WorldcrunchStay updated with comprehensive news on Afghanistan from Worldcrunch. Discover insights on Afghan politics, economic developments, societal issues, and cultural landmarks with translations from top international sources. Highlights include Kabul, Afghan culture, and historical events.
In Afghanistan, where it is considered a disgrace to have only daughters in a family, some families raise their girls as boys — giving them male names, boys’ clothes and the freedoms typically denied to Afghan girls. But what happens to these girls when they grow up?
Iran is reportedly deporting thousands of Afghans — including many legal residents — claiming it can no longer afford to host millions of migrants. Witnesses describe chaotic expulsions marked by beatings and last-minute extortion at the border.
On July 3, Russia recognized the Taliban-led Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan, a decision that will have a significant effect on the positions of other nations, particularly those in Central Asia.
For nearly a century, the West has approached the Middle East with strategic interests — but little genuine understanding. From coups to regime changes to failed red lines, each intervention has produced unintended consequences. Maybe it’s time we admit: the problem isn’t the region. It’s us.
This week, the Taliban closed a radio station broadcasting from Kabul and aimed at women — yet another act in its unprecedented isolation of half of Afghanistan’s population. While the world is not turning a blind eye, it lacks the means to put pressure on the Taliban.
Iranian officials have been unnerved by the Assad regime’s collapse, with one top general admitting the country was “defeated very badly” in Syria. A shaky ceasefire in Gaza follows 15 month of war in which Tehran’s proxy Hamas was decimated. Will unrest in the region spill over to Iran, where problems — both foreign and domestic — are piling up for the regime?
While the fentanyl epidemic has hit the U.S. the hardest, Italy is not immune. The drug has been circulating in the country for at least 10 years and is becoming more widespread due to a series of international factors. Some are sounding the alarm, but questions remain over how to address the problem.
A confounding alliance between leftists, wokism and Islamic fanatics is the perfect smokescreen for an insidious enemy targeting the West’s liberal values. It’s happened before.
Nothing can beautify life in Afghanistan under the Taliban. So how can we promote a country whose government practices terrorism against its people? That’s what Arab world influencers are doing.
With multilateral diplomacy in tatters, the fighting gumption of weaker states against aggression by bigger powers is helping end the age of empires.
Iran and Afghanistan have long had a tense relationship. Recent skirmishes at their shared border indicate that conflict is escalating, but the causes are unclear.
After withdrawing from Afghanistan, the U.S. left a power vacuum. The Taliban regime is officially isolated internationally, but the country has vast mineral resources — on which Beijing is keeping a close eye.
Staying in a theocracy whose rulers subjugate women was not an option, but trying to get to destinations in Europe and beyond comes with unthinkable perils of its own.
No girls, no science, no foreign languages, only the Koran. This is how the Taliban want to erase the generation of students educated for 20 years by the “Western usurpers.” La Stampa’s Francesca Mannocchi visits one of the rigid, boys-only madrasas near Kabul.
Twenty years later the Islamist group is back in power in Afghanistan, but trying this time to win international support. Now that several months have passed, experts on the ground can offer a clear assessment if the group has genuinely transformed on such issues as women’s rights and free speech.
Unlike ISIS-K (Islamic State Khorasan), drug cultivation and trafficking are not an ideological matter for the new rulers of Afghanistan — more likely a bargaining chip in negotiations with the West.
After the Sunni fundamentalist Taliban rulers retook control of Afghanistan, there were initial, friendly signals exchanged with Iran’s Shia regime. But a recent border skirmish recalls tensions from the 1990s, when Iran massed troops on the Afghan frontier.
The new Taliban commander shows reporters from Die Welt around the deserted Camp Marmal, the German army’s former headquarters in Afghanistan.
Born some eight centuries ago, the famed poet and philosopher Rumi offered ideas on religion that bear little resemblance to the brand of Islam being imposed right now in Afghanistan by the Taliban regime.
As the Taliban closed in on Afghanistan, the European Union co-signed a joint statement with dozens of nations agreeing that “the Afghan people deserve to live in safety, security and dignity” and that the international community was “ready to assist them”. As someone who has been researching the refugee crisis on Europe’s borders for years, I found the statement surprising. Before it was making bold statements about events in Kabul, the EU had spent years failing to help thousands of Afghans seeking help at its borders. Since 2015, more than 570,000 Afghan citizens have sought protection in the EU. Thousands […]
The United States has long dictated policy regarding narcotics, and Colombia, in particular, has paid a heavy price. The current presidential race is an opportunity to shift course and prioritize the welfare of everyday people.
Weaponry belonging to the Afghan army is moving into Iran, though it is not clear if it is smuggled, or moved in a deal between the Taliban and Iran’s regime.
