ISLAMABAD: In one of the most significant shake-ups in years, the Taliban put the son of the movement’s feared founder in charge of its military wing and added powerful figures to its negotiating team ahead of expected talks aimed at ending Afghanistan’s decades of war, Taliban officials say.
As head of a newly united military wing, 30-year-old Mullah Mohammad Yaqoob, brings his father’s fiercely uncompromising reputation to the battlefield.
Equally significant is the addition of four members of the insurgent group’s leadership council to the 20-member negotiating team, Taliban officials told The Associated Press.
The shuffle overseen by Taliban leader Mullah Hibatullah Akhunzada is meant to tighten his control over the movement’s military and political arms, the officials said on condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to discuss the inner workings of the movement.
Analysts say the shake-up could be good news for negotiations with Afghanistan’s political leadership in Kabul, and a sign of just how serious the Taliban are taking this second — and perhaps most critical — step in a deal Washington signed with the insurgents in February.
“I’d say it appears to be a positive development because the Taliban are creating a delegation that seems more senior and more broad-based than they’ve used to date, or than might be strictly necessary for the opening stages of talks,” said Andrew Wilder, vice president of the Asia Program at the Washington-based US Institute of Peace.
“If you want to see the glass as half full this strengthened Taliban delegation could be interpreted as a sign that the group is planning to engage in serious discussions,” he said.
When the US signed the deal with the Taliban on Feb. 29, after more than a year and a half of negotiations, it was touted as Afghanistan’s best chance at peace in four decades of war. It was also seen as a road map for the withdrawal of US troops from Afghanistan, ending America’s longest war.
On Monday, four-and-a-half months since the signing, chief US negotiator and peace envoy Zalmay Khalilzad tweeted that “a key milestone in the implementation of the US-Taliban agreement” had been reached as American troop numbers dropped to 8,600 from about 12,000 and five bases were closed.
Even as Khalilzad chastised increased insurgent attacks on Afghan security forces, he said the Taliban had been true to their word not to attack US and NATO troops.
“No American has lost his/her life in Afghanistan to Taliban violence. Regional relations have improved,” he tweeted.
The Taliban have stepped up their military activity against government forces since Yaqoob’s appointment in May, a sign that the religious militia under Yaqoob’s leadership may see battlefield wins as upping their leverage at the negotiation table.
“I can see a lot of reasons for the Taliban to be pushing the envelope — perhaps as a negotiation tactic, but equally likely as a means to test USlimits,” said Daniel Markey, a senior research professor at Johns Hopkins University’s School of Advanced International Studies. “So far, the Trump administration looks like it is heading for the exit, no matter what. Why not ratchet up the violence to see what greater victories can be won? ”
Surprisingly the shuffle also sidelined senior Taliban leader Amir Khan Muttaqi, removing him from the negotiating committee. Seen as close to neighbor Pakistan, his removal could limit Pakistan’s influence and buttress their position with Kabul, which is deeply suspicious of Islamabad.
Already a deputy head of the movement, sudden appointment of the son of Mullah Mohammed Omar as military chief reportedly ruffled feathers among members of the leadership council, who had not been consulted. Yaqoob, however, met with the council and won over his dissenters, said officials.
“Yaqoob’s appointment appears to be, at least in part, an effort by Mullah Akhundzada to shore up oversight of battlefield operations at a key moment for war fighting, as the insurgents ramp up violence to strengthen their negotiating position in preparation for potential peace talks with the Afghan government,” said Michael Kugelman, deputy director of the Asia Program at the Washington-based Wilson Center.
In recent weeks, hopes have been raised of a July start to negotiations even as the Taliban and the Kabul government seem bogged down in the final release of prisoners, a prerequisite to the start of negotiations. The United Nations had expressed hope the negotiations could begin this month.
Countries have been lining up to host talks, with Germany being the latest to put in an offer. Turkey, Iran, Indonesia, Japan and Norway are reportedly among the nations volunteering to play host. However, Taliban and Afghan government officials say the first round is likely to be held in Doha, the capital of the Middle Eastern State of Qatar, where the Taliban maintain a political office.
