Wednesday, December 7, 2011
West's withdrawal set to boost Afghan refugee numbers
ESCALATING sectarian violence in Afghanistan and the staged withdrawal of western forces from the country are likely to lead to a surge in Hazara boatpeople risking the journey to Australia...Continue Reading...
حملات روز عاشورا 'ریشه در پاکستان دارد'؛ نگرانیها کاهش مییابد؟
اگر ثابت شود که بمبگذاریهای روز عاشورا در افغانستان کار یک گروه پاکستانی بوده، آیا نگرانیها از گسترش تنشهای مذهبی در افغانستان کاهش می یابد؟ به نظر می رسد که این طور باشد
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دھماکوں پر پاکستان سے بات ہوگی: کرزئی
افغان صدر حامد کرزئی نے یوم عاشور پر افغانستان کے تین مختلف شہروں میں ہونے والے بم دھماکوں کی ذمہ داری پاکستانی شدت پسند کالعدم تنظیم لشکرِ جھگنوی کی طرف سے قبول کیے جانے کے بعد کہا ہے وہ پاکستان حکومت سے اس معاملے پر بات کریں گے۔
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(The Independent) New fears of sectarian strife after Kabul blast
Suicide attack at Shia shrine on holy day is blamed on Taliban and Pakistan
At least 55 people died in Afghanistan yesterday when a suicide bomber blew himself up at a Shia shrine in Kabul, igniting fears of a new and unprecedented phase of sectarian violence in the Sunni-majority country....Continue Reading...
At least 55 people died in Afghanistan yesterday when a suicide bomber blew himself up at a Shia shrine in Kabul, igniting fears of a new and unprecedented phase of sectarian violence in the Sunni-majority country....Continue Reading...
Tuesday, December 6, 2011
لشکر الجنگوی مسوؤلیت بمگذاری های افغانستان را به عهده گرفت
لشکر الجنگوی پاکستان در حالی مسوؤلیت انفجارات افغانستان را به عهده گرفته است که طالبان این انفجارات را ظالمانه عنوان کرده اند.
بر اساس ویب سایت امنیت ملی آسترالیا، لشکرالجنگوی توسط حکومات ایالات متحده، بریتانیا، کانادا و پاکستان منحیث یک گروه دهشت افگن شناخته شده است. این گروه مرتبط به القاعده در سال 1996 درپاکستان ایجاد شد. لورینس کورب تحلیل گردر مرکز انکشاف امریکا طی مصاحبۀ به رادیو آشنا گفت که این گروه توسط سازمان استخباراتی آی اس آی پاکستان ایجاد شده است.
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بر اساس ویب سایت امنیت ملی آسترالیا، لشکرالجنگوی توسط حکومات ایالات متحده، بریتانیا، کانادا و پاکستان منحیث یک گروه دهشت افگن شناخته شده است. این گروه مرتبط به القاعده در سال 1996 درپاکستان ایجاد شد. لورینس کورب تحلیل گردر مرکز انکشاف امریکا طی مصاحبۀ به رادیو آشنا گفت که این گروه توسط سازمان استخباراتی آی اس آی پاکستان ایجاد شده است.
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UNAMA condemns Kabul and Mazar-e-Sharif explosions
By GHANIZADA - Tue Dec 06, 8:08 pm
Tuesday, DECEMBER 06, 2011 – The United Nations Assistance Mission in Afghanistan (UNAMA) strongly condemns today’s explosions in the cities of Kabul and Mazar-i-Sharif that resulted in the deaths and injuries of tens of Afghan civilians who had gathered to mourn on the occasion of the Tenth of Muharam.
We express our heartfelt condolences to those who have lost their loved ones in these attacks.
Our thoughts are with all those Afghans who have been affected and we hope for the speedy recovery of those who have been injured.
UNAMA stresses that today’s attacks on Afghan civilians have no justification. Such illegal and indiscriminate attacks are completely unacceptable and those responsible are fully accountable for the deaths and injuries of civilians caused by such brutal acts.
Khamma Press
We express our heartfelt condolences to those who have lost their loved ones in these attacks.
Our thoughts are with all those Afghans who have been affected and we hope for the speedy recovery of those who have been injured.
