Afghanistan Analysts Network – English

War and Peace

This thematic category brings together AAN’s reporting on the conflict in Afghanistan, its underlying causes and drivers, the various armed actors and how it affects Afghans in their everyday lives.

Kuduz after the fighting on September 28, 2015. Photo Credit: @ehsan_af (Twitter)

The 2015 Insurgency in the North (3): The fall and recapture of Kunduz

Obaid Ali •

It took 15 days of fierce fighting for Afghan government forces and their US allies to push the Taleban back out of Kunduz city. Clashes continue in the surrounding districts. The Taleban onslaught on 28 September should not have come as a surprise, given how much territory in the province the group was already controlling. […]

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Emergency surgery after the bombing in one of the remaining parts of MSF's hospital in Kunduz on the 3rd October 2015. Photo: MSF

Airstrike on a Hospital in Kunduz: Claims of a war crime

Kate Clark •

Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF) is now demanding an International Humanitarian Fact-Finding Commission look into the United States air strike which hit its hospital in Kunduz in the early hours of Saturday morning (3 October 2015). 12 MSF staff and 10 patients, including three children, were killed in the strike which came four days into fierce […]

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The Fall of Kunduz: What does it tell us about the strength of the post-Omar Taleban?

Borhan Osman •

The capture of Kunduz by the Taleban has surely written off any idea of the movement having been seriously undermined or fractured by the death of Mullah Omar and the leadership dispute that followed. His successor, Akhtar Mansur may still face some resistance from dissidents within the movement, but on the battlefield, the Taleban under […]

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Badakhshan – from anti-Taleban bulwark to contested province. Photo: Mirco Kreibich (2005).

The 2015 Insurgency in the North (2): Badakhshan’s Jurm district under siege

Obaid Ali •

The foreign fighter communities are growing, their recruitment is speeding up and the national security forces deployed to fight them are regularly beaten back – or they give up their bases before, as some claim, “a single bullet has been shot.” Badakhshan, once a province almost free of insurgency, has become contested. AAN’s Obaid Ali […]

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A view of Musa Qala. Source: UK Forces blog (2010).

The Second Fall of Musa Qala: How the Taleban are expanding territorial control

Thomas Ruttig •

While Afghanistan’s northern provinces – mainly Kunduz, Faryab and Sar-e Pul – have been in the media’s focus on this year’s Taleban offensive, fighting in their southern Afghan strongholds has geared up too. Within one month the Taleban were able to capture two district centres in Helmand, Musa Qala (still contested) and Nawzad. This combines […]

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Trouble in Khas Uruzgan: Insults, assaults, a siege and an airlift

Martine van Bijlert •

After three months of near non-stop fighting in Khas Uruzgan, a mixed Pashtun-Hazara district in northeast Uruzgan, the Taleban decimated the district’s Afghan Local Police (ALP) and forced most of the other security forces back into the district centre. The attack was not just part of a wider, concerted effort by the Taleban to put […]

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The Triple Attack in Kabul: A message? If so, to whom?

Kate Clark •

Kabul is facing the aftermath of yet another suicide attack, this time at the entrance to the airport where early reports suggested 21 people were killed or injured. People in the capital were already in shock from the bloody events of 7 August: three attacks in 24 hours that killed more than 50 people and […]

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Highest Civilian Casualty Figures Ever: UNAMA details deaths by mortar, IED, suicide attack and targeted killing

Kate Clark •

UNAMA has published its mid-year assessment of the harm done to civilians by the warring parties in Afghanistan (full report here): the number of civilians killed and injured has risen again. There were 4921 civilian casualties, the highest number for the first half of any year since UNAMA started documenting them. 70 per cent were […]

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Kabul newspaper frontpage, showing three main protagonists of the latest Taleban saga (from l. to r.; Mansur Dadullah; Rahmani, allegedly Omar).

The Murree Process: Divisive peace talks further complicated by Mullah Omar’s death

Borhan Osman •

News of Mullah Omar’s death was leaked just a day before a second meeting between Taleban and Afghan government representatives was supposed to have taken place. The first meeting on 7 July near Islamabad, in Murree, initiated the so-called Murree Process. The revelation of Mullah Omar’s death and subsequent struggle for succession in the Taleban […]

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From Mullah Omar to Mansur: Change at the Taleban’s top leadership

Thomas Ruttig •

After almost two days of silence, the Taleban have finally admitted that their supreme leader, Mullah Muhammad Omar Mujahed, as they call him, has died. On 31 July 2015, they also announced the appointment of Mullah Akhtar Muhammad Mansur, previously Omar’s deputy, as their new leader. Reportedly, this also includes the key title of amir […]

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Classics of Conflict (2): Reviewing some of Afghanistan’s most notorious hotspots

Fabrizio Foschini •

The second part of our series reviewing ten places in Afghanistan that have been fought over throughout the last decade (see part 1 here) starts close to where the first ended: with an area straddling the border between Nuristan and Kunar provinces. Insurgents have in fact just recently captured the administrative centre of one of […]

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Classics of Conflict (1): Reviewing some of Afghanistan’s most notorious hotspots

Fabrizio Foschini •

There are only a few places in Afghanistan everybody has heard of. Names like Panjwayi or Tora Bora, though, have been around for a long time, in some cases more than a decade. They have gained notorious prominence in the international press because of the heavy involvement of foreign forces and the subsequent heavy casualty rates, […]

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