The fall of the Afghan national government may be a calamity for the Afghans but not for the world’s big-money interests, which prefer to deal with ruthless, incompetent regimes that will sell out their countries.
To succeed in withdrawing US troops from Afghanistan White House will need the active help of the Central Asian countries. However, with these post-Soviet republics in play, Russia wants a say.
Russian authorities have more than a few questions to face, including where U.S. forces may relocate after exiting the troubled, central-Asian republic.
As the U.S. government pivots its foreign policy, the Taliban is ramping up plans to reestablish a totalitarian state. Regional support for a sovereign Afghan government has never been more urgent.
Safe from the disapproving eyes of their families, women writers gather secretly in Jalalabad to immerse themselves in poetry.
KABUL — In the crowded old city of the Afghan capital, dozens of shops are lined with piles of colourful dried herbs, sitting out in the open. Their fragrance wafts into the street. Hindu shopkeepers wear red, blue and black turbans, and have long, bushy beards. They tell they’ve been making and selling herbal medicine here for generations. Darmander Singh is a Hindu sage – a wise mystic. People here call him La La Dil Soz, which means ‘Kind big brother” in Persian. He sees more than 30 patients a week, asking them detailed questions about their body, before setting […]
KABUL — You see the images everywhere in the streets of Kabul: bare-chested men posing with their protruding and pulsating muscles. Scattered across the Afghan capital, the posters are eye-catching in there own right, but stand out even more in a place where men typically sport the traditional long trousers and puffy shirts known as […]
KABUL — When a series of terrorist attacks rocked the Afghan capital late last month, killing more than 150, less than a kilometer away from worst blast, a group of women were busy preparing a morning show for the country’s only TV station run by women. Zan TV, or Women’s TV, was launched this month, dedicated to women’s voices and women’s issues. Since the end of Taliban rule in 2001, Afghanistan has gone from having just one state-owned TV station to 76 stations broadcasting across the country. But despite the proliferation of channels, women are often neglected by the Afghan […]
‘Baad’ is a tribal tradition through which a woman is offered as compensation if her relative commits a crime.
Thousands of Afghans are making their way home after years and years living as refugees in neighboring Pakistan. For many of the migrants, their native country is now a foreign place.
An astronomer uses stargazing to give young Afghans some much-appreciated perspective, all the while taking care not to tread on anyone’s religious sensibilities.
JALALABAD — It’s early morning in Jalalabad, eastern Afghanistan. Haroon Sarwari, 17, and Manzoor Ali, 18, are wearing their backpacks and walking quickly to get a taxi to reach Kabul on time. These close friends have laid out plans to travel to Europe illegally with the help of a smuggling agent. Haroon’s cousins managed to get to Germany three months before, so his father, Sarwar Khan, supports the plan. “My father sold a few of his cows and borrowed some money from his friends to send me to Europe,” the teenager explains. “He has already agreed with the agent on […]
ISIS has launched a radio program on the border of Afghanistan and Pakistan, airing programs that target jobless youths and encourage them to adopt extremist views and join the fight in Syria.
JALALABAD — Shah Zaman, 11, spends his days carting people’s luggage to earn a few cents. His mother died during his birth and soon after, his father remarried. “I wish my mother had been taken to the hospital,” he says. Shah lives in Jalalabad, in eastern Afghanistan, where war and internal conflicts have weakened the local economy and health system. Like in so many parts of the country, health facilities lack trained staff. In more remote areas, health facilities can also be hours away, making it difficult for pregnant women to reach them in time. This, in a country where […]
KABUL — Inside the Afghan capital’s soccer federation stadium, dozens of Afghan women, some of them recently returned from a training camp in Japan, are practicing their skills. “From 2006 up to now, the Afghan women’s national soccer team has conducted several different trips abroad, for training and matches,” says Zohra Mihree, chief of the Afghan women’s soccer committee. “The team participated in SAFF (South Asian Football Federation) tournaments in Bangladesh and Pakistan. Our team came in third place in 2014.” Currently, more than 100 women soccer players are training in different clubs around Afghanistan, up from just a handful […]
KABUL — Here at Pol-e Sokhta, in a spot in western Kabul where hundreds of drug addicts gather each day, Afghan government workers have become a regular presence. The government workers have been given the mission to round up the city’s drug users and move them to a former NATO base, less than 10 kilometers away. The Afghan ministries of counter-narcotics, public health and economy have joined together in the initiative to provide treatment for drug addicts at the camp. Salamat Azimi, Minister of Counter Narcotics, says the state has the means to treat thousands of drug addicts, and will […]
While most people around the world consume news and information from TV, radio and the Internet, a centuries-old tradition that has mostly died out is still being practiced in one Afghan province where literacy rates are poor. Meet Bamyan’s town c