Multiple earthquakes struck in the western province of Herat on Saturday and Wednesday, destroying entire villages in the war-torn country, which has long relied on foreign aid that has dried up since the Taliban took over in 2021.

Aid agencies launched fresh appeals for funds to deal with the fallout of deadly earthquakes as local authorities called on Thursday for urgent help for thousands of people left homeless in the aftermath of the tremors.

USAID said in the statement that the assistance to be announced Thursday, first reported by Reuters, will include support for the International Organization for Migration (IOM) to continue to reach those affected by the earthquake, including with emergency shelter kits, cooking and water collection materials, blankets, clothing, and other items.

“USAID will continue to stand with the Afghan people to respond to humanitarian needs,” USAID said in the statement.

Afghanistan’s Taliban-run government has put out conflicting numbers on the death toll, with the disaster management ministry saying over 2,400 had been killed but the health ministry confirming just over 1,000. The U.N.’s humanitarian office on Tuesday put the death toll at 1,294, but from just one district.

Death tolls often change when information comes in from more remote parts of a country where decades of war have left infrastructure in a shambles, and relief and rescue operations difficult to organize and coordinate.

Source: Reuters

The post US to Announce $12 Million in Aid for Afghanistan Following Earthquakes appeared first on The Victoria Post.

This summer, after years of silence, federal officials sent the interpreter, whom CBC News is calling “Joe” for his protection, an invitation to apply to come to Canada.

Joe has been hunted and shot in Afghanistan for helping NATO forces while they were there.

For two years, Maddox Cove resident and retired Canadian Forces brigadier-general James Camsell has been working tirelessly, raising money for Joe, writing and phoning federal officials and politicians on his behalf.

Camsell, who feared his calls for help were being ignored, said he’s “ecstatic” about the news.

When Afghanistan fell two years ago, they started actively looking for him and if he had been arrested, he would have been killed.- James Camsell

“He’s actually dealing with Immigration Canada now … unlike the last two years,” he said.

The Taliban consider working for coalition forces treason, leaving interpreters at great risk, which means Canada owes interpreters a huge debt, says Camsell. He said it’s unconscionable for Canada to abandon Afghan nationals like Joe and his family.

“We have a moral obligation to him. You know, he shed blood for this country. He was wounded. Other interpreters, journalists have been killed over there. So the government needs to do work to get them out,” said Camsell.

CBC News contacted Immigration, Refugees and Citizenship Canada about Joe’s case. 

The department did not address specific details. 

“Canada continues to make progress in its efforts to resettle at least 40,000 vulnerable Afghans to Canada by the end of the year and we will continue to be flexible in our approach to the situation in Afghanistan,” the department said in a statement.

Camsell worked with Joe in Kandahar Province in 2008-09.

“When I was there he was receiving what were called night letters or warnings nailed to his compound where he lived with his family, saying, ‘Stop helping the Canadians or we will kill you,'” he said.

“In 2010, they tried to assassinate him and shot him through the legs as he was driving home. And when Afghanistan fell two years ago, they started actively looking for him, and if he had been arrested, he would have been killed.”

Camsell helped train the Afghan National Army in Kandahar province, travelling on operations with them and working to offer safe education for girls. Camsell says those efforts wouldn’t have been possible without interpreters like Joe. 

They were more than co-workers, he said.

“He became a close friend of mine. Without interpreters in Afghanistan operations wouldn’t occur, because they know the local customs,” he said. Interpreters often serve as the sole link between Canadian and Afghan military staff, who often didn’t speak the same language, he said.

Joe’s life became more difficult when the Taliban took control of Afghanistan in August 2021 after NATO forces pulled out.

In September 2021, Camsell put CBC News in contact with Joe in Kabul, through a video call in which Joe described the increasing danger to him and his family under Taliban rule. 

“They are the government of Afghanistan but they cannot feed themselves. They don’t have food. They don’t have money for themselves. How are they going to run the government?” Joe said, upbeat in spite of his situation.

“Everybody is trying to get out of Afghanistan because their kids, their wives, their families want food, everything — all the facilities — from the Taliban, but they cannot provide it.”

Joe also said he was constantly moving and hiding to avoid the Taliban.

“I’m not staying in one location more than two or three hours. Three times they came to my house. They are asking, ‘Where is he? We want to talk with him. We want to give him a job.’ They are making excuses. After that, they are making a target,” he said.

Last winter, Joe escaped to Pakistan with his family.

“There is a lot of relief on our end that he is out of Afghanistan and safe with his family, but he can’t work in Pakistan and he is on a temporary visa,” said Camsell.

“He and his family are being treated terribly as are many Afghan refugees in Pakistan. So we are trying to get some money to him and looking for people to help us fund him to survive there with his family.”

Camsell now expects that Joe and some of his family members will come to Canada in the next three to six months.

Canada’s commitment

In 2021, the federal government promised to take in 40,000 Afghans.

“I think Canada has been slow on this,” said Camsell.

