Afghanistan’s Foreign Ministry said on Wednesday that Afghans who fled to Pakistan following the Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan’s (IEA) take over in August last year can return home and their safety will be ensured.

The ministry said that a number of Afghans who have been protesting in Islamabad for some time now want to be evacuated to other countries.

These Afghans have told Pakistani media that their lives would be in danger if they returned home.

However, the IEA’s foreign ministry said this would not be the case and that “the Islamic Emirate reiterates that Afghanistan is the common home of all Afghans, there is no threat to them, regardless of their ethnicity, religion or region.”

“The Islamic Emirate considers ensuring the security of every citizen as its religious and national duty,” the IEA said in the statement.

The ministry also said that many of the protesters are people who have been living in Pakistan for years and are now using the opportunity to try to get asylum in Western countries.

They are an estimated 300,000 to 400,000 Afghans in Pakistan who fled there during last year’s take over. This is in addition to the 1.5 million refugees who have been living in Pakistan for decades.

On Monday, hundreds of Afghan nationals, who have been camping outside the National Press Club in Islamabad for weeks, staged a protest rally in the capital calling to be relocated to the West.

One protester, Alyas Zaki, told Dawn News: “We are here and want to get settled in any developed country. So far, we are not being given the status of refugees here.”

He said Pakistan was also not providing asylum to them, adding: “We know people of Pakistan are also facing several challenges such as unemployment and high inflation, therefore, frankly speaking, we want to stay in any developed country,” he said.

Russian troops in Ukraine have likely suffered as many losses in three months as the Soviet army did during over nine years of fighting in Afghanistan, according to a British government report.

The latest update from Britain’s Defence Intelligence agency claims that “a combination of poor low-level tactics, limited air cover, a lack of flexibility, and a command approach which is prepared to reinforce failure and repeat mistakes” has led to Russia’s high casualty rate among its troops in Ukraine.

According to the latest report from the General Staff of Ukraine’s Armed Forces, the Russian military has sustained 29,200 casualties in Ukraine since the beginning of the war on February 24, Newsweek reported.

This number is probably inflated by Ukrainian authorities, but estimates from Western intelligence report a Russian death toll that’s still much higher than the one the Kremlin is officially recognizing.

In the latest official Russian report, the country’s death toll in Ukraine was just over 1,500 casualties.

Newsweek has reached out to the Russian Ministry of Defense for comment.

On May 15, the British Ministry of Defence estimated that Russia had likely lost a third of its troops sent to conduct the invasion of Ukraine.

In March, the Russian tabloid newspaper Komsomolskaya Pravda briefly published a story claiming Russian troops had suffered 10,000 casualties in Ukraine. The article was later deleted, with the tabloid’s newsroom denying responsibility for it.

It’s likely that Russia has suffered even more casualties than reported by the Soviet army in Afghanistan between December 1979 and February 1989, Newsweek reported.

The Soviet invasion of Afghanistan in 1979 turned into a brutal, long conflict that saw the death of an estimated one million civilians, 90,000 Mujahideen fighters and 18,000 Afghan troops. The Soviet Union lost about 14,500-15,000 men.

The UK’s chaotic withdrawal from Afghanistan last year showed “systemic failures of leadership, planning and preparation”, according to a scathing inquiry by British MPs published on Tuesday.

The House of Commons Foreign Affairs Committee probe revealed a “fundamental lack of planning, grip or leadership at a time of national emergency” before and during the Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan (IEA) takeover of Kabul in August last year, France24 reported.

“The manner of our withdrawal from Afghanistan was a disaster and a betrayal of our allies that will damage the UK’s interests for years to come,” the report said.

At the time, Prime Minister Boris Johnson hailed a mission “unlike anything we have seen in our lifetimes” with the UK airlifting over 15,000 people in two weeks.

But foreign secretary at the time, Dominic Raab, was heavily criticised for not immediately leaving a beach holiday when the IEA took control.

The report however stated that during the run-up to the IEA takeover, the government and civil servants suffered from an “optimism bias” that the US would change its mind about withdrawing, despite it having been announced by president Donald Trump in February 2020.

“The UK government failed adequately to shape or respond to Washington’s decision to withdraw, to predict the speed of the Taliban’s (IEA) takeover, or to plan and prepare for the evacuation of our Afghan partners,” it added.

“Most damning for the Foreign Office is the total absence of a plan for evacuating Afghans who supported the UK mission, without being directly employed by the UK government, despite knowing 18 months before the collapse of Afghanistan that an evacuation might be necessary.”

In responding to questions from the Committee, which started work on the report in September, the Foreign Office “provided answers that were intentionally evasive and often deliberately misleading”.

Instead, two whistleblowers provided crucial testimony to the committee, France24 reported.

“Those who lead the Foreign Office should be ashamed that civil servants of great integrity felt compelled to risk their careers to bring the situation to light,” the report said.

The committee called on the government to “commit to a serious strategy for future engagement with Afghanistan”, warning that “attempts to isolate the new regime entirely may only hurt the Afghan people and leave a vacuum to be filled by China.

“Failure to do so would abandon women and girls in the single biggest reversal of rights in a generation,” it said.

It called on the UK to re-establish a diplomatic presence “as soon as it is safe to do so, and to work with those on the ground who can support civil society”, France24 reported.