UNAMA stresses that today’s attacks on Afghan civilians have no justification. Such illegal and indiscriminate attacks are completely unacceptable and those responsible are fully accountable for the deaths and injuries of civilians caused by such brutal acts.
Khamma Press
12 kids killed in suicide carnage
MORE than a dozen children were among 60 killed and 180 injured yesterday in a double bomb atrocity in Afghanistan....Continue Reading...
(NPR) Afghan Attacks Kill 60; Signs Of A Sectarian Shift?
Deadly suicide attacks in Afghanistan aimed at minority Shiite Muslims have experts wondering whether the war there could be taking a dangerous new sectarian turn...Continue Reading...
(Council of Foreign Relations) Renewed Sectarian Violence in Afghanistan
The first time I visited Afghanistan was in 2002. Ashura, the holiest Shiite holiday, was in full swing. As we drove up into the predominantly Shiite central highlands of Bamiyan–Hazara country–my Afghan traveling companions were amazed at the open expressions of Ashura. Processions clogged the single dirt road passing through small villages and long black flags on poles flapped in the wind. During the Taliban years, expressions of Shiism were suppressed by the the Taliban, the hardline Sunni fundamentalists who ruled the country and decried Shiism as apostasy....Read More...
Kim Sengupta: Attacks on Shias mark troubling new chapter
It was not, perhaps, entirely surprising that insurgents would want to demonstrate the scope and reach of their power by carrying out lethal strikes the day after the international great and the good were meeting in Bonn to chart Afghanistan's future....Read More....
(CNN) Attack on shrine signals new nexus of Afghan strife
By Tim Lister, CNN
December 6, 2011 -- Updated 2149 GMT (0549 HKT)
Terrorist attacks in Kabul and Mazar-e Sharif on Tuesday killed dozens of people
Editor's note: Tim Lister has covered international news for 25 years as a producer and reporter for the BBC and CNN. He has lived and worked in the Middle East, and has also worked in Afghanistan and Pakistan. In 2004, he produced the award-winning documentary "Between Hope and Fear: Journeys in the New Iraq" for CNN. He is now an independent writer and producer.
(CNN) -- The deadly attack in Kabul on Shi'ite worshippers celebrating the feast of Ashura adds one more layer to the country's overlapping security crises. And they evoke violent sectarian rivalries in Iraq and Pakistan, where animosity between Sunni and Shia runs deep. Afghanistan has its own cultural rifts -- between ethnic Pashtun and Tajik, for example -- but it's rare to see such an explosion of religiously motivated violence.
Kate Clark, with the Afghan Analysts Network in Kabul, described the attack as "a real shock."
"Whatever else has happened in the past 30 years we haven't had this sort of sectarian attack aimed at killing lots of people," she told CNN by phone from the Afghan capital.
The first claim of responsibility for the bombing in the Afghan capital has come from a militant Sunni group in Pakistan with a history of sectarian attacks against Shia. A man identifying himself as a spokesman for Lashkar-e-Janghvi al Almi, a group with links to al Qaeda and the Pakistan Taliban, claimed responsibility for the attack in a call to Radio Mashaal, a Pashto-language station in Pakistan sponsored by the United States government. A similar call was reportedly made to the BBC's Urdu-language service.
The group is an offshoot of the powerful Lashkar-e-Janghvi (LeJ), which has a record of high-profile suicide bombings in Pakistan, including the attack on the Marriott Hotel in Islamabad in 2008. Al-Almi's most destructive attack to date was a double suicide bombing in northwest Pakistan last year. The bombers -- wearing burkas -- killed 42 people belonging to tribes that opposed the Pakistan Taliban, also known for its antipathy toward Shia.
If the claim by Al-Almi proves valid, it would not surprise some Afghan Shia, who were quick to point the finger at some form of Pakistani involvement in the attacks Tuesday.
LeJ has a long history of targeting the Hazara Shia community in Pakistan. The Hazara are numerous in both Pakistan and Afghanistan, and make up much of Afghanistan's Shia minority. They have endured decades of persecution in both countries, and Sunni militants have frequently painted then as collaborators with occupying powers.
