The ICC chief prosecutor charged the supreme leader of the Islamic Emirate, Haibatullah Akhundzada, and Judge Abdul Hakim Haqqani of persecuting Afghan women and girls. Recently, a senior Taliban official called for reopening schools for women. This and other criticisms suggest a divided leadership.
The people involved worked with the United States in Afghanistan and had already received approval for resettlement. The programme, which grants a Special Immigrant Visa, was established in 2009 and covers the family members of selected people. The day before Trump's inauguration, 200 Afghans made it in time to leave the Philippines, where they had been moved for final paperwork.
The British journalist of Afghan-Pakistani origin in a documentary recounts the work of the Italian NGO Emergency, which since 1999 has accompanied the many dramatic pages of life in the country with its assistance to the wounded and sick. “After the bombs, today the problem of domestic and family violence emerges more and more.” Filippo Bongiovanni, anesthesiologist-reanimator: “Disproportion between care needs and available resources.”
India’s foreign secretary met Afghanistan’s acting foreign minister in Dubai. In a statement, India’s Ministry of External Affairs stressed the importance of humanitarian aid to the Afghan people, but it is also in New Delhi's interest to develop trade through the Iranian port of Chabahar to bypass the ports of Karachi and Gwadar, in rival Pakistan.
Westerners jailed by the Islamic Republic, who are rightly an international issue, are but a fraction of the more than 8,000 non-Iranians jailed in Iran, 95 per cent of them migrants from Afghanistan. More than 70 Afghans were hanged in 2024. Other countries of origin of prisoners include Pakistan, Iraq, Turkey, Azerbaijan and India.
Although excluded from universities, Afghan women and girls could enrol in vocational schools. Now, without midwives and nurses, access to care for women becomes very complicated. When the ban was announced, the Taliban Minister of Health was in Beijing for a WHO-sponsored conference on traditional medicine.
