signed a Peace, Reconciliation and Justice Action Plan that seeks to "establish accountability" -- which some fear could see a backlash from strongmen worried about having to face a judicial process.

Just weeks later the parliament voted in a bill that would give groups and factions amnesty against prosecution. Its position on individuals is vague.

Karzai admitted at a meeting in December, at which Marzia was among several victims who pleaded for justice, that this was a concern.

"There are tyrants in our land," he said. "We must move with lots of caution so as not to cause lots of noise and more human rights violations."

The United Nations has meanwhile expressed disappointment at the delays in implementing the action plan, which also provides for investigations of atrocities and memorials for those killed.

Marzia says she wants justice, even if only from "great God".

Responding to such calls is vital for Afghanistan to recover from its three decades of war and to revive the national spirit, Musadeq says.

"We can't survive as a nation unless we give justice to war victims. Can you imagine that those who have killed her or others' children sit in the parliament, live in palaces and drive Landcruisers?" she asks.

"When Sayyaf speeds past a victim in his Landcruiser, kicking up dust, think how it feels. It feels really bad." Read the full story

March,27,2008
by Mladen Rudman
Daily News

Choctaw grad is a U.S. Foreign Service officer working in Bamyan Province

New Zealanders and Americans are helping Afghans in impoverished Bamyan Province move toward safer, more comfortable lives.

David J. Jea, a 1994 Choctawhatchee High School graduate and now a U.S. State Department Foreign Service officer, is part of a New Zealand Defense Force Provincial Reconstruction Team providing everything from warm clothing to graded roads to villagers in the Hindu Kush province.

The effort is part of a countrywide push by the International Security Assistance Force to rebuild or develop Afghanistan’s infrastructure, while it trains Afghan soldiers and police to fight insurgents.

Working in Bamyan, where winters bring road-clogging snow and summers bring dust and wind, means Jea facilitates projects and serves as a messenger to the American embassy in Kabul.

“Every day is different,” he said in a recent telephone interview from Bamyan City. “Every day has its own frustrations and its own rewards.”
Implementing the Security Assistance Force’s efforts to disarm illegal groups can be frustrating.

Helping stock a girl’s high school with books or a village in Yakawlang district improve its water well are rewards.

Jea also is helping Bamyan preserve its natural heritage. For example, there’s an effort to develop land around Bamyan’s deep, blue Band-i-Amir Lake into a national park.

Bamyan is mostly populated by the Hazara ethnic group. Its people are predominantly Shiites in a country where Sunnis are the religious majority. Hazaras were persecuted and even murdered by the Taliban when they were in power.
The New Zealand Provincial Reconstruction Team is in Bamyan to prevent similar problems and expedite construction or reconstruction of schools, medical clinics and other facilities.

Jea, 31, has measured the attitude of the Hazara toward the “Kiwi” — the nickname for New Zealanders — and Yank Provincial Reconstruction Team, which operates from a headquarters in Bamyan City and three forward bases.

“Bamyan is very safe. We haven’t had a major security issue here,” Jea said. “I can see there’s a lot of gratitude and a lot of urgency.”

He said the Hazara often get frustrated because they believe their mountainous province, although stable militarily, has been ignored by the Afghan government and international donors. Villagers also wonder what will happen when the Security Assistance Force withdraws.

For those reasons, Jea keeps the big picture in mind.

“We have to be sure that the central government can keep Afghanistan functioning after the bricks and mortar have been laid,” he said.

Jea, whose parents live in Fort Walton Beach, helped prepare himself for the assignment by tapping the experience of Okaloosa County Judge and retired Army Reserve Brig. Gen. Patt Maney. Maney served as a senior advisor to the American ambassador to Afghanistan for about 17 months in 2004 and 2005.

His Afghanistan tour was cut short when he was wounded by a roadside bomb. He earned a Purple Heart.

Maney noted that Jea is the senior U.S. diplomat in Bamyan, a province with an estimated population of 500,000.

The judge said the role of Provincial Reconstruction Team is essential to success in Afghanistan. He added that Jea must walk a fine line between helping villagers help themselves and making them dependent on foreign aide.

“I think David should get credit for being willing to step out (to assist) in the manner of those Foreign Service officers who served in Vietnam,” said Maney. “There are not a lot of creature comforts or a heavy security presence (in Bamyan). … It really is a beautiful place, but it’s also a place that has virtually nothing. He really is working in an austere environment.” Read the full story

From earthtimes

Kabul - The Afghan version of "American Idol" show sparked a new round of controversy in Afghanistan, as thousands people participated in voting and millions of viewers watched it on TV, while conservative clerics condemned it as "un-Islamic."Around 300,000 people voted by text message for the two male finalists, while more than 10 million people watched the third season of "Afghan Star" show on Friday night on Tolo, the country's most popular TV channel.

Nineteen-year-old Rafi Nabzada, a Tajik from the northern province of Balkh, was declared the hottest new pop singer on Friday after the six-month show, a national contest held among some 2,000 contenders.

"Today I am very proud because I got this position by the votes of my beloved countrymen," said the boyish favourite Nabzada after being declared the winner.

Hamid Sakhizada, a 21-year-old from the Hazara ethnic minority, who trilled to Afghan traditional rhythms amid cheers and catcalls of music fans during the last competition, was gracious in defeat.

"Whether are from Bamyan or Kandahar, we are brothers," he said.

Both finalists received 8,000 dollars cash plus return-air-tickets to Dubai and India and contracts for recording deals.

Third place went to Pashtun contestant, Lema Sahar, a 20-year-old girl and the first female contender to finish third since the show was launched in 2005.

Sahar is from southern Kandahar province, the most conservative region in the country and the birthplace of Taliban militants, whose government was toppled in a US-led military invasion in late 2001.

During the six-year reign of the ultra-Islamic regime, women were forced to wear a head-to-toe veil and were not allowed to appear in public without male members of their families accompanying them.

The regime that claimed to have applied the "pure Islamic rules" also banned any type of visual broadcastings and music, the offenders of which were subjected to punishment that included whipping and imprisonment.

"I am proud to have reached to this position," Sahar told a press conference a day before the final show.

"I have been threatened, including several phone calls during the night," the shy-looking Sahar said. "But I don't lose my confidence, because I reached to the third position by the votes of my people and I know I will succeed in my decision."

Sahar was not the only girl in the show. Setara Hussainzada, a Tajik female contestant from western Herat province, who came eighth, was forced to flee from her home due to death threats after she was seen on the stage dancing during her performance last month.

Afghanistan had numerous singers and musicians including women, who fled the country en masse after communist-backed government collapsed in 1992 and was succeeded by the Taliban regime which came to power after 10 years of struggle against Soviet troops.

Six years after the Taliban regime's ousting, and amid international efforts to introduce democracy, conservative clerics condemn the TV show as "immoral." Hardliners have demanded that the show be banned, mainly objecting to the performances by women.

The national council of religious scholars sent a statement to President Hamid Karzai in early January demanding a ban of several "immoral and un-Islamic" TV programmes, singling out the Afghan Star.

The clerics charged that the show was "designed to encourage immorality" and was against the Afghan "custom and tradition."

However, show host Daud Sideqi rejected the Islamic conservatives' claims. "Music has always been part of our culture. Those, who oppose the show, they only do it because they have their own political purposes behind their opposition.

"If we look to the nearest Islamic countries around us like Pakistan, Iran, and Tajikistan, they all have singers, including women singers," Sideqi said. "We know after many difficult years, these things take time until the people accept them as the realities of our society."

A senior Afghan government official, who requested anonymity, meanwhile said, "The government has no objection against programmes like Afghan Star show.

"But we are worried that the extremist groups would use this as tool to show to the people in rural areas that we are encouraging these kinds of Westernized programmes, which they deem it as un- Islamic," he added.
Read the full story

By JASON STRAZIUSO
AP

In a first for post-Taliban Afghanistan, a woman from the conservative Pashtun belt is one of the top three contenders in the country's version of "American Idol."

Conservative detractors decry the fact an Afghan woman has found success singing on television, while others — younger Afghans — say the show is helping women progress. Under the Taliban regime that was overthrown in 2001, women were not even allowed out of their homes unaccompanied, while music and television were banned.

With her hair tucked under a wispy blue headscarf, Lima Sahar brushes off her critics, saying there can be no progress for women without upsetting the status quo."No pain, no gain," she told reporters Wednesday in Kabul.

Sahar beat out 2,000 other hopefuls who auditioned for the third season of "Afghan Star." On Friday, the six-month-long TV show will name the final two contestants, based on votes sent in from viewers via text message. The format is the same as "American Idol," although the shows are not connected.

Afghanistan's conservative cleric's council has protested to President Hamid Karzai over "Afghan Star" and Indian dramas shown on Tolo TV, the country's most popular station.

"In the situation that we have in Afghanistan right now, we don't need a woman singer. We don't need `Afghan Star.' We are in need of a good economy, good education," said Ali Ahmad Jebra-ali, a member of the council. "If Lima Sahar wins 'Afghan Star,' how can she help the poor? This is not the way to help the Afghan people."

Haji Baran Khan, a farmer from Kandahar — the Taliban's spiritual birthplace and the city Sahar now calls home — said a Pashtun girl singing on TV goes against the country's culture.

"She is also affecting the minds of other good girls. She should stop singing," said Khan, whose three sons and two daughters told him about Sahar's success.

Sahar says she's just the latest in a long tradition of Afghan artists — albeit in a more modern form.

"Artists are historical and cultural in our country. Artists have been around a long time," Sahar told a news conference this week. "I came by the vote of the people of Afghanistan."

Several hundred supporters lined up to get the three finalists' autographs at an event this week in Kabul. One of the fans, Shohabidin Mohammad, called "Afghan Star" part of a democratic revival for Afghanistan.

"Women's and men's rights are equal. There are no problems," said Mohammad, dressed in a bright colored shirt, brown hipster hat and a gold necklace that dangles a tiny Koran.

The three finalists represent each of Afghanistan's three main ethnic groups: Pashtuns, Hazaras and Tajiks. Mohammad, who is ethnic Hazara, said he doesn't believe ethnicity should play a role in the vote. But, he acknowledged somewhat sheepishly, he will vote for the Hazara finalist.

Standing beside Mohammad was Abass Nariwal, a fan of Sahar's. Both are ethnic Pashtuns. Another of her fans, Nematullah Khan, is a 25-year-old student at Kandahar University.

"She took a bold step. She has a lot of courage," Khan said. "Whether she wins or not, she's a good example for our youth."

"Afghan Star" has become one of Afghanistan's most popular TV shows, gathering large crowds around TVs in restaurants and homes.

The singers perform in front of a studio audience and three judges, and past winners have been given recording deals. A woman finished fifth in the show's first season, but no female has risen as high as Sahar. The other two finalists are men.

The winner this year will take home around US$5,000 (euro3,230) — a king's ransom in Afghanistan.

Daud Sadiqi, the show's host, said "Afghan Star" has been a runaway hit that shows the world the "peaceful face of Afghanistan."

Another finalist, Hameed Sakhizada, a 21-year-old Hazara with a mop of black hair, said that before the show he was "an ordinary person going to work."

"But now I feel like I'm the representative of a nation," Sakhizada said.

The other finalist — and perhaps the odds-on favorite judging by the number of fans seeking his autograph this week — is Rafi Naabzada, a 19-year-old ethnic Tajik wearing a white leather jacket, who calls the show "a symbol of unity."

"'Afghan Star' belongs to all Afghans," he said. "My idea is not to get votes from just my tribe. I think that attitude is now finished — he's a Tajik or he's a Pashtun," Naabzada said. "Of course we still have special support from those ethnic groups."

That is what bothers Mohammad Qasim Akhger, an independent political analyst. He says the most talented singers aren't necessarily the ones who get voted through. He singled out Sahar as having little talent.

"Now there is one Pashtun, one Hazara and one Tajik, so now what will happen is that nobody will care about their talents, they will just vote for their tribe," he said. "If Lima Sahar is not talented enough, it doesn't matter for them (Pashtuns). They are just voting because she is Pashtun."

Even gender loyalties don't seem to be a factor. When the crush of autograph seekers surrounded the singers this week, all the women made a beeline for Naabzada. One fan, Shabana, who goes by one name, was dressed in a pink shawl and bright pink lipstick. She said she was supporting Naabzada over Sahar because he was the better singer.

Would she support a woman? "Yes," Shabana said. "But on condition that she has talent." Read the full story

By JONATHON HOWE
stuff.

Afghanistan's Bamiyan City is home to over 60,000 people, the Bamiyan budhas and from April a contingent of Linton soldiers.

Colonel Darryl Tracy will command the 138 New Zealand soldiers going to Afghanistan next month.

Concerns have been raised about the rising Taliban threat in the war-torn country, but Col Tracy said the Taliban were not active in Bamiyan.

"As of yet we haven't seen the Taliban or insurgents operating in the Bamiyan province. But there are certainly criminally motivated groups operating."

But the potential for the Taliban or al-Qaeda to enter the province was always there, he said.

"We are not out there hunting Taliban, that's not our mandate. Our mandate is to assist the Bamiyan local authorities across all spectrums. Part of that mandate does have security."That's just one part of the New Zealand Defence Force's continual monitoring of that situation, to make sure that we can appropriately meet some of those threats, if they eventuated up in Bamiyan," Col Tracy said.

He would not comment on the coalition's handling of Afghanistan, but did confirm the rise of insurgent activity there.

"That activity is predominantly in the southern provinces, which is not an area where we operate."

Bamiyan's Hazara populations were well-disposed towards the New Zealand soldiers, he said.

"The Bamiyan province is fairly homogenous in being Hazara. They have been one of the more exploited cultures of the Afghanistan wider population, so they are very much enjoying the security. They want their children to have education, they want to have medical facilities, they want to be able to work and raise their children in relative peace."

Col Tracy will be leaving behind his wife Tracy and their three sons Sean, Luke and Michael.

"It's never an easy thing to separate from your wife and children for a period of time."

The troops will deploy from the Ohakea Air Force base on April 9. Read the full story

March 05, 2008
By Catherine Masters
nzherald.co.nz

The talk has been of massacres and destruction, of broken roads and poverty, of fear and polluted water.

Dr Habiba Sarabi has remained a calm and charming figure, steadily responding to an array of questions similar to those asked by other journalists, questions she has patiently answered all week in her slightly broken English, during her visit to New Zealand.
In a room on the 21st floor of an Auckland hotel, with its sweeping views of the Auckland Harbour Bridge and sunny sparkling harbour, Dr Sarabi has suddenly had too She has only skimmed the surface. Her story is that of a woman who has faced down an adversity New Zealanders can only imagine with horror.
Dr Habiba Sarabi was the first woman
to govern a province in Afghanistan.

Dr Sarabi was raised outside of Bamyan in a time when, although many people did not want their girls to be educated, they were not killed for doing so.

She studied at Kabul University and became a doctor. She lived in Kabul when the Taleban took over and, as an educated woman, found herself in grave danger.

She took her three children, one of them a girl, and fled to Pakistan. Her daughter was 10 at the time.

The family had already lived through the Soviet invasion; they knew the noise of rockets "lunging" from one side of the city to the other.

But when the Taleban came, there was no other choice but to leave. Dr Sarabi returned, though, to set up an underground school for girls. She entered the country under cover of the burqa, a garment which represented oppression but allowed her freedom.

Wearing the burqa was still a "very bad experience". Dr Sarabi wears glasses but the burqa with the mesh covering the eyes made that impossible, so she was forever tripping over.much.

A comment about the tendency of Aucklanders to moan about their traffic woes and harbour bridge results in Dr Sarabi agreeing how incredibly lucky New Zealanders are.

"God bless you and save you and I wish you'll be lucky for [a] long time," she said, then turned away.Soon, it was apparent she was fighting tears. This ground-breaking politician was overcome with emotion. She got up and left the room but soon returned and brushed away apologies."No, no, no, it's okay," said the doctor who made history by becoming the first woman to govern a province in war-torn Afghanistan.

Later, she would say of the brief interlude when her country's plight became overwhelming: "Of course, we have many bad experiences ... sometimes we can be emotional."

This relentless fronting to the media is necessary because, although lives have improved in Dr Sarabi's province of Bamyan, the long way to go is daunting.

Without the presence of New Zealand troops, Bamyan would not be the relatively safe province it is, she says.

Dr Sarabi was in New Zealand for two reasons.

One was to offer a heartfelt "thank you" for sending our troops to protect and help rebuild the province.

The other was not exactly to beg, although she may not disagree this is what she is doing, but to put "fuel on the fire" of our country's positive relationship with Bamyan. What the province desperately needs is still more help, she says.

Bamyan is in the central highlands region of Afghanistan, a remote and isolated area with dizzying changes in temperature. It is also mountainous and beautiful.

The name is not known for this so much because Bamyan is where the Taleban went to such painstaking lengths to blow up giant, ancient Buddhas carved into the cliffs.

It is home to the Hazara people, mainly Shia Muslims, who were despised with a vengeance by the Taleban.

Dr Sarabi told of the suffering of the Bamyan people. "Taleban thought that Hazara people are not Muslim so they torture. There were several massacres in Bamyan, so they demolished all the houses and burnt houses, so very, very bad time, the people suffered a lot."
Yet the garment allowed her to work in her underground school "and sometimes I could bring the journalist under the burqa. Believe me, I did such a thing".

Classes would be held in people's houses but they would keep moving around to throw the Taleban off the trail.

Still, some of the teachers were caught. She recalls one woman who was stopped by the Taleban, whose husband was put in prison for allowing his wife to do such a job.

Though she could have stayed in safety in Pakistan, Dr Sarabi has always felt a sense of responsibility to help women, to "rescue" the lives of impoverished and oppressed people.

Rescuing lives is what still motivates her now she is governor of Bamyan.

"Sure, that's why I'm there. I'm always for getting more money, getting more aid for Bamyan, and this is because of Bamyan people, you know.

"In my country, the people who are in the high-ranked position, they could save a lot of property for themselves but I do not have anything, because this is my responsibility, to work for the people, to rescue them."

These days, while girls' schools burn in other parts of the country, in Bamyan it is safe to send your daughters to school.

The top priority now is road reconstruction and clean water, she says.

She is trying to figure out how to grow the economy of a dry, hilly area without great soil, an area which depends on agriculture and livestock.

Tourism is an option, and she says New Zealand tourists would be welcome in Bamyan. The tricky part is that to get there they have to go through Kabul.

The governor's adviser, Amir Foladi, reiterates the importance of the presence of the New Zealand military, who create a safe environment for reconstruction work.

He explains that, though the area is relatively safe, there are still warlords and power struggles. There are still criminals and poppy smugglers.

There are few trained soldiers and the new police force has very limited capabilities and equipment. And there are still some - a very few, he stresses - people who want to support the Taleban."That's why when we say Bamyan is the safest place, it doesn't mean there is no need for a military."

The international community is putting its priority on security in the south, "so sometimes it is discouraging people, that 'why we are not receiving any more attention or enough attention according to our needs [they think] okay, let's fire some rockets somewhere, maybe there will be attention"'.

Everyone laughs but this is the reality.

The very real fear is what may happen to Bamyan when the New Zealand troops leave. Read the full story

UN News Centre 27 February 2008

Many Afghan refugees living in neighbouring Iran and Pakistan are reluctant to return to their homeland due to the deteriorating security situation there and difficulty in sustaining their new lives, a senior official with the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) said today.