This year, apparently in retaliation for the killing of Osama bin Laden, LeJ gunned down several Hazara in Quetta, capital of Balochistan province and also home to the Afghan Taliban's political leadership. In a subsequent open letter, the LeJ warned: "We will rid Pakistan of [this] unclean people. Pakistan means land of the pure, and the Shias have no right to be here."
In October, Sunni militants killed dozens more Hazara. In one instance, they stopped a bus of Shia pilgrims on their way to Iran from Pakistani Balochistan and shot dead 26 male passengers in front of their families.
Lashkar-e-Jhangvi has not been obviously active in Afghanistan since it maintained training camps there during Taliban rule in the 1990s. But other Sunni militants -- especially factions among the Pakistani Taliban -- have established a presence in some Afghan border provinces. And regional analysts perceive fluid links, contacts and cross-fertilization between the myriad groups operating in the Afghan-Pakistan border region.
The Taliban were quick to disown and condemn the attacks. Kate Clark says that while she is circumspect about the Taliban's denial, such an attack would be at odds with the Taliban leadership's claim to be a national movement -- and is not part of a pattern of such attacks by the group.
Clark also points out that Mullah Omar in his Eid message last month urged Taliban fighters to "protect the lives, wealth and honor of ordinary people." That being said, 80 percent of all civilian deaths in Afghanistan are attributed to the armed opposition; and orders from the Quetta Shura, as the leadership is known, are only patchily enforced by field commanders. The Taliban are not a monolith, as one Afghan observer puts it, and it is possible that at local level there may have been collaboration between a Taliban operative and LeJ.
The Taliban have not played the sectarian card since becoming an insurgency. But when in power in the 1990s they brutally persecuted Afghanistan's Hazara community. Human Rights Watch documented two massacres of Hazara in 2000 and 2001 by Taliban forces. And after capturing Mazar e Sharif in 1998, Taliban fighters killed hundreds of Hazara in retaliation for the mass execution of its own soldiers the previous year.
Since the overthrow of the Taliban, Afghanistan's Hazara have prospered -- in higher education, the government and the military and they have embraced new democratic processes. The annual Ashura celebration in Kabul has become more elaborate. That may have been temptation enough for the Hazaras' enemies.
If the bombings on Tuesday were an attempt to sow sectarian strife in Afghanistan, they most obviously imitate al Qaeda in Iraq, which when led by Abu Musab al Zarqawi tried to ignite a sectarian war between Sunnis and the country's Shi'ite majority in a series of attacks aimed at holy Shi'ite occasions and shrines.
Kate Clark of the Afghan Analysts Network believes that in Afghanistan restraint will prevail. Hazara leaders have already called on their community to remain calm and not to take the bait offered by these attacks. On all sides, Clark says, there is a realization that sectarian conflict is a no-win situation in which tit-for-tat attacks would claim hundreds of lives.
CNN
December 6, 2011 -- Updated 2149 GMT (0549 HKT)
Editor's note: Tim Lister has covered international news for 25 years as a producer and reporter for the BBC and CNN. He has lived and worked in the Middle East, and has also worked in Afghanistan and Pakistan. In 2004, he produced the award-winning documentary "Between Hope and Fear: Journeys in the New Iraq" for CNN. He is now an independent writer and producer.
(CNN) -- The deadly attack in Kabul on Shi'ite worshippers celebrating the feast of Ashura adds one more layer to the country's overlapping security crises. And they evoke violent sectarian rivalries in Iraq and Pakistan, where animosity between Sunni and Shia runs deep. Afghanistan has its own cultural rifts -- between ethnic Pashtun and Tajik, for example -- but it's rare to see such an explosion of religiously motivated violence.
Kate Clark, with the Afghan Analysts Network in Kabul, described the attack as "a real shock."
"Whatever else has happened in the past 30 years we haven't had this sort of sectarian attack aimed at killing lots of people," she told CNN by phone from the Afghan capital.
The first claim of responsibility for the bombing in the Afghan capital has come from a militant Sunni group in Pakistan with a history of sectarian attacks against Shia. A man identifying himself as a spokesman for Lashkar-e-Janghvi al Almi, a group with links to al Qaeda and the Pakistan Taliban, claimed responsibility for the attack in a call to Radio Mashaal, a Pashto-language station in Pakistan sponsored by the United States government. A similar call was reportedly made to the BBC's Urdu-language service.
