Using the option of pressure will not help, Amir Khan Muttaqi, foreign minister of the Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan (IEA), said at a meeting in Kabul with Norway’s charge d’affaires Paul Coleman Bakr. The foreign minister said that the international community should adopt the policy of engagement and cooperation with Afghanistan. He said that history shows that pressuring Afghanistan doesn’t […]

The latest issue of “Voice of Khurasan,” an English-language monthly magazine published by Al-Azaim Foundation, the media arm of the Islamic State’s Khurasan Province (ISIS-K), eulogizes the slain Indian jihadi fighter Abu Khalid al-Hindi, condemns Egyptian Islamic scholar Yusuf Al-Qaradawi for digressing from shari’a and for supporting the regimes in Qatar and Turkey, and is sharply critical of Hamas, the […]

Mullah Abdul Ghani Baradar, the Deputy Prime Minister for Economic Affairs of the Islamic Emirate, says that China does not have a destructive plan nor a political agenda in Afghanistan and does not interfere in Afghanistan’s internal affairs. Speaking in a video conference on Saturday, at the opening ceremony of the Sixth Exhibition of Economic Cooperation, Trade and Investment between […]

In Pakistan’s current troubled times where Pakistan is in an existential crisis, both politically and economically, and the Pakistan Army is the sole guarantor of Pakistan’s security and existence, it would be a facile argument that the Pakistan Army has become toothless in tamely submitting to political imposition of the next Army Chief. In an unprecedented intense politicisation of selection […]

Concerns are looming over the rising recession in the USA and its ripple effects on India. Surging inflation in the USA, leading to successive hikes in interest rates, crippled by the Russia-Ukraine war with no end in sight, disruption in supply chain owing to USA-China trade conflict, is causing jitters in India over its trade and investment relations with the USA. […]

Six police officers were killed in an ambush in northwest Pakistan on Wednesday, officials said, an assault claimed by the nation’s homegrown Taliban. The Pakistan Taliban share common lineage with the Afghan Taliban and have staged an increasing number of strikes in the year since Kabul fell into the hands of the hardline Islamists. Gunmen with automatic rifles launched an attack at around 7 am (0200 GMT) on a police vehicle patrolling the village of […]

Turkey is routinely pushing tens of thousands of Afghans back at its land border with Iran or deporting them directly to Afghanistan with little or no examination of their claims for international protection, Human Rights Watch said in a report released on Friday. The 73-page report, “‘No One Asked Me Why I Left Afghanistan,’” says that Turkey has stepped up […]

Afghanistan’s finance ministry has collected 197 billion afghanis in revenue since the Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan (IEA) took over the country in August last year, an official said this week. Speaking in an exclusive interview with Ariana News, Mohammad Meraj Meraj, head of the Revenue Department of Finance Ministry, said that the ministry’s revenues are more than the government’s ordinary […]

China and India, after months of refusing to condemn Russia’s war in Ukraine, did not stand in the way of the release this week of a statement by the world’s leading economies that strongly criticizes Moscow. Could this, at last, signal a bold new policy change by Beijing and New Delhi to align themselves with what the United States and […]

Pakistan said Friday it would not formally recognize the Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan (IEA) without global consensus. Foreign Minister Bilawal Bhutto Zardari told reporters in Islamabad his government continues to advocate sustained international engagement with IEA to help prevent a humanitarian disaster in the war-torn neighboring country. “As far as their official recognition is concerned, Pakistan would not want to […]