Erika Feller, UNHCR's top protection official, has been meeting with refugees and the authorities in Iran, which is currently hosting some 920,000 Afghans who have fled violence in their country over the course of the past 20 years.“What has struck me during this visit is the variety of situations Afghan refugees are living in and the fact that the lack of security in Afghanistan is topmost in influencing their decisions to return home,” Ms. Feller said, as she wrapped up her five-day mission.During the peak of the refugee returns in 2004, there were up to 5,000 people going back to Afghanistan every day; that was the same number of returnees in all of 2007.

“So, we are at a turning point and have to reflect on the way forward with the Iranian authorities for those remaining here,” noted Ms. Feller.

The refugees Ms. Feller met with cited lack of security, employment, education, health clinics and access to land in Afghanistan as some of the main concerns associated with returning home. Female Afghan refugees, who can work informally and move around freely in Iran, fear they would face restrictions in Afghanistan.

“Investing in education, the skills and capacity of the refugees is really important so they can make a real contribution back home in Afghanistan to rebuilding their country, or – if they go to a new country – in restarting their lives,” she stated.

The Assistant High Commissioner for Protection lauded Iran's “very solid track record” in providing assistance to Afghan refugees, who generally have access to basic health care and education and have not been forced to return to the war-torn nation. “I heard many times how refugees feel part of this culture with a number being born here and knowing no other life,” she said.

Ms. Feller discussed the situation of the refugees and their concerns with the Government's Bureau for Aliens and Foreign Immigration Affairs. She hopes to conduct similar visits to Afghanistan and Pakistan in the months ahead. Read the full story

By Tahir Qadiry
IPS

Violence against women perpetrated by a member of the woman’s family or someone known to her appears endemic in Afghanistan.

Few women are able to protect themselves against such violence, often by close relations, or speak out against their abusers.

The United Nations agency for women, UNIFEM, said a recent survey revealed that out of 1,327 incidents of violence against women in Afghanistan, 30.7 percent were related to physical violence; 30.1 percent to psychological violence; 25.2 percent to sexual violence; and 14 percent a combination of the three.

According to the survey, 82 percent of incidents reported were committed by family members, nine percent by those in the community and 1.7 by state authorities.

Afghanistan Independent Human Rights Commission (AIHRC) registered 1,199 cases of sexual and gender-based violence in 2006.

Qazi Sayed Mohammad Sami, head of AIHRC in Afghanistan’s nine northern provinces said: "Very recently, we have had two cases of sexual abuse." The first case was in Sar-e Pol Province, where a grandfather sexually abused his grand daughter. Sami said the AIHRC assessed the case and informed the concerned officials who detained the man. But he was not punished to the extent he deserved to be, he added.

The second case involved a 21-year-old woman from Balkh’s Dehdadi district, 15-km from the capital city Mazar-e-Sharif, who has accused her father of rape. "He was detained and investigation is still under way. I should say that such cases are rare in northern Afghanistan," Sami said.

IPS met with Shogofa, who has dared to speak out against her father, a mullah (prayer leader). Under Islamic law (Sharia) those who sexually abuse a woman are to be harshly dealt with.

"My father is a mullah," she said. "Everyone told me that I was lying. They said how could a mullah do this?"

Shogofa, who has three sisters, said her father has always been violent. He would physically abuse their mother and the girls. When their mother failed to produce a male child, their father forced her to "propose" a second wife for him. "He would punish her (mother). She did not have any way. Eventually, she proposed a girl for my father and he got married for a second time," she said.

Two years after that marriage, he began making sexual demands of Shogofa. "My father used to kiss me and hug me, but I thought it was a father’s sympathy," she said.

It did not stop with Shogofa’s marriage or the birth of her daughter.

The young woman said that when she told her husband, Nehmat, that her father was demanding sex, he told her to carry a tape-recorder with her.

"My father asked me to come with him upstairs. I went there. He came very close to me and put two guns to my two sides and said that if I shouted, he would kill me," she recalled. "He raped me. Having done it, he went to the bazaar and asked me to get ready for another session that night".

But Shogofa had recorded his voice and had something to prove to her husband and other relatives.

Her husband waited with the family for her father to come home, to hand him over to the police.

"When Shogofa’s father came home and saw everyone was upset, he knew what had happened. He tried to escape, but we managed to catch him, have him arrested," said Nehmat.

Shogofa’s 14-year-old sister, who did not want to be named, also said that their father had attempted to rape her many times, but did not manage. "My father used to ask me to watch pornographic films. He sometimes hugged me very tightly, I was afraid," she said.

According to Shogofa, her father has changed since he bought a digital dish antenna that gives him access to hundreds of TV channels. "He was watching pornographic films from evening to mid-night. It changed his behaviour," she said.

In a letter to women’s organisations and authorities in Balkh province, Shogofa said she would commit suicide if her father is not hanged or imprisoned for life. "I do not want to see him anymore. I kindly ask the prosecution department to punish my father. If I see him, I will recall what he did to me," she told IPS.

Malalai Usmani, head of the Balkh women’s department, said her officials were working round the clock to ensure justice would be done.

"He should be stoned to death," said Qari Azizollah, an intellectual and prayer leader. Calling the incident "shameful and cowardly" he told IPS: "I have heard of a girl being raped. But a father raping his daughter!" Read the full story

By Anand Gopal
IPS

Thousands of Afghan refugees, forcibly repatriated by Iran, have been living in makeshift camps across Afghanistan.

Many of the displaced, who fled the Soviet invasion and subsequent civil war, have returned to their home country to find a dearth of jobs, shelter and government programmes to help them reintegrate.

Hoden Makhtab, 40, a mother and deportee from Tehran, says: "We had lived in a house, but we left everything we owned when the (Iranian) government returned us here. There are eight people in my family. We came back here six months ago but the Afghan government has not given us any help. They haven't even visited us."

Makhtab speaks to IPS while standing next to her new home, a small cloth tent supported by wooden stays that shudder in the wind. She lives with close to 400 other families in between the construction projects of the Chamany Babrak section of Kabul, where a clutch of tents sit in an ankle-deep mud pit. There is no running water or electricity here, only dirt-dappled adults and half-naked children. The sprawling camp is home to refugees from neighboring countries and other cities in Afghanistan. Some claim to have been deported from Pakistan, where they lived and worked during the war years. There are even some Pakistani refugees here, fleeing inclement weather and civil strife in their home country.

But the lion’s share is from Iran, where authorities have expelled thousands of Afghans in the recent months. Most of the residents here arrived from Iran and erected tents just six months ago, mirroring a process occurring in other major Afghan cities. Aid agencies say that there are hundreds of camps like Chamanay Babrak sprouting all over Afghanistan, housing thousands of deportees and pointing to the possibility of a burgeoning humanitarian crisis.

A shivering Sadaf Ismat, deportee from Iran six months ago, tells IPS, "My son-in-law was killed in an earthquake in Iran. We thought the government would help us, but instead they forced us to come here."

"I am sick and cannot eat," she says, as she shows visitors her tongue, discoloured from an untreated infection. "We have a big family but I don't know what will happen to us. There is no work for anyone and I am so sick I cannot even beg."

In a country struggling to overcome decades of war and insurgency, jobs are scarce. While some residents here are able to find wage work for a day, most are forced to beg. The returned refugees lack wood to protect against the bitter Kabul winter -- causing widespread sickness -- and rising food costs has meant that many go to sleep hungry.

Both the United Nations High Commission for Refugees (UNHCR) and the Afghan government have programmes in place to help displaced persons who are voluntarily repatriating, but none for those expelled from other countries.

Like Makhtab, others here accuse the Iranian government of forcibly evicting them. "I went to Sheraz, Iran, 20 years ago," Fazel Ghrias tells IPS, as he furnishes a Tehran-issued refugee ID card. "We lived in tents in Iran, but the government helped us. Then one day (six months ago) they said 'your country has freedom now, you can go back’." Ghrias claims that Iranian soldiers forced the refugees to board trucks at gunpoint, and then ransacked the tents, taking all the money they could find.

"The soldiers told us," he continues, that "'if you don't go back to Afghanistan, we will kill you.' Then they burned the houses of those who refused to leave."

UNHCR estimates that close to one million Afghans have returned from Iran since 2001 and that in the last year Iran deported 360,000. According to the Afghan Ministry of Refugees and Returnees Affairs (MRRA), in the first two months of this year already 17,000 Afghans have been expelled, despite an agreement between Kabul and Tehran to curtail deportations during the winter months.

UNHCR and the Iranian government both claim that those expelled were unregistered Afghans in the country illegally seeking work and should be considered economic migrants, not refugees. However, in the camps of Chamany Babrak most tenants are able to produce Tehran-issued refugee ID cards, indicating registered status.

In addition, some NGO reports suggest that Iranian soldiers often evict refugee settlements wholesale, without checking for registration status.

Camp resident Muzafar Khoram, 54, deported six months ago from Sheraz, says: "I was working near my house one day when the (Iranian) soldiers came, without warning. We had ID cards but the government didn't pay any attention to this. We didn't want to return, but they forced us, screaming 'get out of Iran!' They would not even let us collect our belongings. They forced us on to trucks, first the men and later the women and children."

UNHCR spokesperson Ahmed Nader Farhad says that his agency only considers those who voluntarily repatriate as refugees. Those expelled, therefore, fall outside of the UNHCR mandate and go without any significant aid.

"They are not Iran's and not our government's responsibility," Abdul Qader Zazai, chief advisor to Mohammed Etibari, the MRRA minister, tells IPS. Etibari said recently in a statement that the Afghan government does not have the ability or resources to absorb the thousands of deported and is asking the Iranian authorities to stem the tide of expulsions.

This appears to offer little consolation to the Chamany Babrak camp dwellers. "We are so poor and we need help -- that is our main problem," says Khoram. As he speaks a water tanker trundles through the thick mud -- the residents pool together their daily earnings to buy water -- as young children scatter from its path. "We need food and wood," he continues. "Especially in winter, we don't have what we need. We haven't received oil, flour or bread. There are 10 people in my house. We are all sick. I don't know what to do." Read the full story

AFP, March 24, 2008

After nearly three decades of war, Afghanistan is one of the world's most mined countries.
KABUL — Gunmen killed five Afghan mine clearers in an ambush on their convoy in northern Afghanistan, their UN-funded company said Monday, in one of the bloodiest attacks on non-government workers in months.

The attackers halted a convoy of workers for Afghan Technical Consultants (ATC) in the northern province of Jawzjan as they drove back to their base camp after mine clearing operations in a remote area, their director said.

They opened fire into the first vehicle and shot at the others, which included an ambulance, as they turned around and sped off, director Kefayatullah Eblagh told AFP.

"Three people stopped the vehicle and started shooting at them without saying anything," he said.

"Five people were killed and seven injured."
It was the worst attack on the company in its 18 years of operations in Afghanistan, he said. "It was terrible."

After nearly three decades of war, Afghanistan is one of the world's most mined countries.

Several companies are working with UN and other international funding to rid it of the devices, which kill or maim scores of people every year.

Police said the attackers had stopped one vehicle by shooting out a tyre and the others were able to escape.

"Then they made five deminers come down and shot them dead," said the deputy police chief of adjoining Balkh province, Abdul Rauf Taj.

Eblagh said the dead men, who included a driver and a section leader, were aged between 30 and 40 and came from various parts of Afghanistan.

It was not known who the attackers were, he said.

"I don't think they were targeting Afghan deminers," he said, adding that the attackers may have thought the convoy belonged to an non-government organisation -- some of which have been attacked in the north.

Insurgents from the extremist Taliban group, which was in government between 1996 and 2001, have killed dozens of people associated with the new administration -- including non-government workers, doctors and teachers.
Most of their attacks take place in the south and east of the country.

There have however been several incidents in the north, where factional rivalry, warlordism and criminality also have a hand in the violence.

The Taliban says it is expanding its operations in that area and there was some insurgency-linked incidents in the area last year, including in Jawzjan which borders Uzbekistan.

In the past few days, the head of a district in Jawzjan and a highway police commander in northern Kunduz were murdered in incidents the Taliban claimed to have carried out.

But deminers have also been targeted in the spiralling violence in Afghanistan.

In August last year the bullet-riddled bodies of three mine clearers were found dumped in a village in the southern province of Kandahar, which sees a lot of Taliban activity, after they had been missing for several days.

A month earlier, 13 members of a demining team were kidnapped in the eastern province of Paktia by unknown men and released after a week. It is not known if the kidnappers were linked to the Taliban.

And in April last year, dozens of Taliban militants attacked a US-funded mine-clearing team in the south, killing three deminers, three guards and one female passer-by. Read the full story

PAN, March 22, 2008

The people of Baghlan say that cases of kidnappings and robberies by illegally armed men has increased on a large scale.

BAGHLAN: A girl was kidnapped by unknown armed men in the Nahreen District of Baghlan province after the kidnappers had beat her family.

The parents of 16-year old Guldana claimed that she had been kidnapped by a group of five unknown, armed men in the middle of the night in the New City area. Mullah Mohammad Gul her 60-year old father told PAN that one of the men had broken into their home and together with the other four men had beaten them, tied them up and then kidnapped their daughter. He also added that they had cried a lot but no one had come to their help.Guldana’s father said that their home is just fifty meters away from the Police Station of Nahreen but the police had not come on time to rescue his daughter from the kidnappers.

One of the neighbours, Haji Mohammad Afzal, also said that the parents, little sister and aunt of Guldana had been beaten and then she had been kidnapped; and complained about the police not arriving on time.

On the other hand, Mohammad Anwar the Commander-in-Chief of the Police of Nahreen said that Guldana probably had connections with the kidnappers and had planned to run away with them from her home. He added that seven men had been arrested regarding this matter and that investigation is continuing to make things clear.

Afghanistan is a source, transit, and destination country for men, women, and children trafficked for the purposes of commercial sexual exploitation and involuntary servitude. Afghan children are trafficked internally and to Iran, Pakistan, Saudi Arabia, Oman, and Zimbabwe for commercial sexual exploitation, forced marriage to settle debts or disputes, forced begging, debt bondage, service as child soldiers, or other forms of involuntary servitude.
US State Department Trafficking in Persons Report, June 12, 2007

A week back the principal of a school was also kidnapped by unknown men in Nahreen. According to Qais Muhr Ayin, the former Head of Education of Baghlan province, the principal was freed after 60 thousand Afghanis had been given to the kidnappers.

The people said that the principal had been kidnapped by the same men who had kidnapped Guldana. They claimed that cases of kidnappings and robberies by illegally armed men had increased on a large scale. About two months back in crossfire between the police and these armed men in Nahreen a police officer had been killed. Read the full story

19,march,2008
human rights first

Five years into the war in Iraq, more than two million Iraqis are refugees outside of their country, and more than two million are displaced internally but unable to flee across the borders. Iraqis have been targeted for persecution and forced from their homes for virtually every reason imaginable. Women who encouraged their peers to participate in the constitutional referendum were threatened with death and driven out of the country. Sunni families searching for the bodies of their loved ones at the morgue in Baghdad have been kidnapped and brutalized. The churches, villages, and homes of Iraqi religious and ethnic minorities have been bombed and burned down. Doctors, dentists, hairdressers, members of parliament, professors, men, women, and children have fled, abandoning property, careers, and their communities in fear.Refugees in the region and internally displaced persons (IDPs) inside Iraq urgently need humanitarian assistance, but the U.N. refugee agency may have to start cutting its assistance programs in June because the international community has failed to respond to its appeal for $261 million. According to the United Nations, up to 100,000 of the most vulnerable refugees urgently need resettlement, but the United States—the global leader in refugee resettlement—has committed to taking only 12,000 this year.

Perhaps worst of all, for Iraqis today, fleeing their country is no longer an option. It is a principle of international law that refugees not be turned back at the border. Jordan—a very small country—allowed some 500,000 Iraqis to enter, but began imposing restrictions in 2005 and effectively closed the border in January 2007. Syria kept its border open until October 2007, but now imposes a strict visa regime that excludes many refugees. Both countries have been overwhelmed and dismayed at the international community’s failure to share responsibility for the crisis.

On the fifth anniversary of the war, Human Rights First calls on the international community to fully fund the U.N. refugee agency’s appeal for Iraqi refugees and to provide bilateral assistance to countries hosting Iraqi refugees. We also ask President Bush to acknowledge the refugee crisis publicly and direct his agencies to take the lead in providing resettlement to the most vulnerable Iraqis and humanitarian aid to refugees and IDPs.

Human Rights First would also like to share the stories of three Iraqis we interviewed in Amman, Jordan, in September. The refugees’ names have been changed for their protection.

*** *** ***

Sami, a father of three and a Sunni Muslim, fled Iraq after an assassination attempt against him and a mortar attack on his home.

“The Jaish al Mehdi began to wage war against the other militias in my neighborhood. On March 17, 2007, a mortar round hit our home. My younger daughters were playing in the yard. Hana was killed immediately. Yasmin, who is 10, was hit by the explosion. Her body is full of shrapnel now. She’s blind in one eye, and paralyzed below the waist. I couldn’t get any help from the government hospitals in Iraq because we are Sunni, so we fled to Jordan. Now, we can’t afford her medical care. An NGO is helping us pay for some physical therapy. They’re doing their best, but the funds are limited. I need 500 JDs for MRIs and kidney tests and I can’t pay. We have no savings left, and I’m not allowed to work here in Jordan. With the proper treatment she might be able to walk again. I used to have goals for myself, but now my only goal in life is to save this child. I would travel to any country in the world that would give her treatment.”

Khalid worked as an interpreter with the 3rd U.S. Cavalry in western Iraq. He showed us his bullet scars.

“After October 2003 I could no longer move freely because of my work as an interpreter. Extremists followed me. They shot at my car, and tried to bomb my house—my sister was injured. I have a scar from where one of their bullets grazed my head. Eventually, they kidnapped my younger brother on his way to college. They left a threat for the rest of us. It said, ‘We will kill all the men in your family and rape the women.’ Then I knew I had to disappear. I asked our commander for help escaping, but he just told me to wait until March, and so I fled to Jordan. For Iraqi refugees like me, yesterday was better than today, and today is better than tomorrow will be.”

Jana is a 12-year-old child from one of Iraq’s religious minorities, a Gnostic group called the Sabaeans.

“It was like hell in Iraq. Before the collapse of Saddam’s regime, nobody told us we were Sabaean. But after the collapse, the other children would call us infidels and point their fingers. They used to spit in our faces. We complained to our teachers. Our teachers told us, ‘You should be Muslims. You are not supposed to live in this country anymore.’ It got worse. They tried to kidnap me and my brother. They abducted many kids in my neighborhood. They kidnapped a girl I knew and threw her in the river. I was very frightened. We came to Jordan on July 11, 2005.” Read the full story

20,march,2008
United Press International

VANCOUVER, British Columbia, March 20 (UPI) -- The Canadian government used the fifth anniversary of the invasion of Iraq to announce it will double the number of Iraqi refugees it accepts this year.

Canadian Citizenship and Immigration Minister Diane Finley made the announcement Wednesday in Vancouver, British Columbia, where she said Canada will accept 1,800-2,000 refugees in 2008, the Canadian Broadcasting Corp., reported.
Previously, the country was accepting about 900 displaced Iraqis each year, Finley said.

She said the majority of Iraqis have been arriving in Canada from Syria and Jordan. New refugees will be proposed through private sponsorships and by the U.N. High Commissioner for Refugees, the report said.