The newly strengthened negotiating team includes Abdul Hakeem, a former Taliban chief justice and confidant of Akhunzada, as well as Maulvi Saqib, chief justice during the Taliban rule.
Under the US-Taliban deal, the militant group that hosted Al-Qaeda chief Osama bin Laden as he planned the 9/11 attacks on the US may not host terrorist groups and guaranteed Afghanistan will not be used as a launching arena for future attacks against America.
In a tweet this week, Khalilzad said “more progress is needed on counter-terrorism” without elaborating.
This week, US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo also spoke to the controversy surrounding the White House over reports of Russian money being paid to Afghan militias — reportedly with links to the Taliban — to kill US troops.
“There’s a lot of Russian footprint; there are Russian weapon systems there. We have made clear to our Russian counterparts that we ought to work together to get a more sovereign, more independent, peaceful Afghanistan,” he said.
Taliban make big changes ahead of expected talks with Kabul
https://arab.news/2zmc7
Taliban make big changes ahead of expected talks with Kabul
- The shuffle overseen by Taliban leader Mullah Hibatullah Akhunzada is meant to tighten his control over the movement’s military and political arms
- Analysts say the shake-up could be good news for negotiations with Afghanistan’s political leadership in Kabul
Protesters storm parliament in breakaway Georgian region Abkhazia over deal with Russia
“We will now seek the resignation of the current president of Abkhazia,” he was quoted by Russia’s Interfax news agency as saying
TBILISI: Protesters stormed the parliament of the Russian-backed breakaway Georgian region of Abkhazia on Friday and opposition politicians demanded the resignation of the self-styled president over an unpopular investment agreement with Moscow.
Protesters used a truck to smash through the metal gates surrounding the parliament in the capital Sukhumi. Video from the scene then showed people climbing through windows after prying off metal bars and chanting in the corridors.
Eshsou Kakalia, an opposition leader and former deputy prosecutor general, said the parliament building was under the control of the protesters.
“We will now seek the resignation of the current president of Abkhazia,” he was quoted by Russia’s Interfax news agency as saying. Protesters also broke into the presidential administration offices located in the same building as the parliament.
Emergency services said at least eight people were taken to hospital.
The presidential administration said in a statement that authorities were preparing to withdraw the investment agreement with Russia that some Abkhaz fear will price them out of the property market.
Russia recognized Abkhazia and another breakaway region, South Ossetia, as independent states in 2008 after Russian troops repelled a Georgian attempt to retake South Ossetia in a five-day war.
Most of the world recognizes Abkhazia as part of Georgia, from which it broke away during wars in the early 1990s, but Russian money has poured into the lush sub-tropical territory where Soviet-era spa resorts cling to the Black Sea coast.
RUSSIAN MONEY
Abkhazian lawmakers had been set to vote on Friday on the ratification of an investment agreement signed in October in Moscow by Russian Economy Minister Maxim Reshetnikov and his Abkhazian counterpart, Kristina Ozgan.
Abkhazian opposition leaders say the agreement with Moscow, which would allow for investment projects by Russian legal entities, would price locals out of the property market by allowing far more Russian money to flow in.
The opposition said in a statement that the protesters’ actions were not against Russian-Abkhazian relations.
“Abkhazian society had only one demand: to protect the interests of our citizens and our business, but neither the president nor the parliament have heard the voice of the people until today,” Interfax cited the statement as saying.
Earlier this week Abkhazia’s self-styled president, Aslan Bzhania, held an emergency security council meeting after protesters blocked a key highway and rallied in central Sukhumi to demand the release of four activists.
The activists, who were subsequently freed, had been detained for opposing the passage of a law regulating the construction industry which references the Russian-Abkhazian agreement.
In 2014, demonstrators stormed the presidential headquarters, forcing then-leader Alexander Ankvab to flee. He later resigned over accusations of corruption and misrule.
Opposition leader Raul Khadzhimba, elected following the unrest in 2014, was himself forced to step down in 2020 after street protests over disputed election results.
