The Taliban’s abrupt return to power has left hundreds of Afghan diplomats overseas in limbo: running out of money to keep missions operating, fearful for families back home and desperate to secure refuge abroad.
The Islamist militant movement, which swiftly ousted Afghanistan’s Western-backed government on Aug. 15, said on Tuesday that it had sent messages to all of its embassies telling diplomats to continue their work.
But eight embassy staff who spoke on condition of anonymity, in countries including Canada, Germany and Japan, described dysfunction and despair at their missions.
“My colleagues here and in many countries are pleading with host nations to accept them,” said an Afghan diplomat in Berlin, who feared what might happen to his wife and four daughters who remain in Kabul if he allowed his name to be used.
“I am literally begging. Diplomats are willing to become refugees,” he said, adding he would have to sell everything, including a large house in Kabul, and “start all over again.”
Afghanistan’s missions overseas face a period of “prolonged limbo” as countries decide whether to recognize the Taliban, said Afzal Ashraf, an international relations expert and visiting fellow at Britain’s University of Nottingham.
“What can those embassies do? They don’t represent a government. They don’t have a policy to implement,” he said, adding that embassy staff would likely be granted political asylum due to safety concerns if they returned to Afghanistan.
The Taliban, who enforced a strict interpretation of Islamic law with punishments like amputations and stonings during their previous rule from 1996 to 2001, have sought to show a more conciliatory face since coming back to power.
Spokespeople have reassured Afghans that they are not out for revenge and will respect people’s rights, including women’s.
But reports of house-to-house searches and reprisals against former officials and ethnic minorities have made people wary. The Taliban have vowed to investigate any abuses.
A group of envoys from the deposed government issued a first-of-its-kind joint statement, calling on world leaders to deny the Taliban formal recognition.
Afghanistan’s acting foreign minister Amir Khan Muttaqi told a news conference in Kabul on Tuesday that the Taliban had sent messages to all Afghan embassies telling them to continue work.
“Afghanistan invested in you a lot, you are assets of Afghanistan,” he said.
One senior Afghan diplomat estimated there were around 3,000 people either working in the country’s embassies or directly dependent on them.
Ousted president Ashraf Ghani’s toppled administration also penned a letter to foreign missions on Sept. 8 calling the Taliban’s new government “illegitimate” and urging embassies to “continue their normal functions and duties.”
But these calls for continuity do not reflect the chaos on the ground, embassy staff said.
“There is no money. It is not possible to operate in such circumstances. I am not being paid now,” a source at the Afghan embassy in Canada’s capital Ottawa said.
Two Afghan embassy staffers in New Delhi said they were also running out of cash for a mission serving thousands of Afghans who are trying to find ways home to reunite with families or need help applying for asylum in other countries.
Both staffers said they would not return to Afghanistan for fear of being targeted due to their connections to the previous government, but would also struggle to get asylum in India where thousands of Afghans have spent years seeking refugee status.
“I have to just sit tight for now in the embassy premises and wait to exit to any nation that is willing to accept me and my family,” one said.
Some of Afghanistan’s envoys have openly criticized the Taliban.
Manizha Bakhtari, the country’s Austria ambassador, regularly posts allegations of human rights abuses by the Taliban on Twitter, while China envoy Javid Ahmad Qaem warned against believing Taliban promises on extremist groups.
Others are lying low, hoping that their host countries will not rush to recognize the group and put them at risk.
Several Afghan diplomats said they would be closely watching the annual meeting of world leaders at the United Nations in New York next week where there is uncertainty who will fill Afghanistan’s seat.
United Nations credentials give weight to a government, and no one has yet formally claimed Afghanistan’s seat. Any move seen as legitimizing the Taliban might empower the group to replace embassy staff with their own, the diplomats said.
In Tajikistan, some embassy staff managed to bring their families across the border in recent weeks and they are considering converting the embassy into residential premises to house them, a senior diplomat there said.
And, like peers spread out across the globe, they have no plans to return home with the Taliban back in power.
“It’s very clear that not a single Afghan diplomat posted overseas wants to go back,” said a senior Afghan diplomat in Japan. “We are all determined to stay where we are and maybe many countries will accept we are a part of a government that is in exile.”