Canada's resettlement target for the entire Middle East was also increased by more than 50 percent for 2008 to 3,300 people, Finley said.

UNHCR Representative Abraham Abraham, said Canada takes in 10,000 to 12,000 refugees from 70 difference countries every year, which is about 10 percent of all refugees resettled globally. Read the full story

20.march,2008
ABC

A Sudanese refugee who admitted killing his wife at their Newcastle home, in the New South Wales Hunter region, has been found not guilty of her murder on the grounds of mental illness.The 43-year-old man, who cannot be named for legal reasons, hit his 40-year-old wife on the head with a hammer and a pipe in July 2006.

The couple's one-year-old daughter was found lying next to her with blood on her clothes.

The woman was taken to hospital but died.

The man later handed himself in to police. He said he had been told in a dream to kill his wife or she would kill him.

Justice Graham Barr accepted the man was suffering from schizophrenia. He said the man's delusional belief robbed him of the ability to know what he was doing was wrong.

The judge ordered that the man be detained in the psychiatric ward of the Long Bay Prison hospital until his case is assessed by the Mental Health Review Tribunal. Read the full story

19,march,2008
Reuters

WARSAW,The Polish government said on Wednesday it planned to send 400 more troops and eight helicopters to strengthen NATO forces in Afghanistan.

Poland, the biggest ex-communist NATO member, has so far contributed about 1,200 troops to the NATO-led International Security Assistance Force (ISAF) fighting the Taliban and backing the Kabul government.

"It was proposed that the (Polish) force will reach 1,600 soldiers and military personnel," the government said in a statement after a cabinet meeting.
Polish troops are scattered across Afghanistan and in return for boosting troops numbers, Warsaw wants its entire contingent to be based in one province, saying it will raise the effectiveness of the force.

The United States is heading a campaign, ahead of an April NATO summit in Bucharest, for what it calls a fairer sharing of the burden in the fight against Taliban insurgents. Poland, along with Britain, Canada and others supported the campaign.

The final say on whether the troops will go lies now with President Lech Kaczynski, supreme commander of Polish armed forces. (Reporting by Patryk Wasilewski)
Read the full story

Mar 21, 2008
atimes
By Syed Saleem Shahzad

KARACHI - After more than six years, coalition forces in Afghanistan are preparing for an all-out offensive against the Taliban centered on their safe havens straddling the border with Pakistan.

This, allied with intensive North Atlantic Treaty Organization and US operations already this year, has led to much speculation on whether the Taliban will launch their annual spring offensive, with even senior NATO officials suggesting the Taliban will instead bunker down in a war of attrition, much as they did during a rough phase in 2004.

This will not be the case, according to Asia Times Online's interaction with Taliban guerrillas over the past few weeks.
But instead of taking on foreign forces in direct battle in the traditional hot spots, the Taliban plan to open new fronts as they are aware they cannot win head-on against the might of the US-led war machine.

The efforts of the NATO-led International Security Assistance Force (ISAF) and its 47,000 soldiers from nearly 40 nations will focus on specific areas that include the Bajaur and Mohmand tribal agencies in Pakistan, as well as South and North Waziristan in that country, and Nooristan, Kunar, Paktia, Paktika and Khost provinces in Afghanistan. The ISAF is complemented by the separate US-led coalition of about 20,000, the majority being US soldiers. This does not include a contingent of 3,600 US Marine Corps who this week started arriving in southern Afghanistan. They will work under the command of the ISAF.

For their part, the Taliban, according to Asia Times Online contacts, will open new fronts in Khyber Agency in Pakistan and Nangarhar province in east Afghanistan and its capital Jalalabad.

This move follows a meeting of important Taliban commanders of Pakistani and Afghan origin held for the first time in the Tera Valley bordering the Tora Bora mountains in Afghanistan. (Osama bin Laden and other al-Qaeda and Taliban leaders famously evaded US-led forces in the Tora Bora soon after the invasion in 2001.)

Pakistan's Khyber Agency has never been a part of the Taliban's domain. The majority of the population there follows the Brelvi school of thought, which is bitterly opposed to the hardline Taliban and the Salafi brand of Islam. The adjacent Afghan province of Nangarhar has also been a relatively peaceful area.

Conversely, the historic belt starting from Peshawar in North-West Frontier Province and running through Khyber Agency to Nangarhar is NATO's life line - 80% of its supplies pass through it. From Nangarhar, the capital Kabul is only six hours away by road.

Over the past year, the Taliban have worked hard at winning over the population in this region and have installed a new commander, Ustad Yasir, to open up the front in Nangarhar.

New dimensions to the Afghan struggle
After seven years of the "war on terror" and the Iraqi experience, both "sides" have become more pragmatic. Slogans such as "shock and awe", "crusade" against Islamic extremism and "intifada" catch the headlines, but they are not getting the job done. Both sides have refined their approach aimed at achieving specific goals and targets. If NATO has acquired excellent knowledge of the Taliban's network, the Taliban and al-Qaeda have also excelled in gathering information on NATO and its allies.

Al-Qaeda has evolved from an organization that generally only allowed in Arabs and its ideology now accommodates indigenous factors. Today, Pakistani non-Pashtuns, popularly known as Punjabis, are the Pakistani franchise of al-Qaeda. They receive macro policies from the al-Qaeda shura (council) comprising Arabs, but are independent in the implementation of these policies - although an Arab in still in overall charge.

The same goes in Iraq, where al-Qaeda is now a local organization with its hub spread between Mosul, Diyala and Baquba.

At the same time, the "war on terror" extends beyond US-British dominance. Although there are several disagreements at the operation level within NATO in Afghanistan, some partners, such as France, cognizant of the revival of the enemy's strength, have greatly enhanced their input into intelligence resources.

French intelligence is directly involved in fresh moves to track the most wanted targets, including Taliban commander Sirajuddin Haqqani, Pakistani Taliban leader Baitullah Mehsud, chief of the Islamic Movement of Uzbekistan, Tahir Yaldeshiv, besides bin Laden and his deputy Ayman al-Zawahiri.

New funds have been allocated for clandestine operations by French intelligence in Pakistan's North and South Waziristan regions, as well as in Balochistan province, to track high-profile targets with the aim of assassinating them. This is being done in coordination with NATO forces in Afghanistan.

According to Asia Times Online investigations, French intelligence has infiltrated a network of donors who had been arranging money for the Iraqi resistance and the Taliban.

Underlying these efforts is the belief that the war cannot be won through the use of naked violence alone. The militant camps have reached a similar conclusion: their actions now are much more nuanced and calibrated and they realize there will be no quick victory.

A smooth supply of money and arms from various sources as well as thousands of new recruits have rejuvenated their cause and allowed the militants to better plan their operations and carefully select their targets. They have established good rapport within the security forces at an individual level and use these contacts whenever it is essential.

Italian job
Last weekend's attack on an Italian restaurant in the Pakistani capital Islamabad shows how deeply al-Qaeda has made inroads into the Pakistani security agencies and as a result is receiving first-hand information.

The al-Qaeda attack injured, through a time bomb, four US Federal Bureau of Investigation agents, including a senior official of counter-terrorism coordination with the Pakistani Special Intelligence Agency.

The restaurant is co-owned by an Italian woman who is the wife of a man believed to be the main financial backer of anti-Taliban Shi'ites in the northern areas of Pakistan.

More such attacks are expected. Read the full story

20,march,2008
The Star

MacKay says extending 6-month stints possible as manpower shortages hamper Afghan mission

OTTAWA–Longer deployments for Canadian troops in Kandahar – perhaps as long as a year – are being considered as the military struggles to meet the manpower demands of a mission that has been extended by two years.

Defence Minister Peter MacKay said yesterday from Kandahar he is not ruling it out, but added the decision rests with senior commanders.

"I rely very heavily on the military assessment of that," MacKay said yesterday as he wrapped up his visit. "We're not ruling anything out, but of course these are operational decisions where I'll take that up with the chief of defence staff."

Retired general Lewis MacKenzie said the forces could have to introduce longer deployments to meet the demands of keeping 2,500 soldiers in Afghanistan at a time, through to 2011.

"It's a matter of resources. ... I think they're going to have to look at it," MacKenzie said yesterday. "It's a pretty frequent subject of discussion because they are facing the dilemma of just not enough troops."

MacKenzie said the army has an effective infantry corps of about 5,000, once leaves, injuries and other absences are accounted for.

Out of Canada's 2,500 soldiers in Afghanistan at a time, typically 800 to 1,000 are front-line infantry corps.

MacKenzie said the force should consider deployments of nine months, even a year.

Front-line Canadian troops now serve a six-month rotation with typically a three-week vacation; headquarters staff are sent for between nine months and a year.

Senior U.S. commanders have said the six-month rotations could be an impediment to NATO success in Afghanistan.

American soldiers serve 15-month deployments, though the Pentagon is reducing that to 12 months to ease the strain on overburdened soldiers.

"What does 15 months mean? The American soldier ... develops a relationship with the terrain, with the indigenous people and their leadership, and with the enemy. And they have sufficient time to exploit that relationship to their advantage," said top NATO commander Gen. Dan McNeill, an American.

Each new Canadian deployment is accompanied by a period of "instability" as the new troops get used to the local geography and dangers, said Brian MacDonald of the Conference of Defence Associations.

"If it takes them one month to do that, then you have one month at less than 100 per cent effectiveness followed by five months of effectiveness," he said.

"If you're able to do a nine-month rotation, you have one month of stability followed by eight months of solid performance."

MacDonald said extending deployments was a "logical move." But the other side of the argument is the effect on soldiers' morale, as well as their physical and mental health if they spend too long in the conflict zone.

"You always have a trade-off between troop exhaustion if you go beyond six months," said Kenneth Calder, a deputy minister of defence from 1991 to 2006.

Fears that the Canadian Forces might be stretched too thin were bolstered with the statistic that one in five soldiers being deployed to Kandahar was a reservist.

MacDonald said that figure has jumped to between 25 per cent and 30 per cent with the most recent deployment. Part-time soldiers leave the military at a higher rate than professional soldiers, taking with them valuable training and experience.

A year ago, Gen. Rick Hillier, the chief of defence staff, said the six-month tour lengths are "about right."

But MacKenzie said the rotation lengths are a holdover from United Nations peacekeeping missions.

"Everybody that did a lot of peacekeeping got into this routine of six-month rotations, which is really quite inefficient when it comes to an operational theatre," he said.

The Canadian military has made it no secret that the prolonged Afghan mission, already extended once by two years, is straining its resources.

For example, it has been deploying sailors and air force personnel to Afghanistan to help bolster the ground forces.

And it has meant that the pledge by then-defence minister Gordon O'Connor to limit combat troops to one deployment in Afghanistan to avoid wearing them out has gone out the window as well.

Canada's latest casualty – Sgt. Jason Boyes, killed in a bomb blast on Sunday – was on his third tour in Afghanistan.

"You just can't sustain that for very long," MacKenzie said about the repeat tours.

He said the idea of longer deployment has surprising support among families, despite the hardship of the longer absences.

Some families say the current practice of having a soldier return home on vacation in the middle of a tour can bring its own troubles.

"They said it's really disruptive. He's gone for a month, then he comes home and then he goes back again. It disrupts life at home," MacKenzie said.

Longer deployments would mean a greater financial reward, since troops enjoy generous tax benefits for the time they are deployed.

But the change would upset the whole cycle of the military in Canada, meaning significant changes to things like training schedules, post-deployment postings and career courses.

"It would not be impossible, but it would certainly be challenging," MacKenzie said. Read the full story

19,march,2008
The Canadian Press

WASHINGTON — A U.S. Army officer was going to have Canadian Omar Khadr executed after a July 2002 firefight in Afghanistan but was stopped at the last moment by Special Forces troops, according to a diary account.

The witness excerpt, contained in legal briefs released Wednesday by the U.S. Defence Department, confirmed that a second terror suspect was alive when the grenade that killed Sgt. Christopher Speer was thrown.

Khadr, 21, is being held in Guantanamo Bay, charged with murdering Speer. The U.S. government has maintained he was the only one who could have done it because all the other combatants were dead.Not so, said the officer, who described an American soldier having Khadr in his sights "point blank."

"I was about to tap (identity blacked out) on his back to tell him to kill him but the SF guys stopped us and told us not to."

The officer also described the death of the other al-Qaida fighter.

"I remember looking over my right shoulder and seeing (redacted) just waste the guy who was still alive. He was shooting him with controlled pairs," or rapid execution-style firing.

Last month, another witness identified only as OC-1 provided the first testimony in a mistakenly released document that there was a second fighter alive.

The soldier said he killed the fighter before spotting Khadr, who was slumped against a wall facing away from him. He said he shot Khadr twice in the back.

The Pentagon has said American soldiers fired on Khadr in self-defence.

Khadr, who was 15 years old at the time, had two huge exit wounds in his upper left chest.

"(He's) missing a piece of his chest and I can see his heart beating," wrote one officer included in a legal motion.

Defence lawyer Lt.-Cmdr. William Kuebler related that Khadr's wounds "were infected, swollen and still seeping blood nearly seven months after the firefight."

He was still being treated in hospital 10 months later, said Kuebler, adding the circumstances of Khadr's capture and the death of the other fighter may constitute war crimes.

The events could have provided U.S. soldiers with the motive to alter details to protect themselves, he wrote.

Kuebler alleges that an original report on the firefight written a day later by the commander for the Khost region of eastern Afghanistan, identified only as Lt.-Col. W, said the person who threw the grenade that killed Speer also died.

It was later doctored to say Speer's attacker was "engaged" by U.S. forces, in a bid to make Khadr look guilty, said Kuebler - a charge the military denies.

The prosecution acknowledges a memo was updated, but simply to "accurately reflect a fact known to all parties ... that contrary to what was initially believed to be the case, the accused survived his injuries in large part due to the medical attention provided by U.S. medics on July 27, 2002."

In an interview, Kuebler said it's time the Canadian government take action on getting Khadr home because the prosecution's case is getting weaker all the time.

"We have another account that says it was a myth that Khadr alone was alive," said Kuebler.

The defence contends Khadr was abused so badly and in and such terrible medical shape that any damaging statements he made during early interrogations shouldn't be considered.

His chief interrogator for three months at the U.S. facility in Bagram, Afghanistan, identified as Sgt. Joshua Claus, has been given immunity from prosecution for any possible abuse of Khadr in return for his testimony at the Canadian's upcoming murder trial.

Claus was court-martialled and discharged from the army after another badly beaten prisoner at Bagram died in December 2002.

"We think Khadr's been mistreated in a variety of ways," said Kuebler. "However you characterize it, it was illegal."

In an affidavit released earlier this week, Khadr said he was forced to confess to placate interrogators who shackled him for hours, dropped him and threatened him with rape.

Canadian officials who later visited him in Guantanamo told him he was lying about being innocent and said there was nothing they could do for him, said Khadr. Read the full story

20,March, 2008
By DEB RIECHMANN
Associated Press

Vice President Dick Cheney on Thursday called the U.S. commitment to Afghanistan "firm and unshakable" and said members of NATO need to step up their commitment to help it continue to rebound from years of tyranny and war.

Problems in Afghanistan will be a key topic at the NATO summit early next month in Romania. NATO's force is about 43,000-strong, but commanders seek more combat troops for areas in southern Afghanistan where Taliban and al-Qaida fighters are the most active.

"America will ask our NATO allies for an even stronger commitment for the future," Cheney said, standing alongside Afghan President Hamid Karzai at his heavily guarded presidential palace.
Cheney, who is on a 10-day overseas trip, also said that neighboring Pakistan, like other sovereign nations, has an obligation to control its territory and ensure that it's not a sanctuary for insurgents and terrorists.

"They have as big a stake as anyone else in dealing with the threat that sometimes emerges from those areas along the border," Cheney said during a visit that was not announced in advance.

He said he has no reason to doubt Pakistan's commitment to dealing with problems emerging from the border area if terror groups are allowed to operate there because the Pakistani government itself is a target for the al-Qaida and extremists.

"You've seen a number of devastating attacks against the people and government of Pakistan, including of course the tragic assassination of former Prime Minister (Benazir) Bhutto," he said.

Cheney flew from Oman to the Afghan capital, then took a helicopter to the dusty presidential compound where he greeted Karzai with a hearty handshake. The two strolled down a deep red carpet, reviewing troops before heading inside for their talks.

"During the last six years, the people of Afghanistan have made a bold and confident journey, throwing off the burden of tyranny, winning your freedom and reclaiming your future," he said. "The process has been difficult, but the courage of the nation has been unwavering. The United States of America has proudly walked with you on this journey, and we walk with you still."

Cheney advisers said the vice president would urge Karzai to continue to work with Pakistan, in the wake of its recent elections, and stay focused on the problems of extremists and terrorists moving back and forth across the Afghan-Pakistan border, using the mountainous region as a safe place to plot attacks.

The vice president also was to push Karzai to take steps to extend Afghanistan's governance beyond Kabul and conduct successful elections next year. The discussion also was to address ways the Afghan government can curb corruption and deal with rising production of poppies, which are used to make narcotic drugs that fund insurgent operations.

More than 8,000 people died in Afghanistan last year, making it the most violent year since 2001 when the U.S. invaded Afghanistan to oust the hardline Taliban regime after the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks.

Karzai hailed progress in improving security forces, saying the Afghan army is getting stronger "day by day," but added that international support will be needed for years to come. "Some day, Afghanistan will be fully in charge of the security of this country," Karzai said. "That is not going to be anytime soon."

He stressed progress in rebuilding. "We have taken significant steps - from not having even one kilometer of a paved road, now we have more than 3,000 kilometers of paved highways and other roads," he said. "Go to schools, go to hospitals, go to lots of other reconstruction activities in the rebuilding of Afghanistan. ... So thanks to you, the international community, for having giving us all of that. Please continue."
Troops from Canada, Britain, the Netherlands and the United States have done the majority of the fighting against Taliban militants. France, Spain, Germany and Italy are stationed in more peaceful parts of the country.

Canada, which has 2,500 troops in Kandahar province, recently threatened to end its combat role unless other NATO countries provide an additional 1,000 troops to help the anti-Taliban effort there. Canadian Defense Minister Peter MacKay said he expected a pledge for troops before or during the summit April 2-4 in Bucharest, Romania.

The U.S. contributes one-third of the NATO force, and also has about 12,000 other U.S. troops operating independently from NATO. The Pentagon says that by late summer, there will be about 32,000 U.S. troops in Afghanistan - up from about 28,000 now.

The bulk of the increase is the 3,200 Marines that President Bush has agreed to send. About 2,300 troops of the 24th Marine Expeditionary Unit from Camp Lejeune, North Carolina, have begun arriving at their new base in Kandahar, the Taliban's former power base.

After the news conference with Karzai, the vice president took a 20-minute helicopter ride to Bagram Air Base, encircled by rugged brown terrain turning green with the season. Spring is the start of the fighting season, which is determined by weather.

At the base, Cheney received a classified briefing, awarded medals to five troops and witnessed the re-enlistment of six others. He also enjoyed a prime rib dinner. Troops at the base said it was not a special menu for the vice president, but that it was a special day: the Afghan new year. Read the full story

From BAMYAN OFFICIAL WEBSITE

Afghanistan and the history of Bamiyan:

Afghanistan‘s history can be traced back to when the land was once called “Ariana”.

