Afghanistan Analysts Network – English

Posts tagged: Taliban

Taliban

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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Thematic Dossier X: Peace talks and reconciliation

AAN Team •

The flurry of recent ‘peace-related’ events – talks about talks, actual talks, denials of talks, re-definitions of peace, attacks and key figures dying – has compelled AAN to take another look at the whole body of our work on the subject. This “Peace Talks and Reconciliation Thematic Dossier” brings you all related AAN analyses in one […]

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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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The Failed Pilot Test: Kunduz’ local governance crisis

Bethany Matta •

The fighting in Kunduz is only one side of the problem. Also issues not related to security are in disarray. Health care, education, agriculture, reconstruction – all are on hold and do not receive much attention from the newly established top level of local authorities. This, AAN guest author Bethany Matta argues, has much to […]

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The 2015 Insurgency in the North: Case studies from Kunduz and Sar-e Pul provinces

Obaid Ali •

Kunduz and Sar-e Pul have both been staging grounds for the Taleban’s first major onslaughts of the ‘spring offensive’ that they launched in late April – the first under massive public scrutiny, the second a lesser-known example of the same dynamics. In both provinces, the insurgents managed to get close to the provincial centres, at […]

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Banning the Banned from Travel: Taleban Five still in Qatar

Kate Clark •

There has been a spate of stories about the end of the travel ban on the five Taleban detainees released from Guantanamo Bay a year ago and exchanged for the United States soldier Bowe Bergdahl. US politicians and media have been speculating on what impact the five might have on the insurgency if they came […]

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The Park Palace Attack: More losses for Afghanistan (updated with a list of the dead)

Kate Clark •

The Taleban attack on a Kabul guesthouse which killed 15 people (not 14, as earlier reports said) on 13 May 2015 was aimed, the Taleban claimed, at “invaders”, specifically an “important meeting” of “important people from many invading countries, especially Americans.” In this update of our earlier dispatch, AAN’s Kate Clark identifies all the dead: […]

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Thematic Dossier VIII: The evolution of insecurity in Kunduz

AAN Team •

In the last week, the Taleban launched their second large-scale assault on Kunduz in six months and came close to taking the provincial capital, Kunduz City, before being pushed back by Afghan National Security Forces. For the Taleban, Kunduz is probably the key province in the north, the last to be left in 2001 and […]

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Hazaras in the Crosshairs? A scrutiny of recent incidents

Qayoom Suroush •

Eight abductions of groups of people have been reported since late February by officials, activists or media as having targeted ethnic Hazaras. The first was also the biggest: the abduction of 31 bus passengers in Zabul on 23 February 2015. Other crimes ‘against Hazaras’ have been reported from Ghazni, Farah, Daikundi and Balkh. AAN’s Qayoom […]

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