Pakistani province declares health emergency due to smog and locks down two cities
- Smog has choked Punjab for weeks, sickening nearly 2 million people and shrouding vast swathes of the province in a toxic haze
- Average air quality index readings in parts of Lahore exceeded 600 on Friday
LAHORE, Pakistan: A Pakistani province declared a health emergency Friday due to smog and imposed a shutdown in two major cities.
Smog has choked Punjab for weeks, sickening nearly 2 million people and shrouding vast swathes of the province in a toxic haze.
A senior provincial minister, Marriyum Aurangzeb, declared the health emergency at a press conference and announced measures to combat the growing crisis.
Time off for medical staff is canceled, all education institutions are shut until further notice, restaurants are closing at 4 p.m. while takeaway is available up until 8 p.m. Authorities are imposing a lockdown in the cities of Multan and Lahore and halting construction work in those two places.
“Smog is currently a national disaster,” Aurangzeb said. “It will not all be over in a month or a year. We will evaluate the situation after three days and then announce a further strategy.”
Average air quality index readings in parts of Lahore, a city of 11 million, exceeded 600 on Friday. Anything over 300 is considered hazardous to health.
The dangerous smog is a byproduct of large numbers of vehicles, construction and industrial work as well as burning crops at the start of the winter wheat-planting season, experts say.
Pakistan’s national weather center said rain and wind were forecast for the coming days, helping smoggy conditions to subside and air quality to improve in parts of Punjab.
Dr. Muhammad Ashraf, a professor at Jinnah Hospital Lahore and Allama Iqbal Medical College, said the government must take preventative measures well before smog becomes prevalent.
“It is more of an emergency than COVID-19 because every patient is suffering from respiratory tract infections and disease is prevailing at a mass level,” he said earlier this week.
Sri Lankan president’s leftist coalition secures landslide election win
- National People’s Power alliance wins 159 seats in the 225-member parliament
- First time in history, election is won by representatives of Sri Lanka’s poor
COLOMBO: The coalition of Sri Lanka’s new President Anura Kumara Dissanayake won a landslide victory in a snap parliamentary vote, results from the election body showed on Friday, giving the left-leaning leader a mandate to fight poverty and corruption in the crisis-hit island nation.
Dissanayake’s alliance, the National People’s Power, secured 159 seats in the 225-member assembly, according to the results released by the Election Commission.
The United People’s Power of Sajith Premadasa retained its role from the previous parliament as the largest opposition party, winning 40 seats.
When Dissanayake won the presidential vote in September, he had only three members of his party in parliament, which limited his ability to realize his campaign promises.
To boost the NPP’s representation — as government ministers can be appointed only from among lawmakers — he dissolved the parliament and cleared the way for the polls that took place on Thursday, a year ahead of schedule.
While ahead of the poll, the president expressed optimism that the 42 percent of the vote he received in the presidential election showed the NPP was “a winning party,” the landslide win came with a surprise.
“It’s a historic election,” Lakshman Gunasekara, a political analyst in Colombo, told Arab News. “The result has gone far beyond the expectations of analysts ... I did not expect them to win a total majority, but they have done so.”
Dissanayake and his coalition took over control of Sri Lanka as the nation continued to reel from the 2022 economic crisis — its worst since independence in 1948. The austerity measures imposed by his predecessor, Ranil Wickremesinghe — part of a bailout deal with the International Monetary Fund — led to price hikes in food and fuel and caused hardship to millions of Sri Lankans.
Dissanayake said during his campaign that he planned to renegotiate the targets set in the IMF deal, as it placed too much burden on the ordinary people.
More than half of former lawmakers chose not to run for re-election. No contenders were seen from the powerful Rajapaksa family, including former president Mahinda Rajapaksa and his brother, also former president, Gotabaya — who was ousted in 2022 and largely blamed for the crisis.
Sri Lanka People’s Front, the party loyal to the Rajapaksa family, secured only three seats in the new parliament.
Sri Lankans decided to choose the NPP, a movement that until now would never win more than 4 percent, as there was a general “anti-incumbency kind of mood, but also tiredness among the voters of the same old parties alternating and doing political mismanagement, whipping up ethnic chauvinism, encouraging attacks on minorities to cover up for their own corruption,” Gunasekara said.