Afghanistan was influenced by different cultures and civilizations. Situated at a crossroad of civilizations, Afghanistan’s unique culture was born from a mixture of indigenous and foreign elements.



Bamiyan means “the place of shining light”. The rolling hills of the Bamiyan valley are lined in variegated colors. The central valley of Bamiyan is located at 2,500 meters above sea level. Two rivers flow into the valley from sources in the Kuhe-e-Baba: The Kakrak River to the east, and the Foladi River to the west. The principle archaeological sites are located in the long east-west central valley of Bamiyan and in the Kakrak and Foladi river valleys.



Bamiyan’s central cultural monuments were the two Buddha statues carved at the eastern and western ends of a high cliff facing the central valley. Some thousand caves are also cut into the cliff face and decorated with a rich variety of murals. The Buddhist art of Bamiyan, which enjoyed a renaissance in central Afghanistan after the collapse of the earlier Gandharan culture, spread to and influenced various countries along the Silk Road.
Cultural and Archaeological Values of Bamiyan:

The Cultural Landscape and Archaeological Remains of the Bamiyan Valley was inscribed on the “List of World Heritage in Danger” and the World Heritage List at the 27th session of the World Heritage Committee in 2003. The property is in a fragile state of conservation having suffered from neglect, military action, and dynamite explosions. In 2003, the major dangers included: risk of imminent collapse of the Buddha niches with the remaining fragments of the statues, further deterioration of still existing mural paintings in the caves, looting and illicit excavation.





4-7th centuries , Bamyuan seen by Xuan Zang

The name Bamyan first appeared in historical records around the late 4th century . The first detailed description of the region did not appear until around the year 630 , when a Chinese monk named Xuan Zang visited Bamyan for about 15 days , on this way to India , In this travel record ,Da Tang Xi Yu Ji he mentions the kingdom "is situated in the midst of the Snowy Mountains . The people inhabit towns either in the mountains or the valleys , according to circumstances ."The description reveals that the people of Bamyan probably loved in caves dug into the cliffs . Xuan Zanf also mentioned that the Bamyan kingdom "produces wheat and few flowers of fruits . Its suitable for cattle ,and affords pasture for many sheep and horses ." Thus , by the seventh century , the landscape of Bamyan consisted of thousands of caves dug into the Great Cliff and large grain field in the flat land below.

Two statues of Buddha were also reported in details in Xuan Zanag's , Da Tang Xi Yu Ji . He notes that the West Buddha's "golden hues sparkle in every side , and its precious ornaments dazzle the eyes by their brightness ." This indicates that the statues of Buddha were lavishly decorated .Furthermore , Xuan Zang's description mentioned that there were 50 to 60 Buddhist temples with several thousand monks. When hs visited Bamyan in the early seventh century , Bamyan was at its speak as a Buddhist religious center, with the sratues of Buddha and numerous cave-temples.

Xuan Zang also wrotes that "the people remain faithful to the three Treasures (Buddha , law and Priesthood ) at the top , down to various gods and respect them most sincerely ", which suggests that different religions besides Buddhism were also practiced in Bamyan . When Xuan Zang visited Bamyan the area was very prosperous as a transportation crossroad , connecting many different areas of Afghanistan and beyond.

Between the 8-9th centuries :

The Islamic period

In the early eight century , the Silla monk Hui Chao visited Bamyan , and described it as an area where Buddhism flourished . At the same time , he wrote that the area was not subject to any other countries and not been invaded , thanks to Bamyan's strong army . Not long after Hui Chao left Bamyan , however , the king of Bamyan surrendered to the abbasid caliphate . After this time Islam gradually spread over . The latest scientific analysis has revealed that some of the Buddhist mural paintings of Bamyan date back to the early fifth century . At least until this period , Buddhism , Islam and other religions coexisted in the region . During the late ninth century , the Saffarid dynasty (861-910) demolished many Buddhist temples and statues and statues / From that time, Buddhist cultural in bamyan gradually declined.

After the Saffarid period , Bamyan was ruled by various Islamic dynasties including the Samanids , the Ghaznavids and the Ghurids . According to the Arabic and Persian historical texts , Bamyan remained a major city with a fortress under Islamic rule. The prosperity of Bamyan came to an end in 1221 when the Mongol armies , lead by Chinggis Khan invaded . During the battle in Bamyan , the Mongols destroyed the strong fortress completely . The ruins of the fortress are now known as shahr-I Gholghola . After the Mongol destruction of the fortress , Bamyan rarely appeared in historical texts until the 198th century


19-20centuries

In the 19th century , Bamyan reappeares in the historical record . Many expeditions entered the region . In the early 19th Century . Alexendar Burnes and Charles Masson visited Bamyan and sketched the statues of Buddha . In the late 19th century based in Xuan Zang's Da Tang Xi Yu Ji scholars such as Talbot ,Simpson , and Mailtland investigated the Bamyan area.

In the early 20th century , the Delegation Archeologique Francaise en Afghanistan DAFA began the first full-scale archaeological investigation of Bamyan.

Under the supervision of Alfred Foucher , Andre Godard and Josef Hackin , DAFA researched the mural painting and architecture of Bamyan in great detail , and published two comprehensive reports and several articles.

In the late 20th century , Japanese teams from Nagoya ,Kyoto and Seijo Universities visited the area with Zemaryalai Tarzi of the Institute of Archaeology in Afghanistan . In addition to archaeological and art history investigations ,conservation and restoration of the Bamyan site was carried out by the Archaeological Survey of India.

Owing to such long-term international investigations and research , Bamyan became known as the crossroad of civilizations from India, Persia and Central Asia. After 1979 , the country descended into a state of the war , which contributed to preventing further academic research at the site . In 1997 , the Taliban regime took over the Bamyan valley and threatened to demolish the site.


2001 t0 the Present in Bamyan

The demolishment and the illegal exportation of cultural heritage

In march 2001 , the eyes of the world were on Bamyan as the Taliban dynamited its monumental Buddha statues. They were destroyed following decree proclaimed by Mullah Omar in February 2001 ordering the destruction of all non-Islamic statues and tombs considered offensive to Islam.

When Mullah Omar announced this decree ,UNESCO immediately issued appeals to Taliban leaders through the international press , exhorting them to preserve Afghan cultural heritage . The Director- General addressed a personal letter to the Taliban leader on 28 February . He also obtained the full support of many Islamic countries for UNESCO's activities to save the Afghan cultural heritage.

On 1 march a Special Representative of the Director –General left for Islamabad ,Kandahar ,Kabul , the united Arab emirates , Qatar and Saudi Arabia . A number of Muslim religious leaders from Egypt ,Iraq and Pakistan intervened at the request of UNESCO , issuing "fatwas" against the Taliban's order. The Director-General personally contacted the Presidents of the Egypt and Pakistan ,as well as of the Organization of the Islamic Conference , all of whom tried to use the Taliban to cancel the order.

Following these interventions , a delegation of 11 international Muslim leaders went to Kandahar to try convince the Taliban that the Koran does not prescribe the destruction of statues . Nevertheless , all these political and religious interventions proved to be in vain , and the Taliban destroyed not only the statues of Buddha at Bamyan , but also a large number of statues throughout Afghanistan.

After the destruction , in December 2001 , an international conference of "Ulema" , Islamic religious leaders , was jointly organized by UNESCO . The Organization of the Islamic Conference (OIC) , The Islamic Scientific ,Educational and Cultural Organization (ISESCO) and the Arab League Educational , Scientific and Cultural Organization (ALESCO) , to examine the position of the Muslim world towards the preservation of Islamic and non Islamic heritage. This conference resulted in a clear declaration of principles in favor of the protection of cultural heritage, including statues , that can be appealed to in the future.



UNESCO Safeguarding Project-1:

UNESCO responds firmly to the challenge of rehabilitating Afghanistan’s endangered cultural heritage. The safeguarding of all aspects of cultural heritage, both tangible and intangible, including museums, monuments, archaeological sites, music, art, and traditional crafts, is of particular significance in terms of strengthening cultural identity and a sense of national integrity.

Entrusted by the Afghan Government to coordinate all international efforts aiming to safeguard Afghanistan’s cultural heritage, the organization established an International Coordination Committee (ICC) in 2003. Chaired by the Afghan Minister of Information and Culture, it consists of Afghan and international specialists. The aim is to raise funds and to issue concrete recommendations to allow the efficient coordination of actions to safeguard Afghanistan’s heritage to the highest international standards in key areas, such as the development of a long-term strategy, capacity building, the implementation of the Conventions for World Heritage, and Preventing the illicit Traffic of Cultural Property, national inventories and documentation, as well as the rehabilitation of the National Museum in Kabul, and the safeguarding of the sites of Jam, Herat and Bamiyan.

Much Discussion has taken place in Afghanistan and all over the world about the future of this site, revolving around the question of whether the two statues of Buddha should be reconstructed. The 107 Participants at the First International Seminar on the Rehabilitation of Afghanistan’s Cultural Heritage, organized by UNESCO in March 2002, as well as the ICC, clearly recognized that the first emergency priority is to stabilize the cliff face with its niches and caves. Noting that the decision whether to engage in the reconstruction of the Buddha statues is a matter to be settled by the government and people of Afghanistan, it was agreed that reconstruction is not a priority as long as humanitarian aid for the Afghan people is urgently needed. Furthermore, it was emphasized that the authenticity, integrity, and historical importance of this great site need to be memorialized in an appropriate way, and that reconstruction of the statues therefore requires further careful consideration.

The Preservation of the Bamiyan site is one of the most important UNESCO projects in Afghanistan, for which more that $1.8 million have been generously donated by the Government of Japan. The following activities have been undertaken within this project.


UNESCO Safeguarding Project-II


Preparation of Preliminary Master Plan:

It was considered essential to develop a Master Plan to ensure the overall preservation of this large site. National Research Institute for Cultural Properties , Tokyo (NRICP), has carried out archaeological soundings and explorations of the Bamiyan valley and its surroundings in order to specify the archaeological zone and the cultural area to be protected from settlements, agriculture and town development and so on. As a next step, it is essential to develop the Master Plan on the bases of NRICP’s input and in incorporating it into national legislation. The German University of Aachen cooperates in this field under funding provided by the Government of Germany through ICOMOS.



Preservation of Mural Paintings:

Professors Akira Miayaji and Kosaku Maeda, who made the full inventory of these important Buddhist paintings in the 1970s, participated in the preparation mission in October 2002. Their analysis was that 80 to 85 of the paintings have disappeared during the war, through neglect, theft, and voluntary destruction. NRICP has documented and recorded the remaining mural paintings in the Buddhist caves. All fragments of paintings scattered on the floors have been collected, inventoried, and conserved. The access to 25 selected important caves has been banned and the caves closed with walls and locked doors. Armed guards have been hired to protect the site. It is important to note that since these measures were taken no further thefts took place. Further analyses of the fragments are required to develop a plan for their long-term conservation.


Consolidation of Cliffs and Niches:

Due to the imminent risk of collapse of the upper Eastern part of the small Buddha niche and the overall instability of both niches, the consolidation of the cliffs and niches was a priority task, as they shape the general appearance of the site and contain the original staircases and several caves. The backs of the two niches still include remains of the Buddha such as arms and shoulders. No scaffolding could be placed in front of the small Buddha niche, due to the slope and the loose ground. It was therefore decided to work with mountain climbers. In autumn 2003 and spring 2004, the Italian firm RODIO successfully implemented the first phase of emergency consolidation. The emergency stabilization of the remaining areas at both niches now has to be ensured.


Conservation of Fragments:

One particular difficulty in conserving the fragments of the Buddha is the large size of some of the fragments and the steep slope in front of the small Buddha. Two ICOMOS expert missions organized by Aachen University of a total of four months were dispatched to Bamiyan in June and October 2004. A protective shelter for the conservation of the fragments of the large Buddha statue was constructed. The experts started to clear the niches of the fragments and to store them in the shelters. Bearing in mind that the stone material, which holds important information on the history of the Buddha statues, is decaying rapidly it is essential to continue the conservation of fragments during the coming years.


Topographical Map and 3-Dimensional Model of Bamiyan:

The Japanese company PASCO has successfully produced a map and a 3 dimensional relief model of the site. All experts involved in the Bamiyan project appreciated its high quality.


What's the world heritage? World heritage sites are places of outstanding universal value to humanity and are part of the heritage of all humankind. Responsibility for future generations.

As of April 2005, 788 sites have been identified and inscribed on the World Heritage List. They are protected by the cooperative efforts of the international community in the framework provided by an international treaty, the Convention Concerning the Protection of the World Cultural and Natural Heritage , which was adopted by UNESCO in 1972.

The Cultural Landscape of the Bamyan Valley

A cultural landscape is links nature and culture. Cultural landscapes can be included in the World Heritage List when interactions between people and natural environment are evaluated as being of outstanding universal value.

"The cultural landscape and archaeological remains of the Bamyan Valley" represent the artistic and religious developments which from the 1st to the 13th centuries characterized ancient Bactria . Integrating various cultural influences into the Gandhara school of Buddhist art .The area contains numerous Buddhist monastic ensembles and sanctuaries, as well as fortified edifices from the Islamic period.

Protecting of the Bamyan Valley

Undue haste in the pursuit of the development of the valley will result in the irreparable loss of its natural and cultural value. Current efforts to protect the cultural heritage of the valley are of utmost importance for future generations. The valley's protection can be achieved only by the cooperative efforts of all partners concerned , including people living iv Bamyan , with support from the international community.

Justification for Inscription on the World Heritage List

Criterion (i)

The Buddha statues and the cave art in Bamyan Valley are an outstanding representation of the Ganharan school in Buddhist art in the central Asian region.

Criterion (ii)

The artistic and architectural remains of Bamyan Valley , and important Buddhist centre on the Silk Road , are an exceptional testimony to the interchange of Indian , Hellenistic ,Roman, Sasanian influences as the basis for the development of a particular artist expression in the Gandharan school. To this can be added the Islamic influence in a later period.

Criterion (iii)

The Bamyan Valley bears an exceptional testimony to a cultural tradition in the Central Asian region , which has disappeared .

Criterion (iv)

The Bamyan Valley is an outstanding example of a cultural landscape which illustrates a significant period in Buddhism.

Criterion (vi)

The Bamyan Valley is the most monumental expression of the western Buddhism . It was an important centre of pilgrimage over many centuries . Due to their symbolic values , the monuments have suffered at different times of their existence , including the deliberate destruction in 2001 , which shook the whole world. Read the full story

AFP

KANDAHAR, Afghanistan (AFP) — NATO war planes killed a dozen Taliban rebels in southern Afghanistan after bombing the vehicle in which they were travelling, the alliance said Tuesday, rejecting claims several civilians were killed.

The air strike late Monday followed a Taliban attack on International Security Assistance Force soldiers, the ISAF said in a statement.

The strike was called in against three vehicles "positively identified carrying insurgents armed with AK-47 rifles which fired upon ISAF," it said.

"ISAF positively confirmed one vehicle was destroyed and an estimated 12 insurgents were killed."The force said the attack was in a remote area of Helmand province in an "isolated area where there was no housing or civilian activity."

A parliamentarian from the area told AFP he had received phone calls from people in the region who said the bomb had struck a group of local men gathered for a stone-throwing competition and dozens were killed.

"I was told 50 people were killed, which comprises of 18 Taliban and the rest of them civilians gathered for the game," Amir Dad Mohammad told AFP.

A Taliban spokesman, Yousuf Ahmadi, said the bombing had killed 40 civilians. But police said they could not confirm the claim.

The Taliban were ousted from power in 2001 following a US-led invasion of Afghanistan. They are accused of taking shelter in populated areas and using civilians as "human shields".

Last year was the deadliest of the rebel insurgency, with more than 8,000 people killed, most of them rebels, but including about 1,500 of them civilians, according to the United Nations. Read the full story

By AMIR SHAH 19/3/2008
Associated Press

KABUL, Afghanistan (AP) — U.S. forces raided a village near the border with Pakistan early Wednesday and killed six people, including two children and a woman, villagers and a government official said.

The raid came a day after NATO said it killed about 12 insurgents in an airstrike in southern Afghanistan, denying accusations from two Afghan lawmakers that civilians were among the dead.

Three men were also killed in Wednesday's raid, including one who used to work as a border policeman patrolling the region in between Afghanistan and Pakistan, said Mirza Gul, a villager from Hom in Khost province, where the violence took place.One woman and two children were among the six killed, said Khibar Pashtun, a spokesman for the Khost governor.

An official with the U.S.-led coalition said he had no immediate comment but that officials were preparing a statement.

The raid began just after midnight early Wednesday and lasted about an hour, said Gul. Ground troops first arrived with a translator, then more later came by helicopter, said Khadim Khan, a family member.

The governor of Khost province, Arsallah Jamal, has previously called on U.S. forces to seek Afghan assistance before launching nighttime raids, saying Afghans would be in a position to "reduce mistakes."

Going back as far as 2002, President Hamid Karzai has publicly and repeatedly accused the U.S. of heavy-handedness in its counterterrorism operations. The U.S. has said over the years that it has modified tactics to cut down on civilian deaths.

NATO's International Security Assistance Force said the only people killed in Monday's airstrikes in southern Helmand province were militants who had fired on alliance troops.

"The air attack took place in an isolated area where there was no housing or civilian activity," NATO said. "There was no evidence of civilian casualties, which would have been clearly seen by ISAF, and there have been no reports by hospitals in the region of any injuries, or requests for medical aid received."

Dad Mohammad Khan and Mir Wali Khan, the two Afghan lawmakers who said civilians were killed, were in the capital, Kabul, at the time of the strike and relied on reports from local Afghans.

Insurgents and some Afghan civilians hostile to the presence of foreign troops sometimes exaggerate accounts of civilian deaths caused by international forces, or make up claims altogether. Independent verification of battlefield casualties is difficult because the areas are remote and dangerous for travel.

Meanwhile, some of the 3,200 U.S. Marines slated for a seven-month deployment to Afghanistan's volatile south continued arriving at the region's largest base following a call from Canada for more troops.

About 2,300 troops from the 24th Marine Expeditionary Unit, from Camp Lejeune, North Carolina, began arriving in the past days at their new base in Kandahar, the Taliban's former power base.

Canada has 2,500 troops in Kandahar province but has threatened to end its combat role in Afghanistan unless other NATO countries provide an additional 1,000 troops to help the anti-Taliban effort there.

NATO's force is about 43,000-strong, but commanders have asked for more combat troops, particularly for the country's south, where the insurgency is the most active. About 13,000 U.S. troops operate in a separate U.S.-led coalition.

Troops from Canada, Britain, the Netherlands and the United States have done the majority of the fighting against Taliban militants. France, Spain, Germany and Italy are stationed in more peaceful parts of the country.

Last year was Afghanistan's most violent since the 2001 ouster of the Taliban. More than 8,000 people died in violence, the U.N. says. Read the full story

Chicago Tribune, March 16, 2008
By Kim Barker

KABUL: The homes in the fancy Shirpur neighborhood are a child's fantasy of mirrored columns, rainbow-colored tiles, green glass, imposing arches and high gates. They also are evidence of what has gone wrong with Afghanistan, almost seven years after the Taliban was chased from power into the mountains.The residents of the newly built mansions are reputed warlords, drug lords -- and some top government officials.Just outside the gates, the problems of Afghanistan are everywhere. Electricity is intermittent. The rutted dirt roads are barely passable without four-wheel drive. Most people live in mud-brick rooms or Soviet-era concrete apartments. Suicide bombs occasionally explode. Men with guns can be seen on street corners, even though they are not police or army, and even though many are loyal to one of the country's most infamous warlords.