The group is an offshoot of the powerful Lashkar-e-Janghvi (LeJ), which has a record of high-profile suicide bombings in Pakistan, including the attack on the Marriott Hotel in Islamabad in 2008. Al-Almi's most destructive attack to date was a double suicide bombing in northwest Pakistan last year. The bombers -- wearing burkas -- killed 42 people belonging to tribes that opposed the Pakistan Taliban, also known for its antipathy toward Shia.
If the claim by Al-Almi proves valid, it would not surprise some Afghan Shia, who were quick to point the finger at some form of Pakistani involvement in the attacks Tuesday.
LeJ has a long history of targeting the Hazara Shia community in Pakistan. The Hazara are numerous in both Pakistan and Afghanistan, and make up much of Afghanistan's Shia minority. They have endured decades of persecution in both countries, and Sunni militants have frequently painted then as collaborators with occupying powers.
This year, apparently in retaliation for the killing of Osama bin Laden, LeJ gunned down several Hazara in Quetta, capital of Balochistan province and also home to the Afghan Taliban's political leadership. In a subsequent open letter, the LeJ warned: "We will rid Pakistan of [this] unclean people. Pakistan means land of the pure, and the Shias have no right to be here."
In October, Sunni militants killed dozens more Hazara. In one instance, they stopped a bus of Shia pilgrims on their way to Iran from Pakistani Balochistan and shot dead 26 male passengers in front of their families.
Lashkar-e-Jhangvi has not been obviously active in Afghanistan since it maintained training camps there during Taliban rule in the 1990s. But other Sunni militants -- especially factions among the Pakistani Taliban -- have established a presence in some Afghan border provinces. And regional analysts perceive fluid links, contacts and cross-fertilization between the myriad groups operating in the Afghan-Pakistan border region.
The Taliban were quick to disown and condemn the attacks. Kate Clark says that while she is circumspect about the Taliban's denial, such an attack would be at odds with the Taliban leadership's claim to be a national movement -- and is not part of a pattern of such attacks by the group.
Clark also points out that Mullah Omar in his Eid message last month urged Taliban fighters to "protect the lives, wealth and honor of ordinary people." That being said, 80 percent of all civilian deaths in Afghanistan are attributed to the armed opposition; and orders from the Quetta Shura, as the leadership is known, are only patchily enforced by field commanders. The Taliban are not a monolith, as one Afghan observer puts it, and it is possible that at local level there may have been collaboration between a Taliban operative and LeJ.
The Taliban have not played the sectarian card since becoming an insurgency. But when in power in the 1990s they brutally persecuted Afghanistan's Hazara community. Human Rights Watch documented two massacres of Hazara in 2000 and 2001 by Taliban forces. And after capturing Mazar e Sharif in 1998, Taliban fighters killed hundreds of Hazara in retaliation for the mass execution of its own soldiers the previous year.
Since the overthrow of the Taliban, Afghanistan's Hazara have prospered -- in higher education, the government and the military and they have embraced new democratic processes. The annual Ashura celebration in Kabul has become more elaborate. That may have been temptation enough for the Hazaras' enemies.
If the bombings on Tuesday were an attempt to sow sectarian strife in Afghanistan, they most obviously imitate al Qaeda in Iraq, which when led by Abu Musab al Zarqawi tried to ignite a sectarian war between Sunnis and the country's Shi'ite majority in a series of attacks aimed at holy Shi'ite occasions and shrines.
Kate Clark of the Afghan Analysts Network believes that in Afghanistan restraint will prevail. Hazara leaders have already called on their community to remain calm and not to take the bait offered by these attacks. On all sides, Clark says, there is a realization that sectarian conflict is a no-win situation in which tit-for-tat attacks would claim hundreds of lives.
CNN
New York Times; Rare Attacks on Shiites Kill Scores in Afghanistan
KABUL, Afghanistan — At least 63 people were killed and scores wounded after bombers struck Shiite religious observances on Tuesday in three cities, detonating explosives amid crowds of worshipers in the first such sectarian attacks in a decade of war in Afghanistan...Continue Reading..
