Four Taliban cabinet ministers have visited India over the past nine months, highlighting growing engagement between New Delhi and the Taliban as their relations with neighboring Pakistan remain strained. The latest visit came last week, when Ataullah Omari, the Taliban’s acting minister of agriculture, traveled to New Delhi at the head of a delegation. His trip follows earlier visits by […]

Iran’s Foreign Ministry said it will continue expanding relations with the Taliban regardless of whether Tehran formally recognizes their rule, describing recognition as a separate political and legal process. The comments come as Iran maintains close diplomatic and economic ties with the Taliban while stopping short of officially recognizing their rule. Speaking at a news conference, Esmail Baghaei, spokesman for […]

The Taliban’s defense minister, Yaqoob Mujahid, has travelled to border areas in northeastern Badakhshan province, his ministry said, as tensions persist between the Taliban leadership and an influential local commander in the province’s remote Darwaz region. The Taliban Defense Ministry said Yaqoob traveled to inspect border posts in northeastern Afghanistan and assess conditions in the districts of Keran wa Munjan, […]

Pakistan carried out airstrikes overnight in eastern Afghanistan, Islamabad said on Monday, adding its operations had targeted militants as the Afghan government reported dozens of civilian casualties. Pakistan’s information minister said the operations killed 25 militants and were aimed at a group that it blames for a deadly weekend attack in Karachi, though Afghan authorities have repeatedly denied their territory […]

Afghanistan’s dramatic collapse in opium production following the Taliban’s nationwide drug ban is fundamentally reshaping global heroin markets, reducing supplies of the drug while raising the risk that traffickers and users will increasingly turn to more dangerous synthetic opioids, according to a United Nations report released Friday. The World Drug Report 2026, published by the UN Office on Drugs and […]

Since the Taliban returned to power in Afghanistan in August 2021, Moscow has pursued increasingly close ties with the extremist Islamist organization. Russia is now the only country that formally recognizes the Taliban as the legitimate government of Afghanistan. Even neighboring countries such as China, Iran, India, and Pakistan have refused to do so. Earlier this year, Moscow signed a […]

Zamir Kabulov, Russia’s presidential envoy for Afghanistan, said Moscow and the Taliban administration want Afghanistan’s frozen assets to be released. However, he said no breakthrough is expected soon because the United States and Europe are ignoring the issue. Speaking to the Russian newspaper Izvestia, Kabulov said the current deadlock was the result of Western actions. Kabulov said the responsibility for […]

Five years ago, the 20-year American war in Afghanistan came to an inglorious end. In April 2021, the United States had begun its final withdrawal, with the goal of pulling out the 2,500 U.S. troops that remained in the country by September. Within weeks of the first U.S. departures, the Taliban had swept up scores of positions as Afghan government […]

Pakistan’s defense minister, Khawaja Muhammad Asif, has accused the Taliban and India of supporting militant violence inside Pakistan, linking both to recent attacks in the country’s northwest. In a statement following recent violence in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa Province, Asif called for a united and decisive campaign against militancy and said Pakistan faced threats from both external and internal actors. “After last […]

A draft UN Security Council resolution renewing the mandate of the UN Assistance Mission in Afghanistan (UNAMA) no longer refers to the Taliban as Afghanistan’s “de facto authorities,” according to Security Council Report, an independent New York-based organization that monitors and analyzes the work of the Security Council. Instead, the draft resolution uses the phrase “relevant authorities,” a change that […]