Billions of dollars into the U.S.-led effort to keep the country from again becoming a haven for terrorists, Afghanistan is in a stalemate -- and the biggest challenge is not necessarily Taliban-led insurgents, problems with the NATO alliance nor the slow pace of reconstruction.

Instead, it is the U.S.-backed Afghan government, which analysts and some government officials say is not only weak but rife with corruption, from local police in the remote provinces to high-level ministers in Kabul. The central government appears unable or unwilling to stem corruption and the drug trade or to establish rule of law, causing some people in the south to turn to the strict Taliban for justice instead of the slow-moving and often corrupt judiciary.

"What kind of proof in this country do we need to say there are problems?" asked Daoud Sultanzoy, a parliament member who until recently was an ally of Afghan President Hamid Karzai. "It is not the strength of the Taliban that has won over people and hundreds of villages in this country. It is the weakness of the government."

'The mayor of Kabul'

While the Democrats in the U.S. presidential campaign often touch on whether the Bush administration diverted too much attention from Afghanistan after the invasion of Iraq, U.S. officials have largely supported Karzai and talked about progress in the country, torn apart by almost 30 years of war.

At the same time, an increasingly unpopular Karzai -- often described by many Afghans as a U.S. puppet -- has tried to curry favor at home by pushing back against Western powers, even spurning the favorite Western candidate to be the new UN envoy in Afghanistan in January and rejecting a bid to expand the envoy's power.

Recently, several U.S. officials and think tanks have warned that the young democracy is in danger. U.S. National Intelligence Director Mike McConnell said last month in Washington that the resurgent Taliban now controls about 10 percent of the country and Karzai's government controls only about 30 percent. The rest is under tribal control, which often means warlords.

"The luxurious houses and buildings either belong to government staff or members of parliament...there is deceit, misuse and playing with this land" Karzai told a meeting of village elders in Kabul.
Reuters, Nov.13, 2007

Although the Afghan government disputes those figures, several analysts say the government has failed to extend its reach much outside of the capital. Karzai often is derided by many Afghans as "the mayor of Kabul."

In January, a report by former NATO commander and retired U.S. Marine Gen. James Jones concluded that "urgent changes" were required to prevent Afghanistan from becoming a failed state. The independent study, co-written by former UN Ambassador Thomas Pickering, also said Afghanistan risked becoming the forgotten war.

The report said "international engagement is under serious threat from resurgent violence, weakening international resolve, mounting regional challenges and a growing lack of confidence on the part of the Afghan people about the future direction of their country."

The Afghan government points to achievements such as the soon-to-be-completed "ring road," which will connect the country's major cities, and the Afghan army, praised by international forces for the gains it has made in recent years. Although officials acknowledge problems with corruption, they say the Afghan democracy is young and rebuilding a war-torn country is difficult.

"I think the overall majority of Afghans find this government the only alternative, so they are supporting us," said Humayun Hamidzada, the presidential spokesman. "They just have some unmet expectations."

The challenges are daunting: Afghanistan now produces more heroin and opium than the world consumes, the Taliban is able to carry out spectacular suicide attacks regularly, and more Afghans have become disillusioned with both the government and foreign troops.

Last year was the deadliest since the U.S. invasion of Afghanistan, with more than 6,500 people killed in militant-related violence, mostly Taliban fighters, according to an Associated Press tally. Insurgents aren't capable of beating NATO-led forces in combat, but suicide attacks and road mines have managed to give the world and many Afghans the impression that militants are winning, analysts and Afghans say.

Drug-terror nexus

Poppies also are feeding the insurgency -- up to 40 percent of the money fueling terrorism in the country is from the heroin and opium trade, said U.S. Gen. Dan McNeill, the commander of NATO troops in Afghanistan, in a March 9 interview.

The Golden Crescent drug trade, launched by the CIA in the early 1980s, continues to be protected by US intelligence, in liason with NATO occupation forces and the British military. In recent developments, British occupation forces have promoted opium cultivation through paid radio advertisements.
Global Research, April 29, 2007

There are not enough foreign troops here, and self-imposed restrictions by different countries in the NATO alliance on where and how they operate are hampering the coalition, analysts and some NATO officials say.

Reconstruction also has been slower than expected. Of every $1 in aid, only 10 cents goes to the Afghan people, studies show. The capital, Kabul, still does not have 24-hour electricity, and many of the unpaved roads here leave passengers aching as if they've been hit with baseball bats. The countryside, in many places, has a 12th-Century feel.

The pillars of government are so shaky that Karzai basically ignores the cantankerous parliament, which passes laws and resolutions that never seem to go anywhere. Last year, members gave a vote of no confidence to the country's foreign minister, but he remains in office.

Corruption seems ubiquitous. Police shake down drivers for small tips or shirini -- the Dari word for sweets -- at traffic circles in Kabul and collect bribes from drug traffickers in the provinces. Parliament members and analysts allege that many high-level officials or relatives of high-level officials are involved in the illicit drug trade.

Instead of calling the fancy neighborhood in Kabul "Shirpur," which means "child of a lion," Afghans now call it "Shirchoor," which means "looted by lions." English speakers describe the architecture style as "narco-tecture."

Hilaluddin Hilal, the former deputy interior minister and now the head of the security commission in parliament, said drug lords and organized criminals also served in government positions.

"Every year, it is getting worse and worse," Hilal said. "We are facing more challenges. Unfortunately, this weak government of Karzai puts the international community in a very bad position. They are now seen as being with a bad government and opposed to the people of Afghanistan. There is no clear definition of who is the real enemy in Afghanistan anymore." Read the full story

The Independent, March 13, 2008
By John Bingham

The four bodies were found alongside one injured civilian as soldiers went to inspect the area.
Two women and two children were killed in an air strike called in by British forces in Afghanistan, the Ministry of Defence said. It is understood that the incident in Helmand Province took place after British troops had called in air support to help extricate them from a Taliban ambush at an undisclosed location in the southern part of the war-ravaged province.
The four bodies were found alongside one injured civilian as soldiers went to inspect the area.

The MoD said in a statement yesterday: "We can confirm UK forces were involved in an operation in the south of Helmand Province. We deeply regret that this incident happened and do everything we can to mitigate this from happening. This incident is currently under investigation and it would be inappropriate for us to comment."

The tragedy highlights the responsibility on the shoulders of British forward air controllers – the role filled by Prince Harry until he was forced to return from his posting in Afghanistan less than two weeks ago.

The job involves providing air support for ground troops who come into contact with Taliban as well as carrying out aerial surveillance behind enemy lines.

Details of the incident were revealed by a Nato spokesman, Brig-Gen Carlos Branco at a news conference in Afghanistan yesterday. But while he spoke of the Nato-led International Security Assistance Force (Isaf ) involvement, the MoD confirmed that UK troops were present. It is not known if the aircraft was British. Brig-Gen Branco said: "During the ensuing fight, two women and two children, part of a group of civilians who were in the vicinity of the action, were killed. We deeply regret the loss of innocent life and injuries by civilians, and we are saddened that casualties were caused as a result of a deliberate attack against Isaf forces instigated by insurgents."He added: "On the tragic issue of civilian casualties, you will note that Isaf will inform you of such unfortunate events, events which are thoroughly investigated. This is not the case for the insurgents, whose propaganda attempts to seize every opportunity to accuse Nato troops of killing civilians, no matter what the circumstances, to create the perception that ANSF (Afghan National Security Forces) or Isaf are responsible for all civilian casualties."

Unveiling his new book titled 'Final Station', Achim Wohlgetan pointed out that children were misused by ISAF forces to find land- mines in the Kabul region in 2002.
Global Research, January 12, 2008

The MoD spokeswoman said yesterday that the British ground troops had been caught up in an intense battle after being ambushed by Taliban fighters.

Air support was called in and directed on to the area where the Taliban appeared to have been operating but the civilians were unintentionally killed.

The injured civilian has been taken to the British field hospital at Camp Bastion for medical treatment. Read the full story

RAWA

Again the world has been plunged into a newly terrifying nightmare. The US and its allies are willing to destroy Saddam Hussain's regime- the regime with which till yesterday they were allied and which they supported in the war against Iran- and impose their own puppet government on the Iraqi people and by doing so repeat the ghastly tragedy of the Gulf War in which Saddam survived but the war caused the deaths of hundreds of thousands of innocent Iraqi people.

While a war against terrorism in the name of democracy is the excuse for the attack, the people of Afghanistan, at least, know well the hidden nature of these claims and excuses.
First the terrorist Gulbuddin Hekmatyar was the favorite son - the recent American pronouncements against this hangman are meaningless. Then Osama and Mullah Omar occupied his place and now finally they polished the grim appearance of the "Northern Alliance", beautifying them with pantaloons and neckties, and imposed them on our people.

Will America do better than this in Iraq? The Iraqi people have suffered and been pushed to the limit by the crimes of Saddam's regime but this has never meant that they ask the US and its allies to save them with military intervention. The change of government in each country is the prerogative of the people of that country, otherwise the result will be neither stable nor sustainable for the long term. The puppet regimes of Parcham and Khalq followed by the criminal Jehadi regime, the Taliban and finally the re-imposition of the Jehadis, with Karzai as the President, are all proof of this claim.

Even Afghan and other children throughout the world ask why, if the US wants to destroy rulers like Saddam Hussain, has it imposed the war criminals and professional terrorists, who are worse than Saddams, in Afghanistan?

If the US considers Saddam as a threat to the peace and security of the world and region and for this reason intends to disarm Iraq, then why does it support Israel, which is equipped with atomic weapons and is the butcher of the Palestinian people?

Why doesn't the US government, which without any strong evidence or facts claims that the Iraqi regime has connections with Al Qaida, seriously consider these suspicions regarding other Arabic countries? Why doesn't the US government, which calls itself the champion of democracy, pay any respect to the voices of millions of anti-war people around the globe?

The answers to all these questions are crystal clear to everyone:

It is the oil of Iraq (the most important oil reserve in the world), the domination of the Middle East, the threatening and bullying of other countries and finally the desire to surpass its rivals that makes the US government resolute and determined to invade Iraq. It should be noted that still it is not clear which countries will come under attack after the occupation of Iraq.

The US and Britain governments have been exposed as warmongering and hegemonic regimes.

But what is clear in today's world is the stand and wishes of the majority of the people who are separate from their governments.

The people of the world and of the US in particular will not allow the Bush administration to misuse the 11th September incident and, in their name and under the banner of democracy, impose war and bring catastrophe on poor and suffering nations.

Just now the anti-war and anti-jingoism call of the people is so strong in the US, the UK, and all over the world that Bush and Tony Blair can't overlook or ignore it.

The majority of UN Security Council members are also standing against the US and British jingoism, and emphasizing the continuation of the UN inspectors' work. But this is not enough. We must all stand against the war on Iraq and never let it happen.

The Afghan people who have suffered in the fires of war for the past 25 years deeply hate war more than most other nations, but unfortunately in Afghanistan they cannot mingle their anti-war protest voices with the millions of other anti-war protestors around the world because of the domination of the fundamentalist dictatorship in Afghanistan.

The Revolutionary Association of the Women of Afghanistan (RAWA) is pleased that at least in Pakistan through today's demonstration it can announce its solidarity with all peace-loving movements in every nook and corner of the world and can represent and echo the choked and muted voice of its fettered nation against war and warmongers.
Read the full story

The Independent, March 11, 2008
By Kim Sengupta in Mazar-i-Sharif, Afghanistan

There is no one as colourful and controversial among the warlords of Afghanistan as General Abdul Rashid Dostum, a man of immense power and huge wealth whose name became synonymous with bloodshed and betrayal during the long years of conflict.

General Dostum, who once ruled a northern swath of the country with an iron fist is now under siege, with an arrest warrant against him and stripped of his post as chief of staff to the army commander.
A police attempt to arrest the warlord at his home in Kabul's diplomatic enclave of Wazir Akbar Khan ended in a stand-off with his bodyguards, armed with rocket-propelled grenades. But police freed four men being held hostage, among them Akbar Bai, a close ally of General Dostum before they fell out, and his son. They are in hospital with "serious injuries" including "internal damage".

Mr Bai, a leader of the country's Turkmen community, had accused General Dostum of a range of crimes, including plotting to lead an insurrection and the murder of opponents in the Turkmen community. The general and 70 of his men had seized him from his house in the same part of Kabul and, it is alleged, subjected him and his son to hours of torture.

After widespread public consternation over the incident, General Dostum said he would be willing to settle the matter through community elders, and he would ask President Hamid Karzai to intervene if legal proceedings are started against him. "What they are saying against me is wrong and designed to create instability in Afghanistan," he said. "The people who are saying this have hidden motives and they should be warned that this will have bad consequences."

But Mr Bai has made a formal complaint, saying the general "has committed a crime and must be punished if there is law and democracy in this country. This is on top of many other crimes he has committed".

The Attorney General, Abdul Jabar Sabat, who is said to have presidential ambitions and likes to portray himself standing up to strongmen, declared: "The case is that someone enters someone else's house in the middle of Kabul city 500 metres from the presidential palace, beats the people in that house, kidnaps them and abuses them. If the law is not implemented against such a person, it means there is no law at all. If General Dostum knew there was the certainty of the law being implemented, he would not dare to have done it."
President Karzai said: "This culture of impunity has to stop. I can live with undue influence, because it is part of this arrangement we have. But we cannot tolerate and protect criminals, or the whole arrangement will lose its moral existence. We are running out of options."

General Dostum is now in his base at Shibirghan in the north, where his private army is being rearmed, and supporters hold daily demonstrations threatening an uprising unless the arrest warrant against him is revoked and his official powers are restored. The Uzbek, physically a big, bear-like man, is said to be feeling isolated. Increasingly, to the worry of his staff, he is drinking vodka heavily.

But his remarkable ability to survive and bounce back from reverses cannot be underestimated. The man who started as a farm labourer and styled himself the "new Tamerlane", had in his time managed to switch sides repeatedly between the Russians, Afghan- istan's communist government, the Mujahedin, the Taliban, the Northern Alliance of Ahmed Shah Masud and the Americans, successfully playing off one against the other.

Abdul Rashid Dostum, Afghan strongman

* General Dostum is accused of responsibility for the worst atrocity in the 2001 war on the Taliban, when an estimated 400 Taliban prisoners suffocated in containers on their way to Shibirgan prison run by the warlord in northern Afghanistan.

* The journalist Ahmed Rashid noticed pieces of flesh on the ground during a visit to General Dostum's headquarters near Mazar-i-Sharif. Rashid asked a guard whether a goat had just been slaughtered for a meal, and was told that the remains were, in fact, those of a soldier who had been caught stealing. General Dostum had ordered him to be tied to the tracks of a tank which then drove around the courtyard shredding the body.

* General Dostum also reportedly said: "I am dying of these accusations from the international community. 'What is happening in Mazar with these mass killing? Why are you so cruel?' ... If any one of my commanders commits these kinds of acts, I will kill him tomorrow." Read the full story

IRIN News, March 10, 2008

"Our children will die if we do not receive urgent assistance," said a local elder, Atiqullah, on the phone.
GHAZNI: Food shortages in Ajristan District of Ghazni Province, central Afghanistan, have forced some families to eat dried grass in order to survive, local people and the district administrator told IRIN.

"Many families in Ajristan are eating different kinds of dried grass and vegetables like alfalfa, which are normally given to cattle, due to food shortages and extreme poverty," said Raz Mohammad Hemat, the district administrator.Alfalfa (Medicago sativa) is a flowering plant cultivated for forage. In the UK it is known as lucerne. The plant grows to a height of up to one metre, and has a deep root system sometimes spanning 4.5 metres. This makes it very resilient, especially to drought.

Ajristan District - with an estimated population of 100,000, predominately Pashtuns, and lying about 200km south of Ghazni city - saw heavy snowfall in the past three months, which blocked roads, affected staple food prices on local markets, and killed hundreds of animals.

There are staggering: 60,000 children in Afghanistan are addicted to drugs, and another 100,000 are disabled and otherwise severely affected physically due to prolonged conflicts in the country.

Plea for help

A spokesman for the governor of Ghazni Province, Abdullah Nashir, confirmed widespread food shortages in Ajristan and Nawa districts but gave assurances that relief items would be delivered to the affected communities as soon as the roads re-open.

Many families in Ajristan are eating different kinds of dried grass and vegetables like alfalfa, which are normally given to cattle, due to food shortages and extreme poverty.

The consumption of dried alfalfa and grass has raised concern about diarrhoea and sight disorders among the local population.

Continued consumption of dried grass and alfalfa - as the only diet - can worsen a person’s, particularly children’s, susceptibility to diarrhoea and in the long-run can lead to malnourishment, according to Abdullah Fahim, a spokesman for the Ministry of Public Health.

"Patients do not receive adequate treatment in the only health clinic in the district and there is also a lack of medication in local drug stores," said one resident.

Some 50,000-70,000 widows live in Kabul alone.

However, officials in Ghazni's public health department said adequate medical supplies sufficient for six months were dispatched to Ajristan District before winter and more will be delivered quickly if needed.

"We have not received any reports about any [disease] outbreaks in Ajristan," said Ziagul Asfandi, the provincial director of public health. He acknowledged that acute food-insecurity could increase children's vulnerability to communicable diseases.Displaced people in Badakhshan

In the northeastern province of Badakhshan hundreds of families have reportedly been displaced due to food-insecurity in several areas, provincial officials reported.

Preliminary assessments conducted by the Afghan Red Crescent Society (ARCS) indicated that up to 1,000 families had left their homes in Argo and Kishm districts, some of whom had moved to neighbouring Takhaar and Kunduz provinces in search of food.

"There are risks that more families will abandon their houses," warned Saeed Nasir, the provincial head of ARCS.

Roads to several districts in Badakhshan Province - which has a rugged terrain and poor road infrastructure - have remained blocked due to heavy snow and avalanches.

WFP aid programme

According to the World Food Programme (WFP), increases of up to 70 percent in staple food prices, road blockages and other winter-related problems have pushed millions of Afghans into "high risk food-insecurity".

In response, the Afghan government and the UN launched a joint appeal for about US$80 million on 24 January to provide an emergency "safety net" for 2.55 million vulnerable Afghans across the country.

WFP said donors had responded generously to the appeal and an emergency food assistance programme had begun in Kabul, which would soon be extended to other provinces, including Ghazni and Badakhshan.

"Food aid is ready for up to 85,000 people in Ghazni Province and delivery will begin as soon as we receive the lists of beneficiaries from the Ministry of Martyrs and Disabled," Ebadullah Ebadi, a spokesman for WFP, told IRIN in Kabul.

Relief items are also available in WFP stocks in Faizabad, the provincial capital of Badakhshan, which will be distributed to beneficiaries when roads re-open, Ebadi said.

WFP plans to distribute 89,000 tonnes of emergency food aid between now and mid-year, in addition to the 180,000 tonnes that it intends to distribute in 2008 for nearly 3.7 million Afghans affected by conflict, natural disasters and food-insecurity.
Read the full story

Spero News, March 9, 2008

Sexual violence, especially in the home, is on the increase in Afghanistan - according to a UN report. Lack of pre-natal and post-partum care also cited.