Afghan envoys marooned abroad after Taliban’s sudden return
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Afghan envoys marooned abroad after Taliban’s sudden return
- The Islamist militant movement had sent messages to all of its embassies telling diplomats to continue their work
Indian forces clash with Maoist rebels, five dead
- Over 10,000 people have died in the insurgency by Naxalite rebels who say they are fighting for rights of marginalized people
- Government forces stepped up efforts last year to crush the long-running armed conflict, with some 287 rebels killed in 2024
NEW DELHI: Indian security forces on Sunday battled with Maoist rebels in their forested heartland, police said, with at least four guerillas and one policeman killed.
More than 10,000 people have died in the decades-long insurgency waged by Naxalite rebels, who say they are fighting for the rights of marginalized indigenous people in India’s resource-rich central regions.
Government forces stepped up efforts last year to crush the long-running armed conflict, with some 287 rebels killed in 2024, according to government figures.
Clashes broke out late Saturday in Abujhmarh district of Chhattisgarh state, a key battleground in the insurgency.
“Four bodies of Maoists, who were in their battle uniform, have been recovered after an encounter with police forces,” police inspector general P. Sunderraj told AFP, adding one police constable had also been killed.
“Action is still on,” he said.
Around 1,000 suspected Naxalites were arrested and 837 surrendered during 2024.
Amit Shah, India’s interior minister, warned the Maoist rebels in September to surrender or face an “all-out” assault, saying the government expected to quash the insurgency by early 2026.
The insurgency has been drastically restricted in area in recent years.
The Naxalites, named after the district where their armed campaign began in 1967, were inspired by the Chinese revolutionary leader Mao Zedong.
They demanded land, jobs and a share of the region’s immense natural resources for local residents, and made inroads in a number of remote communities across India’s east and south.
The movement gained in strength and numbers until the early 2000s when New Delhi deployed tens of thousands of security personnel against the rebels in a stretch of territory known as the “Red Corridor.”
Authorities have since invested millions of dollars in local infrastructure and social projects to combat the Naxalite appeal.
Israel blocks food supply to northern Gaza’s Indonesian hospital to force out doctors
- Patients, doctors forced out from Kamal Adwan hospital are sheltering in Indonesia Hospital
- The facility has been sheltering critically ill patients with no electricity, water, UN says
JAKARTA: Israeli forces have blocked food and water supply to the Indonesia Hospital in northern Gaza to force out the doctors who are refusing to leave their patients behind, the nongovernmental organization that funded it said on Sunday.
The hospital in Beit Lahiya, a four-story building located near the Jabalia refugee camp, was built from donations organized by the Jakarta-based Medical Emergency Rescue Committee.
It has been sheltering more than a dozen patients, caregivers and health workers from Gaza’s Kamal Adwan hospital, which was destroyed in December after months of relentless Israeli attacks.
The remaining doctors are defying orders to leave the Indonesia Hospital, MER-C said, adding that they last received food aid from the UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs.
“They are still holding out. The condition is deteriorating, there’s a lack of water and food,” Marissa Noriti, a MER-C volunteer in Deir el-Balah in central Gaza, told Arab News via WhatsApp.
“The Israeli occupation forces are blocking supply … The doctors are staying for the patients. They refuse to leave them behind.”
Indonesia Hospital is no longer in service after it was severely damaged by frequent Israeli attacks since October 2023. But the facility was still sheltering critically ill patients, despite not having electricity, water or supplies, according to UNOCHA.
The hospital operated under limited capacity last year, but Israeli bombardments forced the patients and medical staff to transfer to the Al-Shifa hospital in southern Gaza last December, with only a few doctors staying behind.
On Friday, as the hospital was surrounded by Israeli forces attacking the area, the doctors were ordered to leave the facility and the patients.
“We are monitoring the situation. Israel’s occupation forces are cutting off all supplies to force them out; this is their strategy to empty north Gaza, to empty all the hospitals in the north so the people have no place to go to seek help,” Sarbini Abdul Murad, chairman of MER-C’s board of trustees in Jakarta, told Arab News.
“We ask that the international community act by any means to save Palestine from the crimes of the IDF (Israel Defense Forces).”