Democracy’s Enemies in Pakistan
KABUL — Twin blasts at Afghan shrines on the Shiite holy day of Ashura left at least 58 people dead on Tuesday, with one massive suicide attack in Kabul ripping through a crowd of worshippers including children. The attack in the capital and another in the northern city of Mazar-i-Sharif came a day after an international meeting in Germany aimed at charting a course for Afghanistan, 10 years after US-led forces drove the Taliban from power....Continue Reading..
واکنشها به حملات انتحاری مراسم عاشورا در افغانستان
حملات روز سه شنبه به مراسم عاشورا در کابل، مزار شریف و قندهار با واکنشهای منفی جناحهای مختلف داخلی و مقام های خارجی مواجه شده است. در کابل یک انفجار انتحاری در زیارتگاه حضرت ابوالفضل، یکی از شلوغترین زیارتگاههای کابل، که در مرکز این شهر موقعیت دارد، منجر به کشته شدن ۵۴ نفر و زخمی شدن ۱۶۴ تن دیگر شده است.
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Afghanistan opens bids for gold, copper deposits to generate revenue for war-torn nation
KABUL, Afghanistan — Afghanistan opened bids Tuesday on billions of dollars worth of copper and gold deposits in four areas of the country that together are roughly half the size of the Grand Canyon. Despite ongoing violence, Afghanistan has high hopes that its budding mining industry will generate billions in revenue to help rebuild the nation after 30 years of war...Read More...
Why have Afghanistan's Shias been targeted now?
The deadly and unprecedented attacks on a packed shrine in a historic district of Kabul has put the spotlight on Afghanistan's Shia minority. Unlike their brethren in Pakistan, Afghanistan's Shias have largely escaped the wrath of the Sunni militant groups that operate in both countries...Read More..
The Wall Street Journal; Blasts Kill Dozens in Afghanistan
KABUL—Twin blasts in Kabul and the northern city of Mazar-e-Sharif targeted Afghanistan's minority Shiite community on Tuesday, killing nearly 60 people in one of the war's deadliest attacks and infusing the 10-year-old conflict with a new danger of sectarian strife....Read More...
BBC; Shia Muslims 'killed in Pakistan by pro-Taliban groups'
Security is tight in Pakistan ahead of the Day of Ashura, which is the climax of a period of remembrance for Hussein, the grandson of the Prophet Muhammad. Already this year, hundreds of Shia Muslims have been killed in Pakistan, mostly in the western province of Balochistan...Watch it..
عاشورای افغانستان؛ باید نگران بود
به نظر نمی رسد هیچ گروهی جرات کند بمبگذاریهای روزعاشورا در کابل، مزار و قندهار را بعهده بگیرد، اگر قصد عاملان چنین حملاتی دامن زدن به تنش های مذهبی باشد که به احتمال زیاد چنین است، تا روشن شدن هویت عاملان حمله، رسیدن به چنین هدفی دشوار می شود.
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Afghanistan: Kabul shrine attacks kill 54
A suicide bomber struck a crowd of Shiite worshippers at a mosque in Kabul on Tuesday, killing at least 54 people in the deadliest of two attacks on a Shiite holy day – the first major sectarian assaults since the fall of the Taliban a decade ago....Read More
Aljazeera: Shia shrines targeted in deadly Afghan blasts - Central & South Asia - Al Jazeera English
Two bomb blasts apparently targeting Shia Muslim shrines as hundreds of people gathered to mark the day of Ashoura have killed at least 54 people and injured scores more, according to Afghan police and media reports.
At least 50 people were killed by a suicide bomber who detonated explosives at the gate of the Abu-Ul Fazil shrine in the capital Kabul on Tuesday, a security official told the AFP news agency....Read More,
Shia shrines targeted in deadly Afghan blasts - Central & South Asia - Al Jazeera English
At least 50 people were killed by a suicide bomber who detonated explosives at the gate of the Abu-Ul Fazil shrine in the capital Kabul on Tuesday, a security official told the AFP news agency....Read More,
Shia shrines targeted in deadly Afghan blasts - Central & South Asia - Al Jazeera English
(Reuters)- Afghan Shi'ite shrine blast kills 48
(Reuters) - A suicide bomber attacked a Shi'ite Muslim shrine in Kabul on Tuesday killing at least 48 people in unprecedented sectarian violence a day after Afghanistan's Western allies pledged long-term support once their troops leave....Read More
52 Afghans killed in Ashura bomb blasts
Tue Dec 6, 2011 9:3AM
People remove the bodies of those killed in an explosion during a religious ceremony in the centre of Afghanistan's capital of Kabul, December 6, 2011.