He explained that even more voted for the NPP than for Dissanayake in the presidential vote, as during slightly over one month of his and his three-member cabinet’s rule, they “realized that this new leadership is very fresh in their style of governance, very collective ... not personality-oriented, and also did not resort to violence or bullying or thuggery.”
Both Dissanayake and most of his party members come from the poorest segments of Sri Lankan society.
“He’s a son of a farmer, benefited from free education ... He’s an educated person, but coming from the lowest classes, not from the urban elite, not the urban middle class, the Westernized people, fashionable people, not at all,” Gunasekara said.
“It will be a new entrant into the South Asian political arena ... For the first time, we have subalterns who have arrived in power. And they have arrived with a huge majority.”
Primary schools empty as smog persists in India’s capital New Delhi
- New Delhi and the surrounding metropolitan area, home to more than 30 million people, consistently tops world rankings for air pollution in winter
- The smog is blamed for thousands of premature deaths each year and is an annual source of misery for residents
NEW DELHI: Residents in India’s capital New Delhi again woke under a blanket of choking smog on Friday, a day after authorities closed primary schools and imposed measures aimed at alleviating the annual crisis.
Delhi and the surrounding metropolitan area, home to more than 30 million people, consistently tops world rankings for air pollution in winter.
The smog is blamed for thousands of premature deaths each year and is an annual source of misery for residents, with various piecemeal government initiatives failing to measurably address the problem.
All primary schools were shut by government order on Thursday night with young pupils – particularly vulnerable to smog-related ailments due to their age – instead moving to online lessons.
“I have an eight-year-old kid and he has been suffering from a cough the past couple of days,” Delhi resident Satraj, who did not give his surname, said on the streets of the capital.
“The government did the right thing by shutting down schools.”
Thursday’s edict also banned construction work, ordered drivers of older diesel-powered vehicles to stay off the streets and directed water trucks to spray roads in a bid to clear dust particles from the air.
Delhi’s air quality nonetheless deteriorated to “hazardous” levels for the fourth consecutive day this week, according to monitoring firm IQAir.
Levels of PM2.5 pollutants – dangerous cancer-causing microparticles that enter the bloodstream through the lungs – were recorded more than 26 times above the World Health Organization’s recommended daily maximum shortly after dawn on Friday.
Critics have consistently said that authorities have fallen short in their duty to tackle a crisis that blights the city each year.
“We haven’t responded to the emergency with the same intensity with which we are facing this crisis,” Sunil Dahiya of New Delhi-based advocacy group Envirocatalysts said.
The acrid smog over New Delhi each year is primarily blamed on stubble burning by farmers in nearby states to clear their fields for plowing.
A report by broadcaster NDTV on Friday said that more than 7,000 individual farm fires had been recorded in Punjab state, to the capital’s north.
Emissions from industry and numerous coal-fired power stations ringing the city, along with vehicle exhaust and the burning of household waste, also play a part.
“Since we haven’t yet carried out any systemic long-term changes, like the way we commute, generate power, or manage our waste, even the curtailed emissions will be high,” Dahiya said.
Cooler temperatures and slow-moving winds worsen the situation by trapping deadly pollutants each winter.
A study in The Lancet medical journal attributed 1.67 million premature deaths to air pollution in the world’s most populous country in 2019.
World’s most polluting cities revealed at COP29 as frustration grows at fossil fuel presence
- Cities in Asia and the United States emit the most heat-trapping gas that feeds climate change, and Shanghai is the most polluting
- That’s according to new data that combines observations and artificial intelligence to quantify emissions around the world
BAKU: Cities in Asia and the United States emit the most heat-trapping gas that feeds climate change, with Shanghai the most polluting, according to new data that combines observations and artificial intelligence.
Nations at UN climate talks in Baku, Azerbaijan are trying to set new targets to cut such emissions and figure out how much rich nations will pay to help the world with that task. The data comes as climate officials and activists alike are growing increasingly frustrated with what they see as the talks’ — and the world’s — inability to clamp down on planet-warming fossil fuels and the countries and companies that promote them.
