Afghan officials have dismissed US assertion that a deadly attack on a maternity hospital in the capital Kabul earlier this week was carried out by the Daesh terrorist group, blaming the Taliban for the carnage.

The current stand-off in eastern Ladakh is the second such instance since India and China disengaged in Doklam after a 73-day stand-off in 2017. The Indian Air Force (IAF) scrambled its Su-30MKI after it spotted the movement of military helicopters on the Chinese side of the border last week.

President Ashraf Ghani says Afghanistan’s security forces will go on the offensive against the Taliban and other militant groups, following a violent day in which gunmen stormed a maternity hospital in Kabul and a suicide bomber targeted a funeral in the eastern province of Nangarhar.

Memories of the Islamic State’s 2014-2015 “caliphate” peak in Iraq and Syria colour views of its present capacity, leading officials and observers either to exaggerate or understate its threat. In Iraq, the group does pose a danger. Gauging it properly is key to containing it.

Several complex and gruesome attacks, including on a hospital in Kabul and a funeral in Nangarhar, claimed more than 100 civilian casualties on Tuesday, risking further erosion of the atmosphere for delayed intra-Afghan peace talks. Amid widespread horror and anger at the attacks, President Ghani blamed the Taliban and announced Afghan security forces would drop their defensive posture and resume […]

On Saturday, as many as 11 soldiers – four Indian and seven Chinese – were injured after a tense face-off near the Naku La sector (ahead of Muguthang Valley), a pass at a height of over 5,000 metres in the Sikkim sector. As per officials, the two Asian giants share a 2,400-mile long demarcated border.

India must stop buying and depending on foreign-made weapons and instead start manufacturing its own, India’s Chief of Defense Staff General Bipin Rawat told The Times of India in an exclusive interview Saturday.

Two explosions, about an hour apart, struck different areas of the Afghan capital late on Thursday, an official said. There were no casualties but some damage to a power station was reported.

The anti-India militancy in Kashmir suffered a serious setback on Wednesday morning when Indian security forces killed Riyaz Naikoo in an encounter at Pulwama in south Kashmir. Naikoo, who had been the Hizbul Mujahideen’s operational commander in the Valley since 2017, was India’s most-wanted terrorist in Kashmir.

The son of the Afghan Taliban’s late founder has been appointed as the insurgents’ military chief in a political reshuffle to check the power of his predecessor, senior militant figures have said.