Ele Ludeman:

Where are the protests?

Since the Taliban took power in Afghanistan, girls and women have been subjected to increasing loss of rights.

They aren’t allowed to work.

Schools are closed to girls and women can’t go to university.

Ele Ludemann: Women excluded 4 years on

Four years on from the Taliban’s seizure of power in Afghanistan the UN reports on the total exclusion of women:

Four years since the Taliban takeover in Afghanistan, waves of directives have stripped Afghan women and girls of their rights and dignity. These restrictions are not temporary; not one has been reversed. The Taliban is closer than ever to achieving its vision of a society that completely erases women from public life. The most severe women’s rights crisis in the world is at risk of becoming normalized.

Dave Patterson: Syria Falls to Former Al-Qaeda Linked Jihadist Rebels

Syria’s strongman, Bashar al-Assad, fled as his Syrian army crumbled.

After more than 13 years of civil war, the Assad government in Syria has been overthrown. What had been a hapless opposition suddenly won. Hayat Tahrir al-Sham (HTS) forces have, in the last few weeks, been rolling through towns previously held firmly by the Syrian Army. The regular military forces showed no appetite to defend territory, threw off their uniforms, and melted into the citizenry. Consequently, HTS rebel militiamen captured city after city with little or no resistance. What does this mean for the region? And who exactly are these rebels?

James Hickman: Meet the Taliban’s new Sugar Daddy - the American taxpayer

It’s impossible to forget those iconic images from the late summer of 2021— helicopters over the US embassy in Afghanistan. Locals dangling from the landing gear of US Air Force cargo planes desperately trying to escape. The US military frantically packing up their gear to leave the country.

It had only been a few weeks prior when the guy with five decades of experience insisted that the Taliban would never take over Afghanistan. But then it happened within a matter of days.

Ron Smith: War and Civilians

On 17 February, President Hamid Karzai issued a widely-reported decree banning Afghan security forces from requesting coalition air-strikes on ‘Afghan homes or villages’.  This followed the reported deaths of 10 civilians in an airstrike a week earlier on a village in eastern Afghanistan.  It is also in the wake of an ISAF tactical directive of June last year, which forbade international forces from using airstrikes against insurgents ‘within civilian dwellings’.  The Karzai statement was well-received in Afghanistan and in the western media and, particularly (one suspects), by the Taliban and their supporters.  But is it really as simple as this?

Ron Smith: More on justice and war

Two assumptions lay behind the argument in my recent posting, ‘Droning on’ (2 October).  One was that the appropriate moral framework, within which to discuss targeting in the on-going conflict between Islamic extremism and the West (the so called war on terror), is that of ‘war’, and not ‘crime’, notwithstanding that the actions of the insurgent parties are generally crimes, within the jurisdiction of the state in which they occur.  I also took it that the crucial criterion for legitimate combatant status in such conflict is ‘participation in the hostilities’.

I should add that I am taking the term ‘Islamic extremism’ to encompass both an attachment to a fundamental interpretation of Islam, which promotes a way of living as close as possible to the teachings of the Prophet, and, most importantly a commitment to violent means in order to achieve it. It was also assumed, in the previous posting, that the same principles (the same moral requirements) ought to govern all who are involved (on whatever side).