“I understand that this is a complex issue and there are a lot of troubles around the world, like Ukraine, but these individuals certainly deserved more focus on getting them to Canada.”

Immigration, Refugees and Citizenship Canada said in a statement last week that more than 37,000 applications have been accepted.

Source: CBC News

The post An Afghan Interpreter Shot by the Taliban May Soon Be Coming to Canada, After a 2-year Fight to Help Him appeared first on The Victoria Post.

The United States pulled its troops out of Afghanistan in order to focus on Ukraine, Russian Security Council Secretary Nikolay Patrushev said in an interview with aif.ru.

He pointed out that America’s presence in Afghanistan was not the result of combating terrorism but instead generated billion-dollar corruption schemes and skyrocketing drug production. “It turns out that the reasons for the Americans’ abrupt withdrawal from the country included the need to focus on Ukraine, where, in their view, the puppet Kiev regime was making successful preparations for an offensive against Russia,” Patrushev stressed.

According to him, this was confirmed by US Secretary of State Antony Blinken’s remark that without pulling troops out of Afghanistan, Washington would have been unable to allocate as much money to Ukraine. “Besides, some of the equipment withdrawn from Afghanistan was relocated to Europe, mostly to Poland, which made it possible for the Europeans to militarize the Kiev regime,” the Russian Security Council secretary added.

He noted that in order to achieve its goals, the US had created terrorist organizations such as Al-Qaeda and the Terrorist organizations (both outlawed in Russia), and later “fought against them.” “While making a show of killing some terrorist leaders like Osama bin Laden, they trained and armed hundreds of others,” Patrushev emphasized.

The post US Abruptly Left Afghanistan to Focus on Ukraine, Russia’s Top Security Official Says appeared first on The Victoria Post.

Unfortunately, that government is such a dubious partner that hundreds of millions of dollars in U.S. aid have done little to solve the country’s problems or stop the drug business—while helping to shore up its apparatus of repression. The United States has spent nearly $200 million since 2001 on security assistance for Tajikistan, increasingly focused on training and arming special military and police units. In 2012, for example, U.S. Special Forces trained 350 members of the State Committee of National Security, the successor agency of the Soviet-era KGB, including courses in marksmanship, close-quarters combat and weapons.

But while the GKNB is on the front lines of fighting drug traffickers, it is also the primary organ of political repression in the country—and many observers see it as more engaged in the latter. That includes the detention and torture of dozens of dissidents, according to human rights groups.

And besides, a substantial portion of the drugs that transit through Tajikistan—accounting for as much as 30 percent of the country’s GDP—do so through legal border crossings. No surprise, as the largest drug traffickers in Tajikistan are widely believed to be closely tied to high-level officials in the deeply corrupt Tajik government. The man thought to be founder of Tajikistan’s first major drug-trafficking group, for instance, was the lieutenant to the founder of the political party that brought President Emomali Rahmon to power in 1992. “In no other country of the world, except perhaps contemporary Afghanistan, can such a superimposition between drug traffickers and government officials be found,” a 2007 research paper concluded.

Officially, the United States is critical of the human rights record of Tajikistan’s security services, pointing to ineffective law enforcement compromised by drug lords’ “high-level connections with government officials and security agents.” But in reality, Washington is complicit in this vast network of illegal trading: The majority of the trafficking in Tajikistan is believed to occur on the country’s few good roads and bridges—one of which was built in 2009 with $35 million in U.S. Central Command funds. The U.S.-trained and -equipped GKNB targets not the big-time smugglers with ties to the government, but the smaller pushers who have to sneak across the Afghan border. In the most cynical interpretation, the United States is helping the government of Tajikistan take out its drug-trafficking competition.

Congressional restrictions limit military aid to Uzbekistan, the most repressive U.S. partner in Central Asia. But Tajikistan—with a human rights record that is nearly as bad—has been able to slide under the radar and become a major beneficiary of Pentagon largesse. And Tajikistan has benefited even though its strategic utility to the United States is relatively small compared with its Central Asian neighbors. Uzbekistan and Kazakhstan host the lion’s share of overland U.S. military transit to Afghanistan (leaving Tajikistan as a backup supply route for the Uzbekistan route), and Kyrgyzstan hosts a U.S. Air Force base (at least until July).

Tajikistan’s leading opposition politician, Muhiddin Kabiri, says the U.S. focus on military issues in his country has come at the expense of America’s purported interest in human rights. Before Central Asia assumed such a large role in the Afghanistan operation, “the main question between Tajikistan and U.S. representatives was economic questions, human rights, democracy and stability,” Kabiri told me recently. And indeed, while security assistance was less than 5 percent of total U.S. spending in Central Asia in the 1990s, it has climbed to more than 30 percent since 2007. Now, Kabri says, the focus—and spending—heavily leans toward military operations. “Human rights, democracy, free elections—these kinds of problems, maybe they will touch these questions, but only last, only for protocol,” he says. All of which makes the Tajik government “very lucky.”

source: politico

The post The Narcostate appeared first on The Victoria Post.