Afghan forces launch bid to retake Kunduz from Taliban
Afghan forces have begun an operation to retake the city of Kunduz, after suffering a major military reverse when it was seized by the Taliban on Monday.
Security forces have cleared the area around the central prison and the police headquarters, officials said.
The US said it carried out an air strike on the city early on Tuesday.
In one of their biggest assaults since 2001, the Taliban had forced Afghan troops and officials to retreat to the airport and freed hundreds from jail.
The attack on the northern city came as President Ashraf Ghani completed a year in office.
Kunduz is the first provincial capital seized by the Taliban since they lost power in the US-led invasion 14 years ago, and the Taliban's advance there will pile pressure on Mr Ghani's unity government.
'Refugees don't leave their conflicts behind'
Following reports of aggressive incidents in German refugee shelters, authorities are looking for ways to calm the situation. Suggestions include separate housing for Muslim and Christian asylum-seekers.
There are no official statistics, but aid organizations, social workers and volunteers note that ethnic, social, cultural and religious tensions are on the rise in Germany's overcrowded refugee shelters.
Separating refugees according to religion is now being mentioned as an interim solution to help alleviate the problems.
Up to one million migrants are expected to arrive in the country before the end of the year. The sudden surge in asylum demands this year has authorities scrambling for housing for refugees from war zones such as Syria, but also migrants from Albania and Kosovo. Often converted hotels, gyms, schools and tents are used as makeshift shelters.
Tempers flare easily at close quarters. In Leipzig last week, about 200 refugees wielding table legs and bed frames started a fight after they couldn't agree who got to use one of the few toilets first. It took a large police contingent to calm the situation.
Inside Kunduz: 'The Taliban have taken my city'
najib kunduz
In the early hours of Monday, Taliban insurgents overran Kurduz, a major city in northern Afghanistan. A local Afghan journalist spoke to us of the chaos and destruction that ensued.
France 24 spoke to this local journalist on Monday afternoon by phone. The conversation was interrupted by fighting that forced our Observer to seek shelter. This is what he told us:
Overnight, small groups of Taliban fighters – 15 or so men per group – entered Kurduz from different points and started attacking different spots across the city. The soldiers fled, so they easily took over all the official buildings, including the hospital and the prison, from which they freed hundreds of prisoners [Editor’s note: According to local authorities, these prisoners included many Taliban insurgents].
By the morning, the Taliban controlled about half the town. There were pockets of resistance from militiamen funded by the central government, but there were not enough of them. By this afternoon, the Taliban had taken over the whole of our city of Kurduz. Most of the city is deserted; all the stores are closed and most people are staying indoors. I saw them arresting some people and putting them in 4x4s. I don’t know where they’re taking them. Word is they’re looking for anyone belonging to the police or the army, or working with international organizations. These people are trying to hide. The Taliban don’t seem to be targeting anyone else; it seems they’re trying to behave well with ordinary citizens.
From slave trading post to royal prison
The copper rods tell their own tale of the trade in human beings: 28 to 37 copper rods would pay for a female slave, 38 to 48 for a male.
The view of the Calabar River from Government Hill is spectacular. It is easy to imagine that Consul Edward Hewett must have stood on the top floor of his house to watch the ships carrying palm oil as they left for Britain.
Hewett, a stern-faced man with a drooping moustache, was the first resident of what is now known as the Old Residency, a building prefabricated in Britain and then shipped to Calabar in 1884. The ground floor served as the headquarters of the expanding British Protectorate that would eventually become the southern part of the British colony Nigeria. With Nigeria’s independence in 1960, the colonial rulers left, but the Old Residency remained.
Its Scandinavian red-pine wood walls survived the Calabar climate (a 10-month rainy season), the Biafran War (when anything that could serve as firewood disappeared in Nigeria’s blockaded east), and dictatorial destructiveness (under the military rule of Ibrahim Babangida in the 1990s, a sister building some 100 metres away was torn down to make room for a concrete structure that, until now, serves as the presidential lodge).
Nepal accuses India of an economic blockade as border trade freezes up
India has made no secret it is displeased with Nepal's new constitution. An ethnic Hindu minority in southern Nepal has objected to the federal charter's structure.
KATHMANDU, NEPAL — A week after adopting a landmark federal constitution, landlocked Nepal is facing what it calls an economic blockade by India as retribution for the new charter's treatment of an ethnic Hindu minority along the southern border with India.
India, a regional powerbroker, has made no secret that it believes Nepal’s constitution should give greater powers to the Hindu minority, known as the Madhesi. But it denies conducting a formal blockade, blaming the disruption of road transportation into Nepal on insecurity along the border.
Protests erupted here today against Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi, who leads a Hindu nationalist party. Nepalese say India is trying to coerce a sovereign nation and unfairly aid a minority that shares its beliefs and interests. Public television officials today cancelled all India-based programming. The man who would be king of Kurdistan
Decades after warrior-king Sheikh Mahmud's overthrow, Kurds keep on fighting for a homeland.
Tanya Goudsouzian |
Sulaimania, Iraq - By the time Sheikh Mahmud Barzinji declared himself king of Kurdistan in 1922, over an area that included the city of Sulaimania and its environs, he had already fought dozens of battles; some alongside the British against the Ottomans, others against the British alongside the Arabs, and then several more against the Arabs.
From March 1923 to mid-1924, the British retaliated against Sheikh Mahmud's perceived insolence with aerial bombardment, and thus ended the Kurds' first attempt at full-fledged sovereignty.
In 1923, the Treaty of Lausanne had dealt a definitive blow to Kurdish aspirations for self-determination in the aftermath of the Ottoman Empire's disintegration. Three years earlier, the Treaty of Sevres stipulated that the oil-rich Mosul Vilayet be given to the Kurds. But at Lausanne, the British and the French changed their minds and drew up a very different map, which gave rise to the modern state of Iraq.
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