The Iranian regime appears just a few months away from obtaining nuclear weapons, all while the Biden administration is completely silent and has not articulated any clear policy for preventing this dangerous and predatory regime from becoming a nuclear state like North Korea.
Burkina Faso’s president has declared three days of national mourning after suspected jihadists killed 80 people, including 59 civilians, in an attack in the north of the country.
The attack was the latest bloodshed in an area with high levels of Islamist violence.
The assault on Wednesday near the town of Gorgadji also left six pro-government militiamen and 15 military police dead, the government and the military said on Thursday. The initial death toll was put at 47 on Wednesday.
Four days after the quick and unexpected invasion of Kabul by the Taliban, the streets of the Afghan capital are almost entirely devoid of women.
The few women who are on the streets are wearing the traditional blue burqa, Islamic garb that, while customary in Afghanistan, was not used as widely in Kabul until now. Many women are dressed in the long black clothes commonly worn in the Middle East and Arab nations.
All the women are accompanied by a male guardian – a requirement that the Taliban has imposed on women across the country. Many of these women are out grocery shopping; a simple task that has become extremely dangerous for them.
The Taliban has been accused of burning down an amusement park in northern Afghanistan because it had ‘idolatrous statues’ as their ‘moderate’ facade crumbles.
The jihadists torched the recreation grounds last night in the northern city of Sheberghan which are also used for holding sports and cultural events for children.
Sheberghan is in the heartlands of the vanquished strongman Abdul Rashid Dostum whose opulent mansion was seized by the jihadists when he fled over the border into Uzbekistan on Saturday.
The Bokhdi Amusement Park was set on fire by Taliban insurgents in Begha, Sheberghan. The reason is that the statues/idols standing there are in Public access Idols are illegal in Islam, This is the logic of the Taliban's brutal emirate. The homeland is occupied.#Afghanistan pic.twitter.com/MBuYsQQbxk
— Ihtesham Afghan (@IhteshamAfghan) August 17, 2021
Afghan Christians are reportedly fleeing to the mountains in a desperate attempt to escape the Taliban who is going door-to-door trying to kill them.
An underground church that partners with Frontier Alliance International (FAI) has reported that the Taliban are targeting Christians for death.
Afghanistan has a familiar power back in place. Kabul has fallen. The Taliban have won. And Pakistanis are euphoric.
To many a foe, but to others a friend, the cloistered group of extremists has long held cordial ties with Islamabad, and the Taliban’s recent rise from the flames has left many Pakistanis in raptures.
Even the country’s prime minister, Imran Khan, has been waxing lyrical, heaping eulogies on the group of militants, who openly violated women’s rights, in addition to flouting a number of other norms of the civilized world, during their stint in power from 1996 to 2001.
Khan, who often resorts to anti-West rhetoric, said Monday during a ceremony in Islamabad that Afghans have broken the “shackles of slavery.” It was seen as a clear endorsement of Afghanistan’s new rulers, but also as a sideswipe at those who invaded Pakistan’s neighbor in the aftermath of the September 11 attacks in the United States.
h/t John
‘First-Come, First-Serve’: US Embassy Says Military Can’t Ensure ‘Safe Passage’ to Kabul Airport
The U.S. Embassy in Kabul said Wednesday the federal government and military cannot ensure the safe passage to the Kabul airport after Taliban extremists took over the capital as video footage shows throngs of people trying to enter the facility.
“The United States government cannot ensure safe passage to the Hamid Karzai International Airport,” the U.S. Embassy wrote in a security alert issued on Wednesday, adding that “the security situation in Kabul continues to change quickly, including at the airport.”
‘Taliban intensifying hunt for people who collaborated with US and Nato troops’
A UN document says the Taliban are intensifying their hunt for people who worked for and collaborated with Nato and US forces.
The confidential paper was produced by the Norwegian Centre for Global Analyses, which provides the UN with intelligence information.
“The Taliban are arresting and/or threatening to kill or arrest family members of target individuals unless they surrender themselves to the Taliban,” the document, seen by the BBC said.
Cases have been registered against 400 unidentified people after a viral video showed a woman being assaulted at Minar-e-Pakistan on the country’s independence day.
This is why #Pakistanis r supporting #Taliban they have become 1 of them a Girl was Sexually Molested Stripped Naked by 400 Men at Minar E #Pakistan #Lahore on #IndependenceDayPakistan Celebrations NOT ALL MEN #Congratulationsindia #AfghanWomen #Afghanistan #TalibanSympathisers pic.twitter.com/9TIIh6tjC0
— 🇮🇳 Gopal Thakkar🚩 (@GopalAThakkar_) August 17, 2021
Pencils scratch as students in year eight feverishly work through an exam paper. At the back of the classroom, Clara Edna Chevambo, 37, a minute figure in hand-me-down clothes, finishes first and hands her paper to the teacher. As she leaves, her 11-year-old daughter is arriving for afternoon class. A vegetable farmer who supported, clothed and fed five children, her mother and her grandmother, Chevambo is now living in a borrowed tent in a camp, one of the ones with something to do to fill a few hours.
