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U.N. has millions in Afghanistan bank, but cannot use it
The United Nations has about $135 million in the bank in Afghanistan but is unable to use it because the Islamic Emirate-run central bank cannot convert it to the afghani currency, a senior U.N. official said on Thursday.
Abdallah al Dardari, head of the U.N. Development Programme in Afghanistan, said the United Nations had taken the U.S. dollars into the country and deposited it with the Afghanistan International Bank “with a clear promise from the central bank that fresh cash will be automatically converted to afghanis.”
“This did not happen,” he told the ACAMS Global Sanctions Space Summit, adding that UNDP itself has “$30 million stuck at AIB that I cannot convert to afghanis and without afghanis as you can imagine, we cannot implement all our programs.”
The Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan (IEA), who seized power in August, banned the use of foreign currency in a country where U.S. dollars were common.
The IEA has long been under international sanctions, which the United Nations and aid groups say are now hindering humanitarian operations in Afghanistan, where more than half the country’s 39 million people suffer extreme hunger and the economy, education and social services face collapse.
Billions of dollars in Afghan central bank reserves and foreign development aid have been frozen to prevent it from falling into IEA hands. International banks are wary of breaching sanctions, leaving the United Nations and aid groups struggling to get enough money into the country.
Liquidity is also a problem. Al Dardari told Reuters in November that while there was about $4 billion worth of afghanis in the economy, only about $500 million worth was in circulation.
The United Nations and the World Bank are discussing a possible swap facility, aid groups and U.N. officials have said.
Al Dardari said on Thursday that this would allow cash for humanitarian operations to be paid into a mechanism abroad and then afghanis could be collected “from major traders and mobile companies from inside Afghanistan.”
He also said lessons could be learned from a program in Myanmar, where electronic payment systems bypassed the central bank. Myanmar’s military have been hit with a raft of sanctions by the United States and others since a coup a year ago.
The Embassy of Japan in Afghanistan announced on Friday that the country has allocated $19.5 million in humanitarian assistance to Afghanistan.
In a statement, the Japanese Embassy said it hopes the aid will help bring positive change to the lives of vulnerable Afghans.
According to the statement, the assistance will cover the basic humanitarian needs of vulnerable communities in Afghanistan.
The embassy added that the aid will be delivered through United Nations agencies, international organizations, and Japanese non-governmental organizations operating in Afghanistan.
Japan’s total assistance to Afghanistan since August 2021 has reached more than $549 million.
Security forces at the Islam Qala border in Herat province prevented hundreds of young Afghans from illegally entering Iran.
Officials from the 207 Al-Farooq Army Corps said that around 530 people attempted over the past two days to illegally enter Iranian territory through areas of Kohsan district in Herat, but border forces detained them and transferred them back to their original areas.
Meanwhile, officials in the local administration of Herat said that due to severe cold along the illegal migration route to Iran, three Afghan migrants have lost their lives in the Kohsan district of the province, and a shepherd has also died there for the same reason.
Mohammad Yousuf Saeedi, spokesperson for the Herat governor’s office, said that some statistics and images shared on social media regarding the incident are not reliable.
According to him, further investigations are underway to determine whether any individuals have died on the other side of the border.
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.
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