IRIN, 16 May 2012 IRIN points to a new ILO report according to which more than half of the brick kiln workers surveyed in Afghanistan were children, with most under 14.
ost children began working at the age of seven or eight, and almost 80 percent are under 10. According to the ILO, the kilns […]
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AP, 14 May 2012 Kathy Gannon speaks to the former head of the Taleban’s political commission, and Quetta shura member Agha Jan Motassem, who is recovering from an assassination bid in Turkey.
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TOLOnews, 12 May 2012 Afghanistan’s largest cement company based in Pul-e Khumri (Baghlan), that is fully Afghan-owned, is facing bankruptcy at its second cement plant if it cannot secure sufficient bank financing, the company’s officials said Saturday. McClatchy newspapers, in late 2010, that Ghori Cement Factory and Karkar coal mine in Baghlan had ‘become symbols […]
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Independent, 10 May 2012 It was supposed to be good news: the handover of Zana Khan district. Then the Taleban attacked…
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The National Interest, 8 May 2012 The number of 4,200 to 4,300 reintegrated insurgents since the first one signed to the APRP in October 2010 is not statistically significant yet, according to a senior US adviser to Massum Stanekzai, head of the Afghanistan Peace and Reconciliation Program (APRP). (Another 600 are now being ‘vetted,’ the […]
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Washington Post, 7 May 2012 The US have ‘for several years been secretly releasing high-level detainees’ from Bagram military prison ‘as part of negotiations with insurgent groups. This so-called ‘strategic release’ program ‘has quietly served as a live diplomatic channel, allowing American officials to use prisoners as bargaining chips in restive provinces’. ‘Unlike at Guantanamo’, […]
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Guardian, 4 May 2012 Richard Kemp, a former commander of British troops in Afghanistan, doesn’t like Alex Strick van Linschoten and Felix Kuehn’s anthology of Taleban poetry just to be published. He cautioned against ‘being taken in by a lot of self-justifying propaganda […]. What we need to remember is that these are fascist, murdering […]
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BBC, 2 May 2012 ‘Following Bin Laden’s death a year later, both Pakistani and American officials had insisted that the al-Qaeda chief had lived in total seclusion for nearly five years, without once leaving his Abbottabad compound’, writes Pakistani journalist Muhammad Inyas Khan. He has found evidence to the contrary: OBL has visited local elders […]
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Gulf News, 1 May 2012 The Financial Times’ Edward Luce takes a look at Mitt Romney’s stand on foreign policy and on some of his advisors who will also be responsible for policy on Afghanistan, in case… Some interesting names are found here: the former CIA’s chief of counter-terrorism and Blackwater executive Cofer Black and […]
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IWPR, 1 May 2012 The search began with a missing generator. The machine, worth as much as 20,000 US dollars in Kabul, is said to have been bought with money donated by USAID for the Kabul International Conference in July 2010 that was attended by delegates from more than 70 countries. Spending on the conference […]
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The Daily Beast, 25 April 2012 The Newsweek blog protraits Agha Jan Mutassim who once headed the Taleban political commission, would have been their chief negotiator in this position, was sidelined and almost killed by his former comrades and now resides in Ankara.
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Washington Post, 25 April 2012 So back to square 1? A report about an underground girls school in a Taleban-controlled area, sounds like from the year 2000 or so. WE can just hope that the author changed the name of the village…
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