Israel has frequently targeted medical facilities in the Gaza Strip, saying that they are used by Palestinian armed groups. The attacks have pushed the enclave’s healthcare system to the brink of collapse.
Israel’s war on Gaza has killed more than 45,000 Palestinians and wounded over 108,000 since Oct. 7, 2023. The real death toll is believed to be much higher, with estimates published by medical journal The Lancet indicating that, as of July, it could be more than 186,000.
France’s ex-president Sarkozy on trial over alleged Qaddafi pact
- The career of Nicolas Sarkozy has been shadowed by legal troubles since he lost the 2012 presidential election
- Latest trial is the result of a decade of investigations into accusations that Sarkozy accepted illegal campaign financing
PARIS: Former French president Nicolas Sarkozy, already convicted twice in separate cases since leaving office, on Monday goes on trial charged with accepting illegal campaign financing in an alleged pact with the late Libyan dictator Muammar Qaddafi.
The career of Sarkozy has been shadowed by legal troubles since he lost the 2012 presidential election. But he remains an influential figure for many on the right and is also known to regularly meet President Emmanuel Macron.
The fiercely ambitious and energetic politician, 69, who is married to the model and singer Carla Bruni and while in power from 2007-2012 liked to be known as the “hyper-president,” has been convicted in two cases, charged in another and is being investigated in connection with two more.
Sarkozy will be in the dock at the Paris court barely half a month after France’s top appeals court on December 18 rejected his appeal against a one year prison sentence for influence peddling, which he is to serve by wearing an electronic bracelet rather than in jail.
The latest trial is the result of a decade of investigations into accusations that Sarkozy accepted illegal campaign financing — reportedly amounting to some 50 million euros — from Qaddafi to help his victorious 2007 election campaign.
In exchange, it is alleged, Sarkozy and senior figures pledged to help Qaddafi rehabilitate his international image after Tripoli was blamed for bombing attacks on Pan Am Flight 103 in 1988 over Lockerbie in Scotland and UTA Flight 772 in 1989 that killed hundreds of passengers.
Sarkozy has denounced the accusations as part of a conspiracy against him, insisting that he never received any financing for the campaign from Qaddafi and that there is no evidence of any such transfer.
At a time when many Western countries were courting Qaddafi for energy deals as the maverick dictator sought to emerge from decades of international isolation, the Libyan leader in December 2007 visited Paris, famously installing his tent in the center of the city.
But France then backed the UN-sanctioned military action that helped in 2011 oust Qaddafi, who was then killed by rebels. Sarkozy has said allegations from former members of Qaddafi’s inner circle over the alleged campaign financing are motivated by revenge.
If convicted, Sarkozy faces up to 10 years in prison under the charges of concealing embezzlement of public funds and illegal campaign financing. The trial is due to last until April 10.
Sarkozy “is awaiting these four months of hearings with determination. He will fight the artificial construction dreamed up by the prosecution. There was no Libyan financing of the campaign,” said his lawyer Christophe Ingrain.
Among 12 others facing trial over the alleged Libyan financing are heavyweights such as Sarkozy’s former right-hand man, Claude Gueant, his then-head of campaign financing, Eric Woerth, and former minister Brice Hortefeux.
“Claude Gueant will demonstrate that after more than ten years of investigation, none of the offenses he is accused of have been proven,” said his lawyer Philippe Bouchez El Ghozi, denouncing the cases as amounting to “assertions, hypotheses and other approximations.”
For the prosecution, the pact started in 2005 when Qaddafi and Sarkozy, then interior minister, met in Tripoli for a meeting ostensibly devoted to fighting illegal migration. But Sarkozy’s defense counters that no trace of the illegal financing was ever found in the campaign coffers.
The scandal erupted in April 2012, while Sarkozy was in the throes of his re-election campaign, when the Mediapart website published a bombshell article based on a document purportedly from December 2006 it said showed a former Libyan official evoking an agreement over the campaign financing.
Sarkozy has long contended that the document is not genuine.
An embittered Sarkozy would later narrowly lose the second round of the election to Socialist Francois Hollande.