Since March of 2007 until now, there has been a 40% increase in reports of physical violence against women in Afghanistan, according to United Nations sources.The Afghan Independent Human Rights Commission (AIHRC) says that in many parts of the country security has decreased, while the sense of impunity has risen, public institutions are often weak, and poverty is widespread. But there are also cultural causes, like coerced marriage.According to alarming data from Womankind Worldwide, a charitable British group, 80% of Afghan women suffer domestic violence, 60% of marriages are coerced, and half of women are married before the age of 16.

Suraya Subhrang, a member of the AIHRC, comments that "in spite of six years of international rhetoric on the emancipation of Afghan women, there has been no real change in the lives of millions of women". The group recorded 626 suicide attempts by women in 2007, with 130 deaths, many linked to physical and psychological violence.

The number of women attempting suicide in the past year was 626, of whom 130 died. Suicide methods included self-immolation, the slashing of veins and taking lethal doses of drugs, according to the AIHRC.
IRIN News, March 9, 2008

The health care situation is even worse, with 1,600-1,900 women out of 100,000 dying in childbirth, a percentage that is second only to that of Sierra Leone. According to official UN data, each year at least 24,000 women in the country die from childbirth and infections related to it, and it is estimated that 87% of the deaths could be prevented. More than 70% of women do not receive medical care during pregnancy, 40% have no access to emergency obstetric care, and 48% suffer from iron deficiency.Today the secretary general of the United Nations, Ban Ki-moon, on the occasion of International Women's Day, asked governments and international organisations for "more investment on behalf of women and girls", "in order to reach the objective" of effective equality.

According to IRIN News (March 9, 2008):

Gender violence has reached “shocking and worrying” levels in Afghanistan and efforts must be redoubled to tackle it, the country’s human rights watchdog and civil society organisations said. “Our findings clearly indicate that despite over six years of international rhetoric about Afghan women’s emancipation and development, a real and tangible change has not touched the lives of millions of women in this country,” Suraya Subhrang, a commissioner on the rights of women at AIHRC, said.

Cases of rape and self-immolation appeared to be going up: “In 2006 we recorded 1,545 cases of violence against [or severe psychological oppression of] women, which included 98 cases of self-immolation and 34 cases of rape, while in 2007 we listed 2,374 cases of violence, which constitute 165 self-immolations and 51 cases of rape,” Subhrang told IRIN in Kabul. Read the full story

Green Left Weekly, March 8, 2008
Peter Boyle

The rough estimates that have been attempted point to a civilian casualty toll many times that of the September 11 terror bombing in the US that is used to justify this war.

It has to be one of the most unbelievable stories of the century: New Idea, a magazine that trades on gossip about royals and other celebrities, is blamed for exposing Prince Harry’s deployment in the British military intervention in Afghanistan. It is about as believable as the plot of Mark Twain’s The Prince and the Pauper, in which a young prince swaps places with a street lad to see what life is like in “Paupersville”.Prince Harry was rushed back to the safety of Britain and the mass media was flooded with slick videos and glossy pics of the Prince “fighting the Taliban”. After a bit of finger wagging at New Idea’s editors for putting the prince in mortal danger, the story settled into a familiar fairy tale: brave prince puts himself on the line in battle against the forces of darkness.

The original source of this “leak” was probably the military and the British royal family, desperate for a break from endless reruns of Princess Di death stories. It was another PR job for British feudal relics. But more insidiously it sold the idea that the war on Afghanistan is a just war, a good war.

The US government and its allies have committed an unforgivable betrayal to our people by mounting the Jehadi mafias in the power. They have left no doubt for our people and the world that they are after their own global and regional interests and that they have no use for stability, freedom and democracy in Afghanistan.

Of course that is a dirty lie. As one Australian officer accidentally let slip, “We’re fighting poor peasant boys”. According to the Human Development Index there are only four other countries in world poorer than Afghanistan. It is being occupied by an international military force that includes the richest and most powerful states in the world, such a the US, Britain and Australia. What are these foreign armies in Afghanistan protecting? A puppet government that is a coalition of opium warlords, feudal chiefs and right-wing religious fundamentalists. Opium production has more than doubled since the US-led invasion.

While there is no shortage of shots of Prince Harry in action in Afghanistan, you never see the bodies of the people he’s reportedly been shooting at.

Human rights organisations and the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) have been trying to obtain information about the scale of civilian casualties in the war in Afghanistan but a full cover up is in place.
“Since US troops first set foot in Afghanistan in 2001, the Defense Department has gone to unprecedented lengths to control and suppress information about the human costs of war,” said Anthony D. Romero, director of the ACLU in April last year.
The rough estimates that have been attempted point to a civilian casualty toll many times that of the September 11 terror bombing in the US that is used to justify this war. An eye for an eye? No, make that 10 or 100. And they tell us this is a war against barbarism!

Green Left Weekly needs your help to continue as a voice for truth and justice. We had a tough week with our Fighting Fund last week, raising only $2762. Read the full story

The Associated Press, February 19, 2008
By Allauddin Khan and Noor Khan

Country's deadliest insurgent attack since a U.S. invasion defeated the Taliban regime in late 2001
KANDAHAR - A suicide car bomber killed 38 Afghans at a crowded market Monday, pushing the death toll from two days of militant bombings to about 140.

The marketplace blast, which targeted a Canadian army convoy, came a day after the country's deadliest insurgent attack since a U.S. invasion defeated the Taliban regime in late 2001. The toll from that bombing in a crowd watching a dog fight rose to more than 100. The back-to-back blasts in the southern province of Kandahar could be a sign insurgents are now willing to risk high civilian casualties while attacking security forces. Though their attacks occasionally have killed dozens, militants in Afghanistan have generally sought to avoid targeting civilians, unlike insurgents in Iraq's war.

"The attacks show that the enemies of Afghanistan are changing their tactics. Now they are not thinking about civilians at all," said Nasrullah Stanikzai, a professor of political science at Kabul University.

"They wanted to cause such big casualties in these attacks to weaken the morale of the government and the international community, to show the world the Afghan government is too weak to prevent them," he said.

NATO said it expects insurgents in Afghanistan turn more often to suicide bombings in the months ahead. The deployment of more troops into the insurgents' heartland has restricted their ability to hold territory and launch conventional attacks, said U.S. Army Gen. John Craddock, NATO's supreme commander, said at the alliance's headquarters in Belgium.

"I would expect that they will look for other ways to come back and it'll be irregular, asymmetric, it'll be with what is very sensational and resonates in the press and other places, that's the bombings," Craddock said.

The Taliban denied it carried out Sunday's attack, but immediately claimed responsibility for the market bombing, which took place in the town of Spin Boldak about 100 yards from the border with Pakistan.

The bombings come amid warnings that Afghanistan could see even more violence this year than in 2007, when a record 6,500 people _ most of them militants _ were killed. The U.S., with a record high 28,000 soldiers already in the country, is sending 3,200 more Marines in April.

Hours before the marketplace bombing, Kandahar Gov. Asadullah Khalid raised the toll from Sunday's attack from about 80 to more than 100, saying some of the dozens who suffered wounds had died.

Khalid said 38 people died in Monday's bombing and 28 were wounded. Three Canadian soldiers also had wounds, NATO's International Security Assistance Force said.

The governor complained that Canadian troops had failed to heed government warnings to stay away from the border with Pakistan.

"We informed the Canadian forces to avoid patrolling the border areas because our intelligence units had information that suicide attackers were in the areas and wanted to target Canadian or government forces," he said. "Despite informing the Canadians, they went to those areas anyway."

A Canadian military spokesman, Lt. Cmdr. Pierre Babinsky, said threats of attacks would not deter troops from their missions.

"We regularly receive threat warnings and obviously we go where we want to, when we want to, in our area of operation," Babinsky said. "We obviously take notice of these warnings but our aim is to operate freely within our area of operation despite those."

Though the Afghan-Pakistan border was closed Monday because of national elections in Pakistan, some of the wounded were taken to a hospital in Chaman, Pakistan, just across the border.

One of them, Abdul Hakim, lay in a hospital bed, his clothes caked with dust and splattered with blood.

"A white Toyota Corolla car rammed the second vehicle in the convoy as it passed through the bazaar," said Hakim, who witnessed the attack from his grocery store. "Then there was a huge explosion. It was dust. I do not know what happened to me."

One of the Canadian military vehicles was heavily damaged by the blast as were several shops and civilian vehicles, said Abdul Razeq, the Spin Boldak border police chief.

When asked about the large number of civilian deaths, Taliban spokesman Qari Yousef Ahmadi claimed 10 foreign soldiers and "a large number of police" were killed. The Taliban often make false or exaggerated claims that their attacks kill NATO or U.S. troops.

Meanwhile, Afghans buried relatives and friends who died in Sunday's attack. Officials said the attacker targeted an anti-Taliban militia leader, Abdul Hakim Jan, who died along with 35 of his men, who served on a government auxiliary police force.

Khalid, the Kandahar governor, told mourners at a mosque he had warned Jan about three weeks ago that militant suicide bombers were trying to kill him. Government officials haven't identified any suspects in the attack.

Antonio Giustozzi, an Afghanistan expert at the London School of Economics, said it couldn't be ruled out that the attack was carried out by one of Jan's tribal rivals.

Kandahar province, the Taliban's former stronghold, has been the scene of fierce battles between NATO forces and Taliban fighters the last two years.

The province, one of the country's largest opium-producing regions, could again be a flash point in the increasingly violent Afghan conflict this year.

The previous deadliest bombing in Afghanistan killed about 70 people _ mostly students _ in November, part of a record year of violence in 2007 that included more than 140 suicide attacks. Read the full story

Last year, a man sentenced to death for kidnapping an Italian aid worker escaped while being transferred from Pol-i-Charki's old wing to the execution ground.
The Times, February 23, 2008
Jeremy Page in Kabul
On the outskirts of Kabul stands probably the nicest prison wing between Warsaw and Tokyo — complete with security cameras, electronic locks, shaded visiting areas and UN-approved levels of natural light.Built by the United Nations with mostly British money, the “secure wing” of Kabul's Pol-i-Charki prison was designed to hold 96 of the top Afghan drug barons whose business helps to fund a Taliban insurgency.The idea was that it would be impossible for them to escape.

But 18 months after it opened, the problem is getting anyone inside. British and UN officials have told The Times that the wing, built by the UN Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC), with British funding of £1.1 million, stands empty. The reason, they say, is that it is not yet finished — although it was nearing completion when The Times visited in April 2006 and was declared open later that year.

Antonio Maria Costa, the UNODC chief, said in September 2006: “It has 100 beds. We want these beds to be taken up in the next few months.”

The problem now appears to be that the UN insisted on the highest Western standards without appreciating that the elecricity grid could not provide a stable power supply to heat the place and run the cameras, locks and gates. Christina Oguz, UNODC's Afghanistan representative, said: “It would have been irresponsible to hand over the secure wing of the prison to the Ministry of Justice before it was functional. We very much regret the delay.”

The wing is now due to be handed over on April 1 — complete with its own generators. But even if it is, Afghan authorities have yet to arrest, and let alone convict, any of the “high-value” targets for whom it was built, according to British officials.

“High-value” targets are the ringleaders of the 30 large networks thought to run the drugs trade in Afghanistan, which produces 90 per cent of the world's illegal opium.

The empty prison wing is a telling symbol of the international community's failure to curb Afghanistan's drugs industry, which is expected to earn the Taliban about £50 million this year.

The UNODC predicted this month that Afghanistan's opium production would drop only slightly this year, after a 34 per cent rise last year, and would increase in the insurgency-racked south.

Afghan officials blame the international community for not providing security and economic alternatives — and for wasting money on things such as a world-class prison. General Abdullah Azizi, of the Justice Ministry's prison department, told The Times: “We could make four or five prisons for that money, but it was the UNODC's decision. We don't know why.” He said Afghanistan's 35 prisons were so overcrowded that the ministry rented ten houses to use as jails.

Western officials, however, say a big part of the problem is corruption in the Afghan police, judicial and prison systems, which allows many drug traffickers and Taliban fighters to buy their freedom.One official said: “It's reached a point where the police, rather than providing security, are seen as a major security threat. People are just paying their way out of jail.”

Mullah Naqibullah, a senior Taliban commander, boasted last month that he had escaped custody for the third time in three years after paying a bribe of $15,000 (£7,600) to Afghanistan's National Directorate of Security. Lower-level Taliban fighters say they have bought their freedom for as little as $1,000 each. Last year, a man sentenced to death for kidnapping an Italian aid worker escaped while being transferred from Pol-i-Charki's old wing to the execution ground.

The IMF says opium production has risen by 4,000 percent since 2001 and earns Afghan farmers about $1 billion a year. An estimated 93 percent of the world's heroin, made from opium, comes from Afghanistan. Analysts say the Taliban insurgency derives much of its revenue from the illegal opium trade.
VOA, Feb.20, 2008

British officials say the picture is not as bleak as the empty prison suggests. They point to the success of two British-funded outfits — the 1,700-strong Counter Narcotics Police of Afghanistan and the Criminal Justice Task Force (CJTF), which includes investigators, prosecutors and judges.

Last year the CJTF processed 331 cases, convicting 278 people and acquitting 102. Among those convicted were five border police sentenced to 16-18 years each in October for transporting 123kg (270lb) of pure crystal heroin in an official vehicle.

“I don't want to sound victorious but we're starting to get there,” said one counter-narcotics official. “We're seeing more medium-value targets picked up.” “Medium-value” targets are the ringleaders' lieutenants while “low-value” targets are the “mules” who transport the drugs.

The problem, though, is that the few who are convicted are still being housed in Afghanistan's ordinary prisons, whose population has swollen from 600 in 2001 to 10,400 last year. “The older and more crowded the prisons are, obviously the higher the risk of a security breach,” said one official involved in the new wing. Read the full story

AFP, February 21, 2008
The USGS estimates there are about 700 billion cubic metres of gas and 300 million tonnes of oil across several northern provinces.

KABUL — Afghanistan is sitting on a wealth of mineral reserves -- perhaps the richest in the region -- that offer hope for a country mired in poverty after decades of war, the mining minister says.

Significant deposits of copper, iron, gold, oil and gas, and coal -- as well as precious gems such as emeralds and rubies -- are largely untapped and still being mapped, Mohammad Ibrahim Adel told AFP.And they promise prosperity for one of the world's poorest countries, the minister said, dismissing concerns that a Taliban-led insurgency may thwart efforts to unearth this treasure.Already in the pipeline is the exploitation of a massive copper deposit -- one of the biggest in the world -- about 30 kilometres (20 miles) east of Kabul.

"There has not been such a big project in the history of Afghanistan," Adel said.A 30-year lease for the Aynak copper mine was in November offered to the China Metallurgical Group Corporation and the contract is being finalised.

"It is estimated that the Aynak deposit has more than 11 million tonnes (of copper)," he said, citing 1960s surveys by the Soviet Union and a new study by the United States Geological Survey (USGS).

"With today's prices, it contains an 88-billion-dollar deposit," he said.

The mine is expected to bring the government 400 million dollars annually in fees and taxes, Adel said.

That is on top of an 800-million-dollar downpayment from the developer who has also committed to build a railway line, a power plant and a village for workers, complete with schools, clinics and roads.

About 5,000 jobs will be created and mining is expected to start in five years. "Up to 40 percent of the income will pour into our pockets," Adel said.

Afghanistan is ranked as one of the world's most corrupt countries by Transparency International, a Berlin-based monitoring agency.
VOA, Feb.20, 2008

The colossal Aynak project represents, however, only a fraction of Afghanistan's unexploited resources, he said. The scale of the deposits is still being charted.

The USGS is carrying out a nationwide survey of mineral wealth and oil and gas deposits that is expected to be completed in a year, Adel said.

Studies of only 10 percent of the country have discovered abundant deposits of copper, iron, zinc, lead, gold, silver, gems, salt, marble and coal, the ministry says.

The USGS estimates there are about 700 billion cubic metres of gas and 300 million tonnes of oil across several northern provinces.

A Soviet survey estimated there are more than two billion tonnes of iron reserves, the ministry says.

One of the best known iron deposits is at Haji Gak, 90 kilometres west of Kabul.

"If everything goes as we desire, Haji Gak requires two to three billion dollars' investment," said the minister.

"Another 100 million to 1.5 billion dollars is needed to explore the gas and oil mines."

The government plans to offer more projects for private sector tender next year, Adel said.

There is already some mining underway such as ad hoc emerald extraction in the Panjshir valley region northeast of Kabul, where dynamite is used to blow gems out of the ground.

The site for the mine at Aynak, 60 km southeast of Kabul contains the world's second-biggest unexploited copper deposit with the potential to generate revenue of $1.4 billion a year. Of greatest danger is the threat of toxic waste which has led to environmental damage around copper mines in several countries.
Reuters, Dec.12, 2007

And the ministry has handed two coal mines to private Afghan companies, although they lack standard equipment.The Aynak contract will be a model for others, with developers expected to put in basic infrastructure as Afghanistan's power grid is weak and its transport network limited.

There is also the challenge of the insurgency, which overshadows development and has made many areas off-limits to foreign companies.

Writer and analyst Waheed Mujda warned there could be no mining in Taliban-held areas, which are mostly in the south, without the permission of the Islamic extremists.

"Any kind of agreement with Taliban will have to involve money and that money obviously would finance the insurgency in part," Mujda told AFP.

But Adel is not concerned. "We can provide security for mining sites simply by hiring a private security company," he said.

Most of the deposits that have been discovered are in the relatively stable north. There are, however, uranium reserves in the southern province of Helmand, one of the worst for Taliban attacks, the minister said.

The minister's sights are firmly set on mining bringing his impoverished country a brighter future.

"In five years' time Afghanistan will not need the world's aid money," he said. "In 10 years Afghanistan will be the richest country in the region." Read the full story

Prof. Marc W. Herold, February 21, 2008
Eleven people were killed in the air strike including seven members of one family – a woman, 2 children, and 4 men.
Late Sunday, February 3/4, 2008 in a compound in Bakwa district, Shagay area of Farah Province. NATO occupation and Afghan forces carried out an air and ground assault upon a home where allegedly a Taliban commander was present. Eleven people were killed in the air strike including seven members of one family – a woman, 2 children, and 4 men. The raiders also abducted seven family members to a fate unknown. The photo from Iran’s Alalam News shows relatives mourning the dead.As usual the news wire service headlines were revealing:

“Air Strike Kills 7 Civilians in Afghanistan,” Reuters (Feb 4, 2008, 11:51 AM GMT)
“Afghan Air Strike Kills Eight,” Reuters (Feb, 2008 at 5:50 GMT)
“Ten Civilians Killed in Airstrike in Afghanistan,” DPA (Feb 4, 2008, 10:11 GMT)
“Women, Children Killed in Afghan Raid: Local Officials,” Agence France Presse (Feb 4, 2008)
“Afghan, NATO Troops Kill 10 Civilians,” Press TV (Iran) (Feb 4, 2008 at 13:54:56)
“Occupiers Kill Afghan Civilians,” Prensa Latina (Cuba) (Feb 4, 2008)
“19 Dead in Raids, Clashes in Afghanistan,” Associated Press (Feb 4, 2008)
“Provincial Official Says Civilians Killed in Afghan West Operation,” Afghan Islamic Press printed by BBC Worldwide Monitoring (February 12, 2008)

Noor Khan, Associated Press reporter based in Kandahar, omits all reference to civilians dying and no mention is made of air strikes. The Associated Press heeds the Pentagon and official U.S. preference, neglecting or burying the sensitive issue of civilian causalities caused by the US/NATO occupation forces’ actions.