At least 52 Afghans have lost their lives in two separate explosions in Afghanistan's Kabul and Mazar-i-Sharif as Shia Muslims were commemorating the martyrdom of the third Shia Imam, Imam Hussein (PBUH), Press TV reports.
On Tuesday, a bomb went off in the centre of Kabul, where Shias had gathered to commemorate the day of Ashura and the martyrdom of Imam Hussein, AFP reported.
At least 48 people, including children, were killed and more than 100 others wounded in the bloody attack.
Hashmatullah Stanekzai, a spokesman for Kabul police, said that the blast took place at the Abu Fazel shrine where worshippers had gathered for mourning rituals.
In a separate incident, four Afghans, including a soldier, were killed in a bomb blast near a mosque in the northern city of Mazar-i-Sharif in Balkh Province on Tuesday.
Millions of Shia Muslims across the globe are holding mourning rituals to honor Imam Hossein (PBUH), the grandson of Prophet Muhammad (PBUH), and a number of his loyal companions who were brutally killed while fighting for justice in Karbala, Iraq, over 1,300 years ago.
Press TV
People remove the bodies of those killed in an explosion during a religious ceremony in the centre of Afghanistan's capital of Kabul, December 6, 2011.
At least 52 Afghans have lost their lives in two separate explosions in Afghanistan's Kabul and Mazar-i-Sharif as Shia Muslims were commemorating the martyrdom of the third Shia Imam, Imam Hussein (PBUH), Press TV reports.
On Tuesday, a bomb went off in the centre of Kabul, where Shias had gathered to commemorate the day of Ashura and the martyrdom of Imam Hussein, AFP reported.
At least 48 people, including children, were killed and more than 100 others wounded in the bloody attack.
Hashmatullah Stanekzai, a spokesman for Kabul police, said that the blast took place at the Abu Fazel shrine where worshippers had gathered for mourning rituals.
In a separate incident, four Afghans, including a soldier, were killed in a bomb blast near a mosque in the northern city of Mazar-i-Sharif in Balkh Province on Tuesday.
Millions of Shia Muslims across the globe are holding mourning rituals to honor Imam Hossein (PBUH), the grandson of Prophet Muhammad (PBUH), and a number of his loyal companions who were brutally killed while fighting for justice in Karbala, Iraq, over 1,300 years ago.
Press TV
عزاداران عاشورا در کابل، قندهار و مزار شریف هدف بمبگذاری قرار گرفتند
مراسم عزاداری عاشورا در شهرهای کابل، مزار شریف و قندهار هدف حمله انتحاری قرار گرفته چندین نفر کشته و دهها زخمی بجا گذاشته است.
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Monday, December 5, 2011
کنفرانس بن؛ تقاضا برای شنیدن صدای فراموش شده ها
همزمان با برگزاری کنفرانس بن، شماری از روشنفکران و فعالان فرهنگی و سیاسی افغانستان نسبت به توزیع نابرابر امکانات و فرصتها در طول ده سال گذشته انتقاد کرده اند
....Read more on BBC Farsi
....Read more on BBC Farsi
BBC; A year of suffering for Pakistan's Shias
Hundreds of people belonging to the minority Shia community have been killed in Pakistan in 2011. Most of the killings have taken place in the western province of Balochistan.... Read More
9th Muharram procession taken out in Quetta
QUETTA, Dec 05 (APP): The 9th Muharram-ul-Haram procession was taken out in the provincial capital under the auspices of Balochistan Shia Conference (BSC) here on Monday..... Read More
Ashura: Tragedy of sectarianism
The 10th of Muharram was once historically the day of the remembrance of Imam Husain’s martyrdom as Islam’s central allegory of right and wrong, in which right triumphed through a refusal to accept wrong. Today.... Read More
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