“I’m in school every day, and I don’t want to miss class. I send my daughter to school every day.”
Where she lived and farmed in Cabo Delgado, Mozambique’s northernmost region, bordering Tanzania, is too dangerous a place to be now war has engulfed the region. An estimated 800,000 people have been displaced by an Islamist insurgency that has killed 3,000 people since 2017. Known as al-Shabaab, although not linked to Somalia’s group of the same name, it has declared itself affiliated to Islamic State.
Fresh chaos descended in Kabul today as thousands of Afghans desperate to escape Taliban rule pleaded with troops to be allowed on planes out of the country after the militants used whips, sharp objects, and gunfire to bead back crowds outside the city’s airport.
One man was photographed with tears streaming down his cheeks, his face contorted in anguish as he saw his fellow Afghans being whipped. The Taliban then opened fire to drive the masses back from the site.
Women were filmed reaching their hands through iron railings towards US troops while screaming ‘the Taliban are coming’ in footage being circulated on Afghan social media accounts this morning.
Taliban fire into crowd, beat protesters: reports
KABUL, Afghanistan (AP) — The Taliban violently broke up a protest in eastern Afghanistan on Wednesday, killing at least one person as they quashed a rare public show of dissent. The militant group meanwhile met with former officials from the toppled Western-backed government.
The insurgents’ every action in their sudden sweep to power is being watched closely. They insist they have changed and won’t impose the same draconian restrictions they did when they last ruled Afghanistan, all but eliminating women’s rights, carrying out public executions and harboring al-Qaida in the years before the 9/11 attacks.
BREAKING: Taliban opens fire on protesters in Jalalabad because they were reportedly waiving the Afghan flag.
— Election Wizard (@ElectionWiz) August 18, 2021
In the days before the US-led invasion of Afghanistan in 2001, a group of British defence and security officials took a top-secret trip to Moscow.
The plan was to ask their Russian counterparts for advice on operating in the country given the former Soviet Union’s doomed Afghan intervention that ended in defeat in 1989.
There’s an old saying in Afghanistan that encapsulates the country’s views on divorce: “A woman only leaves her father’s house in the white bridal clothes, and she can only return in the white shrouds.”
In this deeply conservative and patriarchal society, women who defy convention and seek divorce are often disowned by their families and shunned by Afghan society. Left alone, they have to fight for basic rights, such as renting an apartment, which require the involvement or guarantees of male relatives.
Despite the social stigma and barriers to independence, there are divorced women living in Afghanistan today. Women like Roqia* and Tahira*, who divorced seven and eight years ago respectively, and now share an apartment. Together, Roqia and Tahira have weathered many storms and supported each other, united by their similar experiences.
Hate preacher Anjem Choudary is secretly posting vile messages to his followers on an encrypted smartphone app favoured by Islamic State terrorists, The Mail on Sunday can reveal.
The extremist imam, who called the 9/11 hijackers ‘magnificent martyrs’ and radicalised the killers of soldier Lee Rigby, is sending messages on the Telegram app after he was banned by Twitter, Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp for violating hate-speech rules.
Choudary told his Telegram followers last week that Britain is a ‘police state’ and preached that Muslims are having their freedoms taken away ‘under the guise of counter-terrorism’.
A Muslim police officer facing investigation for tweeting racist messages once admitted that her employer found her views ‘extreme’.
Ruby Begum, 26, posted the comment when she worked for a market-research company.
The Mail on Sunday revealed last week that Ms Begum used Twitter in the months before joining the Metropolitan Police to insult Jews and mock the 9/11 terror attacks.
The government’s pledge to outlaw virginity testing will be undermined unless fake surgery touted as “virginity repair” is also banned, the Royal College of Obstetricians and Gynaecologists (RCOG) has warned.
Last month ministers committed to criminalising the invasive and unscientific “tests” offered by some private clinics to determine whether someone is a virgin through an examination to see if the hymen is intact.
However, there are no plans to ban a procedure the same doctors claim can “restore virginity” by constructing a layer of skin at the entrance to the vagina to create the illusion of an unbroken hymen.
Just what are those Baptists up to? Goes on in Canada as well but we’re too busy banning cis-gendered white males to pay it much mind.