Eleven days after the deadly attack, a report by the private Pakistan-based news service, Afghan Islamic Press news agency provided further shocking details, which I quote:

Herat, 12 February: The chairman of the Provincial Council of Farah [western Afghanistan] says those killed in Farah are not Taleban, but civilians, including three women. Speaking to Afghan Islamic Press [AIP] this morning, the chairmanof Farah Provincial Council, Abdol Qader Daqiq, said: "The 11 people killed by foreigners in an operation duringthe night in the Shagay area of Bakwa District some days ago were not Taleban, but civilians, who also included three women."

Mr Daqiq said: "Foreign forces directly went to this area from Kandahar and killed whoever they saw there. They even killed people in their blankets." Mr Daqiq who seemed quite disturbed by the incident told AIP: "There was not even a single Taleb in the area and pilgrims were guests there and even one of the pilgrims was also martyred inthe attack who had come from the pilgrimage only 14 days ago."

Mr Daqiq said: "I am not saying this, but after the incident, 100 elders and leaders of Bakwa, Golestan and Delaram Districts came to the Provincial Council and said all of those killed were civilians. These elders and leadersalso visited the governor, National Security Department and the PRT [Provincial Reconstruction Team] and told them the whole story. They said that foreign forces had killed civilians." Mr Daqiq also said: "This incident has disturbed people a great deal and they are not happy. If such operations continue, people may migrate to another country or move to the mountains. This will also help the Taleban conduct their propaganda."

Asked what they demanded of the government, the chairman of Farah Provincial Council said: "No-one apologized for killing these people nor did they assist and sympathize with them. This is not fair. They should apologize for killing these people and assist and sympathize with them. Such operations should not be carried out in future, so that the gap between the government and the nation does not widen."
In memory of and sympathy for

Faiz Mohammad, 79
Mauladad, son of Bismallah
Allahdad, 10, child of Bismallah
Shah Wali, son of Noor Mohammad
Ahmad Shah, 14, child of Gul Baran
Haji Saleh, son of Haji Qalander
Malok, child of Mohammad Masoom
3 women killed
Gul Baran, son of Noor Mohammad, injured
Janan, 11, son of Masoom, injured
Mohammad Wali, 7, son of Shah Wali, injured
Khara, 5, son of Mauladad, injured
A woman injured
7 family members abducted (to a fate unknown) Read the full story

IRIN News, March 5, 2008
Preventable diseases such as diarrhoea, cholera, dysentery and pneumonia kill about 600 under-five Afghan children every day, according to the UN Children's Fund (UNICEF).

ASADABAD - Saliha still mourns the death of her three-year-old daughter, Halima, who died due to severe diarrhoea at a hospital in Kunar Province, eastern Afghanistan, on 11 January.

The child had drunk contaminated water which Saliha's family collects from a nearby river and uses for all purposes, including drinking, cooking and washing. About 200 metres away from where households in Spinkay village, Asmar District, collect water, is a mosque built across the river where dozens of men gather for prayer five times a day. Men who come to the mosque often perform their ablutions (washing their hands, arms, face, head and feet) with river water. Some even urinate and/or defecate near the riverbanks, and refresh afterwards with the river water.

It is not always a surprise for locals to see human faeces, sputum and even animal dung floating in the running water. There is a consensus among some residents in Spinkay village, and indeed many other rural communities across Afghanistan, that "flowing water" is always clean, unless the colour, smell and taste is changed.

However, not only was Saliha's daughter killed by the "flowing" river water but many other children also suffer various water-borne diseases, according to medical experts in Asadabad, provincial capital of Kunar Province.

Preventable diseases such as diarrhoea, cholera, dysentery and pneumonia kill about 600 under-five Afghan children every day, according to the UN Children's Fund (UNICEF).

About 25 percent of under-five children in Afghanistan are affected annually by diseases originating from poor and/or bad sanitation.

World's worst toilets

According to the State of the World's Toilets 2007 report, about 92 percent of Afghanistan's estimated 26.6 million population do not have access to proper sanitation. This has placed the country at the top of the list of "the worst places in the world for sanitation".

UNICEF statistics show that 34 percent of Afghans (urban 49 percent, rural 29 percent) are using adequate sanitation facilities.

Others also highlight the problem: "The sanitation status of Afghanistan, where 60 percent of the population lives in unplanned shantytowns and where there are growing inequalities in cities in terms of sanitation, is not satisfactory," Bindeshwar Pathak, founder of New Delhi-based Sulabh International, a sanitation and social services organisation, told IRIN.

Open defecation is prevalent, causing social, health, environmental and development problems.

In the past six years the government of Afghanistan and the international aid community has spent a lot of development money on projects that have improved access to drinking water, while sanitation issues have received little or no funding, according to the Ministry of Rural Rehabilitation and Development.

As poor sanitation hurts communities throughout the country, killing thousands of children, there are hopes that the issue of sanitation will be brought into the development process.

"UNICEF wants to pay greater attention to sanitation and the government has also increasingly realised the importance of sanitation," said Nadarjah Moorthy, head of the water and environmental sanitation unit with UNICEF in Kabul.

Poor waste management

Officials in Kabul Municipality estimate that the over three million people living there produce at least 1,500 cubic metres of solid waste every day. However, due to lack of resources and a limited capacity, the municipality does not collect more than half of the waste from open locations in and around Kabul city."We collect 700-800 cubic metres of solid waste in Kabul city on a daily basis, except Fridays," said Payenda Mohammad, an official at the department of waste management in the municipality.

Some of the remaining solid waste is either consumed by grazing animals in some parts of the city and/or collected by destitute children. "When it rains a lot of waste mixes with rainwater and often reaches drinking-water sources, which causes different diseases," Nasrullah Habibi, a specialist on sanitation with the UN Human Settlements Programme (UN-HABITAT) in Kabul, told IRIN.

The traditional dry vault toilet system – a specially-shaped dry vault that separately collects solid and liquid waste and which is commonly used in Afghanistan - is also considered a major health and sanitation problem.
Septic tanks and sewerage (whereby solid and liquid waste is collected near the home for disposal elsewhere) are two other widely used toilet systems, particularly in urban areas, both of which are not "safe" or "eco-friendly", according to Pathak of Sulabh International.

Sulabh has constructed five public toilets in Kabul city "with biogas digesters for recycling human waste into biogas, which can be used for lighting and electricity generation".
"The Sulabh two-pit-pour-flush toilet system is an appropriate and affordable solution to the crisis of dry vault toilets in Afghanistan," said Habibi of UN-HABITAT.

Boosting public awareness

The UN General Assembly has named 2008 the Year of Sanitation and has asked member states to improve their citizens' access to adequate sanitation.
UNICEF, in partnership with government bodies, plans to boost public awareness on personal hygiene and sanitation and save thousands of lives. "We will nominate 'model villages' to encourage communities to improve sanitation," said Nadarjah Moorthy, UNICEF's sanitation expert in Kabul. "It requires government, donors and communities' support," he added.

Personal hygiene

Apart from the widespread lack of a proper toilet system, experts such as Moorthy are concerned about very poor personal and family hygiene practices among Afghans.
"Hygiene practices need to change," said Moorthy. Improving sanitation and hygiene practices often requires behavioural change and takes a long time, he added.
A compelling reason for parents to improve their hygiene practices and sanitation is the very safety and well-being of their children: "I would have protected my daughter from all unclean things and would never have given her the river water, if I had known that that would kill her," said Saliha, the bereaved mother of Halima. Read the full story

They allegedly paid the jail chief USD20,000 in front money while the rest of the amount was to be given later on.
KABUL: Five Taliban militants, who escaped from the heavily-fortified Pul-i-Charkhi Prison on the eastern periphery of Kabul a day earlier, had been sentenced to death and long jail terms, one fugitive said on Thursday.

Mullah Naqibullah, a senior Taliban commander, boasted last month that he had escaped custody for the third time in three years after paying a bribe of $15,000 (£7,600) to Afghanistan's National Directorate of Security. Lower-level Taliban fighters say they have bought their freedom for as little as $1,000 each. Last year, a man sentenced to death for kidnapping an Italian aid worker escaped while being transferred from Pol-i-Charki's old wing to the execution ground.
The Times, Feb.23, 2008

With authorities still in denial of the breakout, one of the fleeing prisoners told Pajhwok Afghan News he had already arrived in Helmand along with four associates. Abdul Malik said in all seven inmates came out of their block but four were stopped by security guards at the entrance. Moments earlier, I was informed that two of them have been let off, revealed Malik, who identified the runaways as Mullah Muhammad Daud from Shinkai district of Zabul, Mullah Jan Muhammad from Nad Ali district of Helmand, Mullah Abdul Hayee from the same province and Mullah Khair Muhammad, also from Helmand.Mullah Daud had been awarded the death penalty while both Jan Muhammad and Abdul Hayee were sentenced to 16 years imprisonment. Similarly, Khair Muhammad was serving a five-year jail term, Malik explained.

A former prison official, Malik recalled, had offered to pave the ground for their flight in exchange for a $120,000 bribe. They allegedly paid the jail chief $20,000 in front money while the rest of the amount was to be given later on.
When removed from job, the jail superintendent assured us his colleagues would help us flee, the Helmand resident divulged without naming the officers who let them run away.
In a related development, a prisoner told Pajhwok by the telephone from Pul-i-Charkhi that the convicts had escaped from the Third Block. The caller, who sought anonymity, added the four men rang him up last night to say they had made it to a safe place.
One judicial officer, meanwhile, confirmed two prisoners had been missing and six others arrested while trying to steal out of jail. He confided a dozen prison officials, detained on suspicion of involvement in the incident, were being grilled.
However, Afghan prisons head Haji Abdul Salam Asmat and Pul-i-Charkhi Commander Haji Daulat Muhammad vehemently denied the breakout. Nothing could be said for sure until all Block Three inmates were counted, Salam argued.
Earlier in the day, Taliban spokesman Zabihullah Mujahid claimed three of the absconders from the sprawling Soviet-era prison were important rebel leaders. They slipped out of the prison disguised as inmate attendants, he said.
Although officials insisted the situation had returned to normal, sources alleged there was a commotion inside the prison. One inmate phoned this news agency to speak of the disorderly scenes.
As the prisoner spoke over the telephone, this scribe heard gunshots and loud harsh exchanges. The prisoner alleged jail wardens received heavy backhander to release illegally a number of inmates.
The jail staff later arrested attendants with the prisoners in a bid to cover up their crime, he charged. As a result, infuriated prisoners broke through iron gates to demand the immediate release of their attendants.
Read the full story

Some 2.8 per cent of the population aged between 15 and 64 use opiates, the UN says

By Stephen Fidler in London

Afghanistan's record poppy crop is fuelling an intensifying drugs emergency in neighbouring countries, a United Nations report published today warns.

The UN International Narcotics Control Board says the rise in Afghanistan's opium cultivation is "alarming" and that its effects - including an increase in organised crime, corruption and the incidence of drug use - are spilling over into Iran, Pakistan and the central Asian republics.Afghanistan is estimated to supply more than 90 per cent of the world's illicit opium, from which heroin is made. Poppies were cultivated on an estimated 193,000 hectares last year, 17 per cent up on 2006, according to UN estimates. The opium harvest jumped 34 per cent last year to an estimated 8,200 tonnes.
Much of the growth in poppy cultivation is taking place in the south of the country, where the Taliban insurgency against the government of President Hamid Karzai is most intense.

The Golden Crescent drug trade, launched by the CIA in the early 1980s, continues to be protected by US intelligence, in liason with NATO occupation forces and the British military. In recent developments, British occupation forces have promoted opium cultivation through paid radio advertisements.
Global Research, April 29, 2007

The issue is the subject of fierce policy disagreement, marked by disputes within Mr Karzai's government and with foreign donors and troop contributors.

Iran, the chief transit country for drugs from Afghanistan, now has the highest rate of opiate abuse in the world, the report states.
Some 2.8 per cent of the population aged between 15 and 64 use opiates, the UN says, equivalent to 1.3m people. This compares with 3.8m users in the whole of EuropeThe report says that more than half of inmates in Iran's prisons have been convicted for drug-related offences, and seizures of opium, morphine and heroin have risen rapidly. Iran seizes more opiates than any other country and im-pounded more than 180 tonnes of opium in the first half of 2007 alone.

"the Pakistan-Afghanistan borderlands became the world's top heroin producer, supplying 60 per cent of U.S. demand. In Pakistan, the heroin-addict population went from near zero in 1979 to 1.2 million by 1985, a much steeper rise than in any other nation."
"CIA assets again controlled this heroin trade. As the Mujahideen guerrillas seized territory inside Afghanistan, they ordered peasants to plant opium as a revolutionary tax. Across the border in Pakistan, Afghan leaders and local syndicates under the protection of Pakistan Intelligence operated hundreds of heroin laboratories. During this decade of wide-open drug-dealing, the U.S. Drug Enforcement Agency in Islamabad failed to instigate major seizures or arrests.
The Progressive, August 1, 1997

Pakistan, through which an estimated 35 per cent of Afghanistan's opiates are smuggled, faces growing problems, with seizures in 2006, the last year for which figures were available, rising 46 per cent.
An estimated 21 per cent of Afghanistan's heroin and morphine transit via central Asia, the report says, leading to large increases in seizures in Tajikistan, Turkmenistan and Uzbekistan.
"The in-creased availability of opiates in central Asia, with its population totalling 60m, resulted in an alarming rise in drug-related crime, the abuse of narcotics drugs and the spread of HIV/Aids," says the UN. The UN is also worried that drug trafficking and abuse in Armenia, Azerbaijan and Georgia, which have long borders with Turkey and Russia, will deteriorate further.
The problems are also being felt farther afield. The report says drug abuse in Iraq appears to have risen dramatically and while opiate use in western and central Europe has remained stable or declined, it has increased in Russia and eastern Europe.
The report also notes what it calls another worrying development in Afghanistan: the rise of cannabis cultivation in Afghanistan, including in some areas that have been declared poppy-free. The area under cannabis cultivation increased to 70,000ha last year, from 50,000ha in 2006 and 30,000ha in 2005. Read the full story

Shafaq has had other bad news as well: He will not be able to marry his girlfriend back in Waras. "I love her and she loved me," Shafaq says, but "when I sent my mother to ask for her hand from her father, he refused. Because I am a Hazara."

And so, Shafaq is alone, back in Hazarajat, teaching at Bamian University, where all the other teachers are also Hazaras. Like their students, they are earnest, motivated, intelligent—and a bit fearful. Since reopening in 2004, the university has grown.Beyond the entrance is a dusty courtyard where groups of smartly dressed male and female students, books in hand, make their way to class. The sign on the front of the school is written in three languages—in English and in Dari, the most common language in Afghanistan, and then in Pashtu, the language of the Pashtuns, in the largest script.

Shafaq teaches the history of Afghanistan during the enlightenment and the industrial revolution, expounding on John Locke and Abraham Lincoln, on liberty and democracy. His salary is 2,000 afghanis a month, about $40.

After so much hope, so many promises, the Hazaras are feeling ignored by the new government—led as it is by a Pashtun president. Across Hazarajat, the question echoes: Why has there not been more development and more interest in an area that is safe, where the population supports the government, where corruption is not widespread, where women play a role in public life, where poppies are not proliferating? It's not uncommon to hear farmers muse about growing poppies to sell on the heroin market, maybe even causing a little violence, because they think that might draw the government's attention.

Construction is not easy in this terrain, granted, but Hazarajat could be a model of what's possible when a region buys into the nation-building process. Yet so much time has passed. Already, the resurgence of the Tali-ban, who recently have targeted Hazara leaders in several districts abutting their southern strongholds, is stirring difficult memories. "Anytime we hear news of the Taliban on the radio, our bones turn to water," says Mohsin Moisafid in Kata Khona.

Perhaps a new generation of Afghan leaders will emerge to finally lead people beyond the mindset of war and warlords and jihad. Much depends on whether the Taliban will continue to grow, whether the international community will lose interest, whether the tensions between the U.S. and Iran, fellow Shiites, will adversely affect the Hazaras. Whatever happens, much more than the fate of the Hazara people is at stake. As Dan Terry, an American aid worker who has lived in Afghanistan for 30 years, puts it: What happens to the Hazaras is "not just the story of this people. It's the story of the whole country. It's everybody's story."

Phil Zabriskie has reported extensively in Afghanistan for Time magazine. Steve McCurry has shot for National Geographic for over 20 years and is the best known for his 1985 cover photo of an Afghan girl. Read the full story

The first job of the day is from a man who needs 20 bags of plaster moved to a work site. Pahlawan has wandered off, so Baba and Assadullah load the bags, 77 pounds each. Both men grasp the cart's bar, pulling roughly 1,500 pounds as cars and buses honk and spit fumes. Seven minutes and several hundred yards later, they turn into the mud-walled warrens of Kabul's backstreets. Breathing heavily, sweating profusely, they reach the site. They'll have to carry the bags the last 30 feet. Baba throws a bag over his shoulder and walks stooped over, head down, holding the bag with one hand, white powder spilling on his clothes. Another ten minutes and they're done. Baba and Assadullah get $1.20, to split."You see our situation, at my age," says Baba, turning his head so I see his good eye. He pulls out a snuff tin, puts a handful in his mouth before heading back to see if another job comes.

Some observers believe the discrimination Hazaras face in Kabul could be fueling a long-elusive sense of unity—and a desire for democracy. "I think there is a greater degree of Hazara nationalism in Kabul as compared with rural Hazarajat because people are experiencing this disparity between Hazara and non-Hazara in their day-to-day lives," says Ibrahimi. The director of the Afghan Independent Human Rights Commission, Sima Samar, agrees: "The Hazaras are more adaptable to democracy, because they feel the pain more than the others. They feel the discrimination. They really want equality and social justice."

Were the Buddhas still standing last May, they would have gazed down on a young man walking Bamian's main street, a bumpy unpaved tract with shops on both sides selling cooking oil, medicines, and building materials. A large billboard depicting Mazari, the martyred Hazara leader, stands on a hillside.

Musa Shafaq is back in the Hazara heartland. He did not get the job at Kabul University he wanted. "If I am going to live in Afghanistan, it should be in Kabul," he says. His stellar academic record should have made that possible. "He was one of the brightest students. He should have been recruited," says Issa Rezai, an adviser at the Ministry of Higher Education. But prejudice against Hazaras remains high at the university. Fundamentalist Pashtun professors still predominate, including some hard-core fundamentalists who led factions accused of atrocities against Hazara civilians. Sayed Askar Mousavi, author of The Hazaras of Afghanistan, says such discrimination underscores how little has fundamentally changed. In Bamian, he says, "there are two changes. There were two Buddhas, and now there are none."
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Scores of schools have been built in Hazarajat in recent years, mainly by aid agencies and the Bamian-based Provincial Reconstruction Team operated by New Zealand. In Daykundi's provincial capital, a group of teenagers said young people are refusing to marry until they finish school. Hazara high schoolers make up more than a third of those who take the university entrance exam, and the number—including the number of girls—is rising. Hazarajat is a deeply conservative place, but it is far from fundamentalist. Women here "go to school, they have their own pursuits, and they have their freedom," says Ryhana Azad, a female district council member in Daykundi.In time, perhaps, these seeds will bear fruit the whole society can sample, but for now families must address immediate concerns. Often that means going where the work is. In village after village you see women—wearing long skirts, blouses, and head scarves in greens, reds, and sky blues—shoveling snow off their roofs or harvesting fields by themselves, because the men are working as day laborers in Pakistan or Iran or Herat or Kabul. It's hard on those who go and hard on those who stay behind. But sometimes adapting to the landscape means finding a new one.

