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Top U.N. officials seek to ‘water down’ bans on women in Afghanistan

The United Nations is pushing the Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan (IEA) administration for more exemptions to its ban on most female aid workers, top U.N. officials said on Wednesday, while also expressing concern that foreign women working for international organizations and embassies could next be targeted.
Speaking to Reuters during a visit to Kabul, U.N. aid chief Martin Griffiths said that his message during meetings with Taliban officials had been: “If you can’t help us rescind the ban, give us the exemptions to allow women to operate.”
Last month, the IEA – who seized power in August 2021 – banned most female aid workers and stopped women from attending university after stopping girls from attending high school in March. Griffiths traveled to Afghanistan after a visit last week by U.N. Deputy Secretary-General Amina Mohammed.
Griffiths said some exemptions to the female aid worker ban had been granted in health and education and that there were indications there could be a possible exemption in agriculture. But he said much more was needed, with nutrition and water and sanitation services a priority to prevent severe illnesses and malnutrition during a severe humanitarian crisis in Afghanistan, Reuters reported.
“We have not seen the history of the Taliban (IEA) reversing any edict. What we have seen is exemptions that, hopefully, if we keep pushing them, they will water down those edicts to a point where we will get women and girls back into school and into the workplace,” Mohammed told reporters in New York on Wednesday.
Griffiths told Reuters that, following his recent discussions with the IEA, he was hopeful they would create a set of written guidelines to allow aid groups to operate with female staff in more areas with certainty in coming weeks.
“The next few weeks are absolutely crucial to see if the humanitarian community … can stay and deliver,” he said, while cautioning: “I don’t want to speculate as to whether we’re going to come out of this in the right place.”
The IEA did not immediately respond to a request for comment on its plans over guidelines.
During her visit last week, Mohammed met with the Shura – the leadership council that issues the bans – in the southern Taliban heartland of Kandahar. She said there is a concern that they may next prohibit “international women from international organizations and embassies.”
“It hasn’t happened so far,” said Mohammed, adding that they had been expecting a possible announcement all month. “I don’t say that it won’t, but clearly the pressure that we’re putting on has stopped that rollback as quickly.”
Griffiths said the United Nations would continue operating in Afghanistan wherever it could, but there was a concern that international donors might not want to commit to the huge financial cost of aid at around $4.6 billion a year.
“I lose sleep about this, I really do,” Griffiths said, adding that he would meet with donors in coming weeks to make the case for why Afghanistan needed help during an intense humanitarian crisis in which 28 million people were in need of aid, including 6 million on the brink of famine.
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Lebanon and Afghanistan named unhappiest countries in the world

According to the annual World Happiness Report, Afghanistan (ranked 137) and Lebanon (ranked 136) are the two unhappiest countries.
The report includes six key factors to help explain variation in happiness levels, namely social support, income, health, freedom, generosity, and absence of corruption.
According to the survey, Finland remained in the top position for the sixth year, followed by Denmark, Iceland, Israel, and the Netherlands. In contrast, Afghanistan and Lebanon remained the unhappiest countries, preceded by Sierra Leone, Zimbabwe, and Congo.
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1401 In Review: Diplomacy a focal point for Afghanistan

The Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan (IEA) has made extensive efforts on the diplomatic front to open a new chapter in political relations with the world in the past 12 months.
Although these efforts have not yet led to any country officially recognizing the IEA government, the Islamic Emirate’s flag has been raised at a few foreign missions in the region.
Russia, China, Turkey, Iran, Pakistan, Uzbekistan, Turkmenistan, Kazakhstan, Qatar and the United Arab Emirates have allowed the IEA to post its diplomats to the embassies of Afghanistan.
The messages of almost all of Afghanistan’s neighbors, except for Tajikistan, in the field of fighting terrorism, human rights and sovereignty, have been comprehensive, which have been described as largely aligned with the interests of the United States.
In the past twelve months, the political representations of European countries in Afghanistan have continued to operate only for the purpose of coordinating humanitarian aid.
India meanwhile also has a technical team to coordinate humanitarian aid in Afghanistan.
Foreign Minister Amir Khan Muttaqi has said that the Islamic Emirate respects the interests of other countries and in return asks them to have similar interactions with the IEA.
This goal has been expressed many times by Mullah Abdul Ghani Baradar, Deputy Prime Minister of Economy. He has said the IEA has a balanced and economy-oriented foreign policy and wants to have friendly relations with all the countries of the world.
Over the past 12 months, the countries of the region and the world also hosted meetings for Afghanistan, but almost no representative of the Islamic Emirate was present at most of these gatherings.
At the joint meeting of the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe held in Tashkent at the end of this solar year, the Minister of Foreign Affairs of Uzbekistan suggested the establishment of an international negotiating group to carry on negotiations with the IEA.
Russian President’s Special Envoy to Afghanistan Zamir Kabulov also made similar statements and emphasized that Afghanistan should not be in political isolation on the world stage.
Questions have however been raised as to why the world, especially the US and Western countries, did not have a clear and specific strategy for Afghanistan in the past year, and why countries did not deal with Afghanistan through multilateral diplomacy.
“Some of our neighboring countries have interactions based on their own interests in the framework of “de facto” relations, the countries of the world wanted to interact at the beginning, and according to one of the ambassadors of the European countries, the world’s interaction with the Taliban (Islamic Emirate) is going in a negative way,” said Aziz Bariz, an international relations analyst.
Meanwhile, the Islamic Emirate hopes that in the new solar year, it will be able to further strengthen its relations and political ties with the countries of the region and the world, and as a result, achieve positive interactions with the world and establish friendly relations with international legitimacy.
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IEA’s supreme leader orders torching of drugs

In a new decree, the supreme leader of the Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan Hibatullah Akhundzada ordered all drugs and drug paraphernalia to be burned, according to a statement published by the Administrative Office.
Based on the decree, the drug dealers and producers will be punished and the tools and equipment used in the production of drugs should be destroyed.
According to the decree, the joint board of the Ministries of Interior and Public Health and the Directorate of General Intelligence has been tasked with burning drugs and equipment used in drug production in public in the presence of the relevant court.
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