Franco-Lebanese businessman Ziad Takieddine, a key figure in the case, had claimed several times that he helped deliver up to five million euros ($5.4 million at current rates) in cash from Qaddafi to Sarkozy and his chief of staff in 2006 and 2007.
But in 2020, Takieddine suddenly retracted his incriminating statement, raising suspicions that Sarkozy and close allies may have paid the witness to change his mind.
In a further twist, Sarkozy was charged in October 2023 with illegal witness tampering while Carla Bruni was last year charged with hiding evidence in the same case.
Sarkozy’s second conviction, in another campaign financing case, was confirmed last year by a Paris appeals court which ruled he should serve six months in prison, with another six months suspended. This verdict can still go to a higher domestic appeals court.
Indian forces clash with Maoist rebels, five dead
- More than 10,000 people have died in the decades-long insurgency waged by Naxalite rebels
- Rebels demand land, jobs and share of central India’s natural resources for local residents
New Delhi: Indian security forces on Sunday battled with Maoist rebels in their forested heartland, police said, with at least four guerillas and one policeman killed.
More than 10,000 people have died in the decades-long insurgency waged by Naxalite rebels, who say they are fighting for the rights of marginalized indigenous people in India’s resource-rich central regions.
Government forces stepped up efforts last year to crush the long-running armed conflict, with some 287 rebels killed in 2024, according to government figures.
Clashes broke out late Saturday in Abujhmarh district of Chhattisgarh state, a key battleground in the insurgency.
“Four bodies of Maoists, who were in their battle uniform, have been recovered after an encounter with police forces,” police inspector general P. Sunderraj told AFP, adding one police constable had also been killed.
“Action is still on,” he said.
Around 1,000 suspected Naxalites were arrested and 837 surrendered during 2024.
Amit Shah, India’s interior minister, warned the Maoist rebels in September to surrender or face an “all-out” assault, saying the government expected to quash the insurgency by early 2026.
The insurgency has been drastically restricted in area in recent years.
The Naxalites, named after the district where their armed campaign began in 1967, were inspired by the Chinese revolutionary leader Mao Zedong.
They demanded land, jobs and a share of the region’s immense natural resources for local residents, and made inroads in a number of remote communities across India’s east and south.
The movement gained in strength and numbers until the early 2000s when New Delhi deployed tens of thousands of security personnel against the rebels in a stretch of territory known as the “Red Corridor.”
Authorities have since invested millions of dollars in local infrastructure and social projects to combat the Naxalite appeal.
Indian forces clash with Maoist rebels, five dead
- More than 10,000 people have died in the decades-long insurgency waged by Naxalite rebels
- Government forces stepped up efforts last year to crush the long-running armed conflict
NEW DELHI: Indian security forces on Sunday battled with Maoist rebels in their forested heartland, police said, with at least four guerillas and one policeman killed.
More than 10,000 people have died in the decades-long insurgency waged by Naxalite rebels, who say they are fighting for the rights of marginalized indigenous people in India’s resource-rich central regions.
Government forces stepped up efforts last year to crush the long-running armed conflict, with some 287 rebels killed in 2024, according to government figures.
Clashes broke out late Saturday in Abujhmarh district of Chhattisgarh state, a key battleground in the insurgency.
“Four bodies of Maoists, who were in their battle uniform, have been recovered after an encounter with police forces,” police inspector general P. Sunderraj said, adding one police constable had also been killed.
“Action is still on,” he said.
Around 1,000 suspected Naxalites were arrested and 837 surrendered during 2024.
Amit Shah, India’s interior minister, warned the Maoist rebels in September to surrender or face an “all-out” assault, saying the government expected to quash the insurgency by early 2026.
The insurgency has been drastically restricted in area in recent years.
The Naxalites, named after the district where their armed campaign began in 1967, were inspired by the Chinese revolutionary leader Mao Zedong.
They demanded land, jobs and a share of the region’s immense natural resources for local residents, and made inroads in a number of remote communities across India’s east and south.
The movement gained in strength and numbers until the early 2000s when New Delhi deployed tens of thousands of security personnel against the rebels in a stretch of territory known as the “Red Corridor.”
Authorities have since invested millions of dollars in local infrastructure and social projects to combat the Naxalite appeal.