For many that new place is Kabul, where some 40 percent of the population is now Hazara. On neighborhood streets in the western part of the city, you see Hazara children in uniform going to school, Hazara vegetable vendors setting up their carts, and Hazara shop owners and tailors opening stores. Hossein Yasa, the editor of the Daily Outlook newspaper, notes that there are Hazara-owned television stations, Hazara-owned newspapers, and a huge Shiite madrassa and mosque complex under construction. "The middle class of Hazaras is growing very fast," Yasa says.

Watching from the sidelines, however, is a huge Hazara underclass made up of manual laborers living in west Kabul neighborhoods—Dasht-e Barchi, Kart-e She, and Chindawul—that have neither electricity nor clean water. "You are talking about ghettos," says Niamatullah Ibrahimi, a fellow with the London School of Economics.

Every day, the Hazara cart pullers are out on the main road of Dasht-e Barchi, wondering if they'll get any work. Sunup, sundown, winter, spring, summer, fall, they wait, hoping someone will hire them to use their carts to transport lumber, building materials, bags of wheat, cans of cooking oil, panes of glass, window frames, dishes for wedding receptions—something, anything—from one place to another.

Pahlawan, Baba, and Assadullah are three of many men doing this because they must, because it's all they know. They think themselves invisible, unseen, but in many ways they're the public face of Hazaras in Kabul, doing the jobs no one else wants. On a good day they'll earn 200 or 250 afghanis, four or five dollars. But they can never count on a good day. Pahlawan, "the wrestler," is the strongest, in his mid-30s, working since he was seven. "Every day we sit with our carts from morning to evening," he says. Zulfiqar Azimi is "Baba," 67, with a glass eye and missing fingers on one hand. "I have never had a moment of comfort in this life," he says. Assadullah is the youngest, quiet, handsome under all the dust. He recently returned from Iran. He is lean but moves stiffly. In his 20s, he says he used to be an expert martial artist. "Now," he says, "I have this cart."
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A Hazarajat winter, once it arrives, stays for six months. The snow renders roads impassable even with four-wheel drive and tire chains, and closes the high mountain passes that separate districts. Despite promises, years ago, by the government and international donors to pave the roads from Kabul to Bamian and Bamian to Yakawlang, most are still glorified mule tracks. In winter greater numbers of women die in childbirth because they can't get help in time. Even in the best of weather, farmers can't get crops to market. "We tried taking melons and peaches to Kabul, and it was juice by the time we got there," says Chris Eaton, CEO of the Aga Khan Foundation's Afghanistan office.Mohammed Akbar is a Hazara farmer with gray-blue eyes that match his tightly wound turban and an elfin face ringed by a white beard. He lives in Lorcha, a speck of a place in western Yakawlang. On a bluff above a narrow stream, mud-walled homes cling together in tightly packed clusters. These houses are among those the Taliban burned down in 2001. Every man in Lorcha can point to the mountain his family fled to and describe arduous journeys through thick snow lugging whatever they could carry. Today most damaged homes have been rebuilt. The villagers donated funds for a new mosque too. Money is short, but the village elder has persuaded farmers to resist the temptation to grow poppies. "It is haram," says Akbar, forbidden by Islam.

As the snow began melting last spring, some areas suffered deadly flooding. But Akbar—all of Hazarajat, really—hoped the runoff signaled the end of a punishing drought that had limited crop yields and forced many families to sell animals in recent years. On a mild, late spring day, Akbar irrigated a small plot of wheat just outside the village. The surrounding valley was a patchwork of similar fields filled with potatoes, hay, and wheat in early stages of growth. The nearest road was on the other side of the stream. A footbridge leading to the road had washed away when the stream swelled with runoff from melting snow. Three logs had been laid over the water, and parents piggybacked their children across on their way to school.

In this tiny hamlet and throughout Hazarajat, education is a priority. Even if the school is a tent or a building with no doors or windows, even if the teacher has only a few years of schooling, parents want their kids to study, far more so than elsewhere in the country. Hussain Ali lives in a cave in Bamian, where his family sleeps on thin bedrolls and the walls are blackened with soot. His children could bring in extra income, but he wants them in school. "I'm old, my time has passed," he says, "but my children should learn something."
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Local leaders got permission to bury the bodies. The frozen corpses had to be separated with boiling water. Two weeks later, the fighting started anew. According to Human Rights Watch, Taliban forces burned down more than 4,000 homes, shops, and public buildings. They destroyed entire towns in western Bamian Province. Villagers fled into the mountains, then looked down and watched their homes burn.Many took sanctuary in Waras, where Shafaq's family—mother, father, and seven siblings—were struggling to find food. Shafaq stopped studying and started teaching—Hazarajat schools today are full of teachers who didn't finish grade school. But his dreams were fading. "I was not very hopeful because I was thinking the Taliban will stay for another 10 or 20 years," he says.

The Taliban's onslaught was at its peak when planes crashed into the World Trade Center and the Pentagon. It was a deus ex machina, says Michael Semple, who documented, at great personal risk, the 2001 Yakawlang massacre. After U.S. forces drove the Taliban from power, expectations rose. The Hazaras, in particular, thought deliverance was at hand. "I've operated in the days when Hazaras felt they were virtually faced with an apartheid system," Semple says. "Now it's a totally different kettle of fish."

But it is hard for Hazaras like Shafaq to trust this moment. "I would like to see a place where the dreams of young people are attainable," he says, "where there is a church and a Hindu temple, where other religions can exist. That is the aim of pluralism." He dreams of the teaching job at Kabul University and of marrying a woman back home. She is the daughter of family friends, a Sayed Shiite who traces her lineage to the prophet Muhammad. Sayed families do not customarily let their daughters marry Hazara men. But in this new era, maybe it is possible.

From the sky, Hazarajat is a slide show of stunning landscapes: The purple-hued canyonlands around Bamian, the deep blue waters of Band-e Amir Lake, cloud-piercing peaks rising from mountain passes near Waras. On the ground, it's a different story. For those who live here, this is a hard land with a hard history, from which they must wring a life.
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Accounts of the Hazaras' dark history have been passed down through generations, a cultural inheritance of sorts. "It was an embarrassment for Hazara people to show their ethnicity," recalls Habiba Sarobi, Bamian's governor. Mohammed Mohaqeq, the former Hazara commander who received the most votes in the 2005 parliamentary elections, says, "We were like donkeys, good for carrying things from one place to another."Shafaq was in tenth grade when the Taliban rose to power in 1996, promising security to a populace tired of the bitter conflict among ethnic warlords, including Hazara factions. A year earlier, the Taliban had brutally murdered Abdul Ali Mazari—a charismatic leader sometimes called the father of the Hazara people—who had helped found "the party of unity," or Hezb i Wahdat, in an effort to stop the infighting among Hazaras. After his death, the party splintered, and Taliban forces soon spread across Hazarajat.

"I was working with my father in the field when my sister ran to us and said, 'The Taliban are everywhere,'" Shafaq says. Villagers fashioned white flags from bags of fertilizer. Local leaders struck deals to appease the Taliban. Shafaq hid his books.

It was an ugly war. In Bamian Province, Wahdat fighters hoped to prevent the Taliban from taking the few parts of the country they'd yet to conquer. Schools closed. Crops lay unattended. Families fled for Iran or for the hills. The Taliban imposed a blockade on Hazarajat, prompting food shortages in a region already suffering from drought. In Bamian, the bazaar was torched and scores of families sought sanctuary in the caves near the Buddhas.

In early 2001, in the coldest days of a brutal Hazarajat winter, the horror came to the district of Yakawlang. On January 8, the Taliban rounded up young Hazara men in Nayak, the district center. "People were thinking they would be taken to court," recalls Sayed Jawhar Amal, a teacher in the nearby village of Kata Khona. "But at 8 a.m. they were killed. All of them." The men were lined up and shot in public view. When elders from Kata Khona inquired about young men from their community, they were also killed. In all, Human Rights Watch concluded, more than 170 were exe-cuted in four days. "Because we were Shia. That was the only reason," says Mohsin Moisafid, 55, of Kata Khona, who lost two brothers that day.
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"The Hazaras are producing the most enthusiastic, educated, forward-looking youth, who are seizing the opportunities provided by the new situation," says Michael Semple, a red-bearded Irishman who serves as the deputy to the special representative of the European Union in Afghanistan. Shafaq helped found the Center for Dialogue, a Hazara student organization with 150 members.The group publishes its own magazine, holds events promoting "humanism and pluralism," and works with human rights organizations to monitor elections. Semple deems the group part of an emerging political consciousness among Hazara youth.

"We have a window of opportunity," Shafaq says, "but we are not sure how long it will remain open." This son of Hazarajat is the proverbial country boy who came to the big city and made good. Shafaq's father farmed in their village, Haft Gody, in Waras, a district in southern Bamian, and ran a restaurant in the district center. Children in Waras customarily marry young, stay close to home, and tend the potato fields. But Shafaq wanted something more. When he wasn't helping his father, he read voraciously—novels, history, philosophy, translations of Abraham Lincoln, John Locke, and Albert Camus.

Growing up, Shafaq heard the stories of where his people came from, why they looked different from Pashtuns and Tajiks. He and his fellow Hazaras, the story goes, are the descendants of Genghis Khan's Mongolian soldiers, who marched into central Afghanistan in the 13th century, built a garrison, and conquered the inhabitants—a varied mix of peoples not uncommon along the Silk Road. When the locals rose up and killed Genghis's son, the conqueror retaliated by leveling Bamian and wiping out most of its residents. Those who survived intermarried with the Mongolian invaders and became the Hazaras—a genetic collaboration evident in the diversity of facial features among the region's people today.

In recent times a minority of Hazaras have embraced the Genghis connection as a point of pride, but more often the outsider lineage has been used against them. For many the modern-day narrative starts in the 1890s, when King Abdur Rahman, a Pashtun, launched bloody anti-Hazara pogroms in and around Hazarajat. Fueled by chauvinism, armed with fatwas from Sunni mullahs who declared the Hazaras infidels, Rahman's forces killed many thousands and took slaves from among the survivors. Throngs of Hazaras were driven from lowland farms up into the central highlands. Later rulers used force, law, and manipulation to keep the Hazaras confined, physically and psychologically, to those highlands.
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The ruling Taliban—mostly fundamentalist Sunni, ethnic Pashtuns—saw Hazaras as infidels, animals, other. They didn't look the way Afghans should look and didn't worship the way Muslims should worship. A Taliban saying about Afghanistan's non-Pashtun ethnic groups went: "Tajiks to Tajikistan, Uzbeks to Uzbekistan, and Hazaras to goristan," the graveyard. And in fact, when the Buddhas fell,Taliban forces were besieging Hazarajat, burning down villages to render the region uninhabitable. As autumn began, the people of Hazarajat wondered if they'd survive winter. Then came September 11, a tragedy elsewhere that appeared to deliver salvation to the Hazara people.

Six years after the Taliban fell, scars remain in the highlands of the Hazara homeland, but there is a sense of possibility unthinkable a decade ago. Today the region is one of the safest in Afghanistan, mostly free of the poppy fields that dominate other regions. A new political order reigns in Kabul, seat of President Hamid Karzai's central government. Hazaras have new access to universities, civil service jobs, and other avenues of advancement long denied them. One of the country's vice presidents is Hazara, as is parliament's leading vote getter, and a Hazara woman is the first and only female governor in the country. The best-selling American novel The Kite Runner—now a feature film—depicted a fictional Hazara character, and a real Hazara won the first Afghan Star, an American Idol-like program.

As the country struggles to rebuild itself after decades of civil war, many believe that Hazarajat could be a model of what's possible not just for Hazaras but for all Afghans. But that optimism is tempered by past memories and present frustrations—over roads not built, a resurgent Taliban, and rising tides of Sunni extremism.

A project is now under way to gather thousands of stone fragments and rebuild the Buddhas. Something similar is occurring among Hazaras as they try to repair their fractured past, with one notable difference: There are pictures of the destroyed Buddhas. The Hazaras have no such blueprint, no sense of what a future free from persecution is supposed to look like.

Musa Shafaq wants to live in that future. He is 28, with shoulder-length black hair and typical Hazara features, not unlike those of the Buddhas. He stands at the gate of Kabul University in a red sweater, black jeans, and tinted prescription glasses. Classes are out for the day. In two months, he will graduate, a notable achievement for any Afghan given the country's instability. Because he is Hazara, his success signals a new era. Shafaq is poised to finish at the top of his class, which should guarantee him the job he most wants, a teaching post at Kabul University.
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Set apart by geography and beliefs, oppressed by the Taliban, the Hazara people could be Afghanistan's best hope.
By Phil Zabriskie
National Geographic magazine

At the heart of Afghanistan is an empty space, a striking absence, where the larger of the colossal Bamian Buddhas once stood. In March 2001 the Taliban fired rockets at the statues for days on end, then planted and detonated explosives inside them. The Buddhas had looked out over Bamian for some 1,500 years. Silk Road traders and missionaries of several faiths came and went.Emissaries of empires passed through—Mongols, Safavids, Moguls, British, Soviets—often leaving bloody footprints. A country called Afghanistan took shape. Regimes rose and collapsed or were overthrown. The statues stood through it all. But the Taliban saw the Buddhas simply as non-Islamic idols, heresies carved in stone. They did not mind being thought brutish. They did not fear further isolation. Destroying the statues was a pious assertion of their brand of faith over history and culture.

It was also a projection of power over the people living under the Buddhas' gaze: the Hazaras, residents of an isolated region in Afghanistan's central highlands known as Hazarajat—their heartland, if not entirely by choice. Accounting for up to one-fifth of Afghanistan's population, Hazaras have long been branded outsiders. They are largely Shiite Muslims in an overwhelmingly Sunni Muslim country. They have a reputation for industriousness yet work the least desirable jobs. Their Asian features—narrow eyes, flat noses, broad cheeks—have set them apart in a de facto lower caste, reminded so often of their inferiority that some accept it as truth.
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At least 66 people, many of them civilians, had been killed in factional fighting within three months in a northern province of Afghanistan, a United Nations spokesman said in Kabul on Sunday.

Speaking to reporters at a routine press briefing, Manoel de Almeida e Silva of the UN Assistance Mission in Afghanistan (UNAMA) said the differences and continued tensions between two factions in Sare-pul province would destabilize the whole region. The two rival factions, all belonging to the Hazara ethnic group, are loyal to Muhammad Mohaqqeq, a cabinet member of President Hamid Karzai's transitional government, and local military commander Mohamed Akbari, respectively.

Both the factions support the government in Kabul but have been fighting each other for many times in the past, sources here said.

According to the UN spokesman, a delegation of north Afghanistan's security commission left earlier in the day for Sare-pol province in an effort to settle the factional dispute.

The delegation also includes representatives of the UNAMA in the northern Afghan region, Silva said.

Meanwhile, Afghanistan's northern provinces, in particular Balkh, have been the scene of fierce battles between troops loyal to Abdul Rashid Dostam and Mohammad Atta, two leaders of the Northern Alliance, during the past year.

Dostam serves as the presidential envoy to north Afghanistan and deputy Defense Minister in the current government, while Atta is a corps commander of the government troops stationed in Balkh province.

The government in Kabul and the UNAMA have tried many times in the past to disarm the two commanders or bring reconciliation between the two arch rivals, but all in vain.
(People's Daily Online)
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The Guardian, February 13, 2008
By Richard Norton-Taylor

According to British estimates, there are 23,000 displaced people in the Lashkar Gar region of Helmand province, the base for more than 7,000 UK troops.

A growing humanitarian crisis in Afghanistan is being overlooked as an unknown number of people are fleeing their homes, caught between security forces and the Taliban, Red Cross officials have told the Guardian.

They say they have less access now to displaced people than at any time over the past 27 years. "The conflict has not only intensified but it has also spread over the last few years. Prolonged human suffering is causing real concern in ever larger areas," said Reto Stocker, head of the International Committee of the Red Cross delegation in Kabul. "There is little capacity to address it. We've never had so little access." With the emphasis placed on security and development aid, large humanitarian needs were being overlooked, he said.

According to British estimates, there are 23,000 displaced people in the Lashkar Gar region of Helmand province, the base for more than 7,000 UK troops. It is impossible to judge the accuracy of the figure and there is no way of knowing how many people are displaced throughout the country, Stocker said. "Some areas are completely inaccessible."

Travellers on one of the country's most important roads, between Kabul and Kandahar, are subjected to daily attacks, he added.

Stocker said Taliban supporters force Afghan villagers to feed and shelter them at night. Then the Afghan security forces accuse them of supporting the Taliban and force them to leave their homes.

Stocker is in London to meet officials in the Foreign Office, Ministry of Defence, and international development department. He said the ICRC spends about £50m a year in Afghanistan, double the amount earmarked for the country. The shortfall is made up by taking money from other parts of the ICRC budget.

"We are not funded adequately," said Stocker, who described the ICRC as the only organisation mandated to talk to "the armed opposition" - the Red Cross's official description of the Taliban. The ICRC arranged daily exchanges of prisoners when the Taliban ruled the country.

The ICRC deploys 80 staff there, supported by 1,200 Afghan employees. They help an estimated 80,000 Afghans who have lost limbs, mainly as a result of landmines. They also monitor the treatment of detainees, including those handed over to the Afghan authorities by Nato troops. The number had risen from 5,000 to 13,000 in two years, Stocker said. They were being held in prisons and detention centres designed to accommodate a quarter of that number. The figures do not include an estimated 630 Afghans held by US forces.

Red Cross officials echo concern recently expressed by Oxfam about the dangerous confusion between Nato-led military and civilian operations. Nato-sponsored provincial reconstruction teams are treated with suspicion by Afghans, who believe they are controlled by foreign soldiers, the officials say.

Officials from humanitarian organisations paint a very different picture of Afghanistan to the one presented publicly by ministers.

In a speech yesterday David Miliband, the foreign secretary, said Britain should help spread democracy round the world. Speaking on condition of anonymity, humanitarian groups say most Afghans want security rather than "democracy" as represented by a powerful elite in control in Kabul. Afghans are increasingly dependent on central government and a corrupt national police force, even though their loyalties are with local elders, officials say.

They add that last year an estimated 550 Afghan businessmen and their families were abducted - victims of extortion. This is rarely mentioned yet has an important impact on the Afghan economy, the officials say.

Aid agency staff also express concern about British plans to train defence forces consisting of local volunteers. The US and Hamid Karzai, the Afghan president, have opposed the plan, saying they could turn into Taliban militia. "What message does that give to the Tajiks in the north when you are arming Pashtuns in the south?" one official said. British officials defend the plan, though they say the proposed groups must be properly monitored.

The Ministry of Defence yesterday announced that Afghan forces, operating with British troops, had seized a tonne of raw opium and about 20kg of pure white heroin powder in the Mosulmani area of Helmand province. Read the full story