The Pakistani Taliban threatened to begin attacking Chinese Belt and Road development projects unless the government pays them a 5 per cent tax on the construction.
Afghanistan's embassy in New Delhi has closed as diplomats appointed by the Afghan government ousted by the Taliban two years ago failed to secure visa extensions from their Indian hosts, the outgoing ambassador said in a statement on Friday. India does not recognise the Taliban government which seized power in 2021, and had allowed Ambassador Farid Mamundzay and mission staff to stay in place, issuing visas and handling trade matters. An embassy statement posted on X, formerly known as Twitter, on Friday said that period in limbo was over, and the embassy was shutting and the keys had been given to the host government.
Online abuse and hate speech targeting politically active women in Afghanistan has significantly increased since the Taliban took over the country in Aug. 2021, according to a report released Monday by a U.K.-based rights group. Afghan Witness, an open-source project run by the non-profit Center for Information Resilience, says it found that abusive posts tripled, a 217% increase, between June-December 2021 and the same period of 2022. Building on expertise gained from similar research in Myanmar, the Afghan Witness team analyzed publicly available information from X, formerly known as Twitter, and conducted in-depth interviews with six Afghan women to investigate the nature of the online abuse since the Taliban takeover.
Nigerian President Bola Tinubu recently attended a conference in Saudi Arabia to attract foreign investment into Africa’s most populous country. Following Tinubu’s trip to Riyadh, the self-proclaimed leader of a Nigerian separatist movement posted a claim that the Taliban had executed 229 Christian missionaries and included an image of what appeared to show a beheading. But the claim about 229 Christians being killed by the Taliban is an old hoax that AFP Fact Check has already debunked. The pos
The Taliban's acting commerce minister said he had asked Pakistan to help return the assets of expelled Afghans and discussed ways to overcome Afghanistan's stalled banking sector transactions during a four-day visit to Islamabad this week. Acting minister Nooruddin Azizi's arrival in the Pakistani capital marked the first public visit by a senior Taliban official since Pakistan announced its policy to deport thousands of undocumented Afghans and other foreign citizens after Nov. 1.