Taliban seizes cities as Afghan military collapses

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Written by northsouth

Category: Asia

Published: 14 July 2021

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By Joe Evans

KABUL - Taliban seizes cities as Afghan military collapses and more than 1,000 soldiers flee across the border as others hand over weapons to insurgents

The top US commander in Afghanistan formally stepped down yesterday in a simple ceremony in Kabul marking the end of the two-decade occupation.

General Austin “Scott” Miller officially transferred control just days after Joe Biden announced that US military operations in the war-ravaged country would cease by 31 August.

Other Nato allies, including the United Kingdom, are also withdrawing nearly all military forces ahead of the president’s deadline.

But as Miller quietly gave up his duties, a very different scene was playing out in northern Afghanistan, a “traditional stronghold of US-allied warlords and an area dominated by the country’s ethnic minorities”, says Associated Press (AP).

In the past 15 days alone, advances by the insurgents “have driven more than 5,600 families from their homes” as the nation’s security forces crumble.

s the withdrawal gathers pace, civilians in the north are “fleeing their homes, fearful of living under the insurgents’ rule”, says AP. In Camp Istiqlal, a “makeshift camp on a rocky patch of land” near the city of Mazar-e-Sharif, “family after family” tell of “Taliban commanders using heavy-handed tactics as they overran their towns and villages”, the agency continues.

Many Afghan soldiers have “surrendered to the militants, handing over their equipment and weapons”, The Guardian reports, while others have fled to neighbouring nations.

Following the final departure from Bagram Airfield - the key US base in Afghanistan - earlier this month, “there is perhaps just one thing that the entire political spectrum can agree on: no one foresaw the scale or speed of the collapse of the Afghan security forces in recent weeks”, says The Guardian.

“Instead of retrenchment there was collapse, and intelligence agencies have ripped up their assessments of the strength of the Afghan military,” the paper continues.

The US “now fears Kabul could fall within months”, with control of the capital city handed to the insurgents who were warned 20 years ago by then president George W. Bush that there was “nothing to negotiate” following the US-led invasion.

The Taliban “recently claimed that their fighters have retaken 85% of territory in Afghanistan”, the BBC reports. Although that figure is “impossible to independently verify and disputed by the government”, analysts suggest the group controls at least “a third of Afghanistan's 400 districts”, says the British broadcaster.

India’s COVID cases above 24 million as mutant spreads across globe

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Written by northsouth

Category: Asia

Published: 14 May 2021

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NEW DELHI - The number of recorded COVID-19 infections in India climbed above 24 million on Friday amid reports that the highly transmissible coronavirus mutant first detected in the country was spreading across the globe.

The Indian B.1.617 variant of the virus has been found in cases in eight countries of the Americas, including Canada and the United States, said Jairo Mendez, a WHO infectious diseases expert.

People infected by the variant included travellers in Panama and Argentina who had arrived from India or Europe. In the Caribbean, cases of the Indian variant have been detected in Aruba, Dutch St Maarten and the French department of Guadeloupe.

The mutant strain has also been detected in Britain, as well as in Singapore.

"These variants have a greater capacity for transmission, but so far we have not found any collateral consequences," Mendez said. "The only worry is that they spread faster."

Public Health England said the total number of confirmed cases of the variant had more than doubled in the past week to 1,313 across the United Kingdom.

“We are anxious about it - it has been spreading,” British Prime Minister Boris Johnson said, adding that there would be meetings to discuss what to do. “We’re ruling nothing out,” he added.

According to health ministry data, India recorded 4,000 deaths and 343,144 infections in the last 24 hours. It was the third consecutive day of 4,000 or more deaths but daily infections have stayed below a peak of 414,188 last week.

While the total number of recorded infections crossed 24 million, the number of people confirmed to have died from COVID-19 stood at 262,317 since the pandemic first struck India over a year ago.

But a lack of testing in many places meant a lot of deaths and infections were omitted from the official count, and experts say the real numbers could be five to ten times higher.

Bhramar Mukherjee, a professor of epidemiology at the University of Michigan, said most models had predicted a peak this week and that the country could be seeing signs of that trend.

Still, the number of new cases each day is large enough to overwhelm hospitals, she said on Twitter on Thursday. "The key word is cautious optimism."

The situation is particularly bad in rural areas of Uttar Pradesh, India's most populous state with a population of over 240 million. Television pictures have shown families weeping over the dead in rural hospitals or camping in wards to tend the sick.

Bodies have washed up in the Ganges, the river that flows through the state, as crematoriums are overwhelmed and wood for funeral pyres is in short supply.

CLAMOUR FOR VACCINES

The second wave of infections, which erupted in February, has been accompanied by a slowdown in vaccinations, although Prime Minister Narendra Modi announced that vaccinations would be open to all adults from May 1.

India is the world's largest vaccine producer but has run low on stocks in the face of the huge demand. As of Thursday, it had fully vaccinated just over 38.2 million people, or about 2.8% of a population of about 1.35 billion, government data shows.

More than 2 billion doses of coronavirus vaccines will likely be available in India between August to December this year, top government adviser V.K.Paul told reporters amid criticism that the government had mishandled the vaccine plan.

Those doses would include 750 million of AstraZeneca's vaccine, as well as 550 million doses of Covaxin, made by Bharat Biotech.

“We are going through a phase of finite supply. The entire world is going through this. It takes time to come out of this phase,” Paul said.

Afghan school blast toll rises to 58, families bury victims

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Written by northsouth

Category: Asia

Published: 09 May 2021

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KABUL - The death toll from an explosion outside a school in Afghanistan’s capital Kabul has risen to 58, Afghan officials said on Sunday, with doctors struggling to provide medical care to at least 150 injured.

The bombing on Saturday evening shook the city's Shi'ite Muslim neighbourhood of Dasht-e-Barchi. The community, a religious minority in Afghanistan, has been targeted in the past by Islamic State militants, a Sunni militant group.

An eyewitness told Reuters all but seven or eight of the victims were schoolgirls going home after finishing studies.

Afghan President Ashraf Ghani on Saturday blamed the attack on Taliban insurgents but a spokesman for the Taliban denied involvement, saying the group condemns any attacks on Afghan civilians.

Families of the victims blamed the Afghan government and Western powers for failing to put an end to violence and the ongoing war.

Bodies were still being collected from morgues as the first burials were conducted in the west of the city. Some families were still searching for missing relatives on Sunday, gathering outside hospitals to read names posted on the walls, and checking morgues.

"The entire night we carried bodies of young girls and boys to a graveyard and prayed for everyone wounded in the attack," said Mohammed Reza Ali, who has been helping families of the victims at a private hospital.

"Why not just kill all of us to put and end to this war?" he said.

The violence comes a week after remaining U.S. and NATO troops began exiting Afghanistan, with a mission to complete the drawdown by September 11, which will mark the end of America's longest war.

But the foreign troop withdrawal has led a surge in fighting between Afghan security forces and Taliban insurgents with both sides trying to retain control over strategic centres.