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Humanitarian crisis in focus as Italy hosts G20 summit on Afghanistan
Italian Prime Minister Mario Draghi will host a special summit of the Group of 20 major economies on Tuesday to discuss Afghanistan, as worries grow about a looming humanitarian disaster following the Islamic Emirate’s (IEA) return to power.
Since the IEA took over Afghanistan on August 15, the country – already struggling with drought and severe poverty after decades of war – has seen its economy all but collapse, raising the spectre of an exodus of refugees.
The video conference, which is due to start at 3.30pm Kabul time will focus on aid needs, concerns over security and ways of guaranteeing safe passage abroad for thousands of Western-allied Afghans still in the country.
“Providing humanitarian support is urgent for the most vulnerable groups, especially women and children, with winter arriving,” said an official with knowledge of the G20 agenda.
The U.N. Secretary General Antonio Guterres is due to join the summit, underlining the central role given to the United Nations in tackling the crisis – in part because many countries don’t want to establish direct relations with the IEA.
Italy, which holds the rotating presidency of the G20, has worked hard to set up the meeting in the face of highly divergent views within the disparate group on how to deal with Afghanistan after the chaotic U.S. withdrawal from Kabul.
“The main problem is that Western countries want to put their finger on the way the Taliban (IEA) run the country, how they treat women for example, while China and Russia on the other hand have a non-interference foreign policy,” said a diplomatic source close to the matter.
China has publicly demanded that economic sanctions on Afghanistan be lifted and that billions of dollars in Afghan international assets be unfrozen and handed back to Kabul. It was not clear if this would even be discussed on Tuesday.
While U.S. President Joe Biden, Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi and Europe’s G20 leaders were expected to take part in the meeting, Chinese media reported that President Xi Jinping would not participate. It was also not clear if Russian President Vladimir Putin would dial in.
Afghanistan’s neighbours Pakistan and Iran have not been invited to the virtual call, but Qatar, which has played a key role as an interlocutor between the IEA and the West, will join the discussions, a diplomatic source said.
The virtual summit comes just days after senior U.S. and IEA officials met in Qatar for their first face-to-face meeting since the IEA retook power.
Tuesday’s meeting comes less than three weeks before the formal G20 leaders summit in Rome on October 30 and 31, which is due to focus on climate change, the global economic recovery, tackling malnutrition and the COVID-19 pandemic.
President Donald Trump suspended the green card lottery program on Thursday that allowed the suspect in the Brown University and MIT shootings to come to the United States.
Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem said in a post on the social platform X that, at Trump’s direction, she is ordering the United States Citizenship and Immigration Services to pause the program, the Associated Press reported.
“This heinous individual should never have been allowed in our country,” she said of the suspect, Portuguese national Claudio Neves Valente.
Neves Valente, 48, is suspected in the shootings at Brown University that killed two students and wounded nine others, and the killing of an MIT professor. He was found dead Thursday evening from a self-inflicted gunshot wound, officials said.
Neves Valente had studied at Brown on a student visa beginning in 2000, according to an affidavit from a Providence police detective. In 2017, he was issued a diversity immigrant visa and months later obtained legal permanent residence status, according to the affidavit. It was not immediately clear where he was between taking a leave of absence from the school in 2001 and getting the visa in 2017.
The diversity visa program makes up to 50,000 green cards available each year by lottery to people from countries that are little represented in the U.S., many of them in Africa. The lottery was created by Congress, and the move is almost certain to invite legal challenges.
Nearly 20 million people applied for the 2025 visa lottery, with more than 131,000 selected when including spouses with the winners. After winning, they must undergo vetting to win admission to the United States. Portuguese citizens won only 38 slots.
Lottery winners are invited to apply for a green card. They are interviewed at consulates and subject to the same requirements and vetting as other green-card applicants.
Trump has long opposed the diversity visa lottery. Noem’s announcement is the latest example of using tragedy to advance immigration policy goals. After an Afghan man was identified as the gunman in a fatal attack on National Guard members in November, Trump’s administration imposed sweeping rules against immigration from Afghanistan and other counties.
While pursuing mass deportation, Trump has sought to limit or eliminate avenues to legal immigration. He has not been deterred if they are enshrined in law, like the diversity visa lottery, or the Constitution, as with a right to citizenship for anyone born on U.S. soil. The Supreme Court recently agreed to hear his challenge to birthright citizenship.
Sixty-one members of the U.S. Congress have urged the Trump administration to reverse its decision to halt immigration processing for Afghan nationals, warning that the move unfairly targets Afghan nationals following a deadly shooting involving two National Guard members.
In a letter addressed to Secretary of State Marco Rubio and Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem, the lawmakers said the incident should not be used to vilify Afghans who are legally seeking entry into the United States. They stressed that Afghan applicants undergo extensive vetting involving multiple U.S. security agencies.
The letter criticized the suspension of Special Immigrant Visa processing, the termination of Temporary Protected Status for Afghanistan, and broader travel and asylum restrictions, warning that such policies endanger Afghan allies who supported U.S. forces during the war.
“Exploiting this tragedy to sow division and inflame fear will not make America safer. Abandoning those who made the courageous choice to stand beside us signals to those we may need as allies in the future that we cannot be trusted to honor our commitments. That is a mistake we cannot afford,” the group said.
The U.S. admitted nearly 200,000 Afghan nationals in the wake of the U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan.
Thousands of Afghans who worked with the U.S. military and their families still wait at military bases and refugee camps around the world for a small number of SIVs.
An earthquake of magnitude 5.3 struck Afghanistan on Friday, the United States Geological Survey (USGS) said.
The quake occurred at 10:09 local time at a depth of 35 km, USGS said.
Its epicentre was 25 kilometres from Nahrin district of Baghlan province in north Afghanistan.
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