Washington is weighing a plan to move roughly 1,100 Afghan evacuees from a former U.S. base in Qatar to the Democratic Republic of the Congo, according to AfghanEvac, an advocacy coalition. The evacuees—interpreters, former Afghan commandos, and relatives of personnel tied to the United States—were airlifted out after the 2021 U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan. AfghanEvac has sharply criticized the idea, alleging that U.S. officials intend to steer the group back toward Taliban-ruled Afghanistan by trying to "manufacture a…

Taliban say hundreds killed in strike on Kabul hospital; Pakistan denies civilian toll The Taliban government said an air strike killed at least 400 people and wounded 250 at a Kabul drug rehabilitation hospital, a claim Pakistan rejected as false, saying it precisely targeted militant sites with no collateral damage. At least 400 people were killed and 250 injured in an air strike on a rehabilitation hospital in Afghanistan’s capital, Kabul, a spokesman for the Taliban government said. Pakistan dismissed the allegation as…

KABUL/ISLAMABAD — Afghanistan said its air defenses fired at Pakistani jets over Kabul after pre-dawn explosions and gunfire rattled the capital, the latest and most visible escalation in a burst of cross-border hostilities that has raised fears of a wider conflict in a region already on edge from U.S.-Israeli strikes on Iran and retaliatory attacks on U.S. targets in Gulf states. Taliban administration spokesperson Zabihullah Mujahid said the blasts heard across parts of Kabul before sunrise were the result of Afghan forces…

Pakistan strikes Kabul and Kandahar as border clashes with Taliban escalate ISLAMABAD — Pakistan launched airstrikes on targets in Kabul and Kandahar early Friday, officials in Islamabad said, after a night of heavy cross-border fighting with Afghanistan’s Taliban that shattered a fragile ceasefire and drove civilians to flee frontline towns. A spokesperson for the Afghan Taliban said on X that its forces responded with renewed attacks against Pakistani military positions along the frontier. The post was later deleted.…

Starmer condemns Trump’s Afghanistan comments as ‘insulting’ as UK, allies push back U.K. Prime Minister Keir Starmer denounced as “insulting” Donald Trump’s claim that British troops stayed off the front lines in Afghanistan, drawing cross-party anger in Britain and rebukes from allies and veterans’ groups. Trump, in a Fox News interview aired Monday, suggested NATO partners had not borne the brunt of combat, saying, “They’ll say they sent some troops to Afghanistan. And they did, they stayed a little back, a little off the…

Across continents, an earthquake's echoes: Afghan villages flattened, diaspora left to grieve One week after a late‑night earthquake tore through the steep valleys of eastern Afghanistan, survivors still sift through mud and stone, looking for the impossible — the bodies of loved ones, the foundations of a life. In Ireland, a man named Raoof Safi repeated the same ritual of pale modern grief: scrolling through videos, answering phone calls, counting names. The quake, measured at about magnitude 6.0 and striking around…

Meryl Streep shines brightly as one of the finest talents in Hollywood, but her recent appearance at the United Nations highlighted a different mission: advocating for the women of Afghanistan. These women, stripped of their right to self-expression under Taliban rule, face astonishing limitations on their lives. A recent UN report paints a grim picture of the situation, asserting that for the last three years, the Taliban regime has systematically "erased women from Afghanistan's public sphere." True to these findings, at…

After Uganda, it is Rwanda's turn to welcome refugees from Afghanistan. While the first plane filled with people fleeing the Taliban's capture of Kabul arrived in Kampala on Wednesday, Kigali is waiting for an entire school to arrive. This is the Afghanistan School of Leadership, the only boarding school for young girls in the country. It was the founder of the facility who announced it on Twitter on…

Tonight Uganda welcomes its first group of refugees fleeing Afghanistan, we head to South Africa as the country has the highest unemployment rate in the world according to Bloomberg, and Yemeni fish become the dish national of Djibouti. .

Ugandan parliamentarians on Wednesday (August 17) called for clarification on the government's proposal to welcome people fleeing Kabul after the Taliban took control of Afghanistan over the weekend. While negotiations are still ongoing to complete the terms of this reception in the Ugandan Parliament, some have expressed reservations.…