Seven states or provinces spew more than 1 billion metric tons of greenhouse gases, all of them in China, except Texas, which ranks sixth, according to new data from an organization co-founded by former US Vice President Al Gore and released Friday at COP29.
Using satellite and ground observations, supplemented by artificial intelligence to fill in gaps, Climate Trace sought to quantify heat-trapping carbon dioxide, methane and nitrous oxide, as well as other traditional air pollutants worldwide, including for the first time in more than 9,000 urban areas.
Earth’s total carbon dioxide and methane pollution grew 0.7 percent to 61.2 billion metric tons with the short-lived but extra potent methane rising 0.2 percent. The figures are higher than other datasets “because we have such comprehensive coverage and we have observed more emissions in more sectors than are typically available,” said Gavin McCormick, Climate Trace’s co-founder.
Plenty of big cities emit far more than some nations
Shanghai’s 256 million metric tons of greenhouse gases led all cities and exceeded those from the nations of Colombia or Norway. Tokyo’s 250 million metric tons would rank in the top 40 of nations if it were a country, while New York City’s 160 million metric tons and Houston’s 150 million metric tons would be in the top 50 of countrywide emissions. Seoul, South Korea, ranks fifth among cities at 142 million metric tons.
“One of the sites in the Permian Basin in Texas is by far the No. 1 worst polluting site in the entire world,” Gore said. “And maybe I shouldn’t have been surprised by that, but I think of how dirty some of these sites are in Russia and China and so forth. But Permian Basin is putting them all in the shade.”
China, India, Iran, Indonesia and Russia had the biggest increases in emissions from 2022 to 2023, while Venezuela, Japan, Germany, the United Kingdom and the United States had the biggest decreases in pollution.
The dataset — maintained by scientists and analysts from various groups — also looked at traditional pollutants such as carbon monoxide, volatile organic compounds, ammonia, sulfur dioxide and other chemicals associated with dirty air. Burning fossil fuels releases both types of pollution, Gore said.
This “represents the single biggest health threat facing humanity,” Gore said.
Climate talks wrestle with fossil fuel interests
Gore criticized the hosting of climate talks, called COPs, by Azerbaijan, an oil nation and site of the world’s first oil wells, and by the United Arab Emirates last year.
“It’s unfortunate that the fossil fuel industry and the petrostates have seized control of the COP process to an unhealthy degree,” Gore said. “Next year in Brazil, we’ll see a change in that pattern. But, you know, it’s not good for the world community to give the No. 1 polluting industry in the world that much control over the whole process.”
Brazil President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva has called for more to be done on climate change and has sought to slow deforestation since returning for a third term as president. But Brazil last year produced more oil than both Azerbaijan and the United Arab Emirates, according to the US Energy Information Administration.
On Friday, former UN secretary-general Ban Ki-moon, former UN climate chief Christina Figueres and leading climate scientists released a letter calling for “an urgent overhaul” on climate talks.
The letter said the “global climate process has been captured and is no longer fit for purpose” in response to Azerbaijan’s president Ilham Aliyev saying that oil and gas are a “gift of the gods.”
UN Environment Programme Executive Director Inger Andresen said she understands much of the frustration in the letter calling for massive reform of the negotiation process, but said their push to slash emissions fits nicely with UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres’ constant prodding.
One key benefit of the UN climate talks process is it is the only place where victim small island nations have an equal seat at the table, Andersen told The Associated Press. But the process has its limits because “the rules of the game are set by member states,” she said.
An analysis from the Kick Big Polluters Out coalition said Friday that the official attendance list of the talks featured at least 1,770 fossil fuel lobbyists.
At a press conference with small island nations chair Cedric Schuster said the negotiating bloc feels the need to remind everyone else why the talks matter.
“We’re here to defend the Paris agreement,” Schuster said, referring to the climate deal in 2015 to limit warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius (2.7 Fahrenheit). “We’re concerned that countries are forgetting that protecting the world’s most vulnerable is at the core of this framework.”
