index greater middle east
[Link] US military kills Islamic State leader in Syria airstrike
Read: 12/7/2022 www.theguardian.com
The US military killed a leader of the Islamic State on Tuesday in an airstrike in Syria, Joe Biden said.
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[Link] When confronted by his inaction on the Brereton reforms, Peter Dutton attempts to shoot the messenger
Read: 6/5/2022 www.theguardian.com
Peter Dutton attempted to shoot the messenger on Thursday, branding the Guardian a trashy publication and denying he had ever hung the chief of defence out to dry on the Brereton inquiry reforms.
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[Link] SAS soldier denies colluding with Ben Roberts-Smith on evidence, defamation trial hears
Read: 6/5/2022 www.theguardian.com
A serving SAS soldier has denied in court that emails between him and Ben Roberts-Smith – including marked-up pictures of a compound in Afghanistan – demonstrated they had colluded on their evidence about a mission, during which the newspaper defendants allege two civilians were murdered.
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[Link] Israel says Putin apologised for foreign minister's Hitler remarks
Read: 6/5/2022 www.theguardian.com
The Israeli prime minister, Naftali Bennett, said on Thursday that the Russian president, Vladimir Putin, had apologised for his foreign minister’s claims that Adolf Hitler had Jewish origins.
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[Link] Ben Roberts-Smith to call ex-SAS member alleged to have committed war crime as his first reply witness in defamation trial
Read: 18/4/2022 www.theguardian.com
A former Australian SAS soldier alleged by three newspapers to have ordered the execution of an unarmed elderly man in Afghanistan will be the first witness-in-reply called by Ben Roberts-Smith in his war crimes defamation trial.
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[Link] Maya Assad's family has been stateless for generations, but that could soon change
Read: 10/4/2022 www.abc.net.au
For more than a year the engineer and her businessman husband had been jobless, as the economy in the country in which she was born and raised, Lebanon, imploded.
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[Link] Witness in Ben Roberts-Smith defamation trial denies he is a ‘liar and a fantasist’
Read: 2/4/2022 www.theguardian.com
A former SAS soldier who testified that Ben Roberts-Smith ordered him to stage a mock execution of a comrade during a training drill has defended himself in court against accusations he was a liar and fantasist who was trying to justify his own failures as a soldier.
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[Link] Police Arrest Father Who Shot and Killed His 7-Day-Old Baby Girl
Read: 13/3/2022 www.vice.com
Police caught 24-year-old Shahazib Khan on Thursday in the Bhakkar district of Punjab province, 57 miles from his home in Mianwali district where he fatally shot his baby girl Jannat, whose name means “heaven” in Urdu.
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[Link] North Korea Is Pissed After Pakistani Police Raided Its Embassy Over Bootlegging Suspicions
Read: 13/3/2022 www.vice.com
Pakistan has apologized to North Korea for raiding the North Korean Embassy in a bizarre diplomatic row involving rogue cops and allegedly illicit booze. The embassy on Tuesday accused Islamabad police of breaking into its premises and threatened intervening diplomatic staff with guns.
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[Link] 'Rumours expanded tenfold': Defamation trial hears a surprising comparison of elite SAS unit
Read: 13/3/2022 www.abc.net.au
But what they share, according to evidence heard in a Sydney court this week, is a propensity for rumours. The surprising analogy was drawn by a Special Air Service Regiment (SAS) witness at the defamation trial of war veteran Ben Roberts-Smith against three newspapers.
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[Link] The Taliban Have Wished Women a Happy International Women’s Day
Read: 9/3/2022 www.vice.com
The Taliban have wished women across the world a happy International Women’s Day, despite spending the last 6 months in power repressing Afghan women and crushing any dissent.
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[Link] Witness tells court he killed a Taliban fighter credited to Ben Roberts-Smith in Victoria Cross award
Read: 3/3/2022 www.theguardian.com
A soldier who fought alongside Ben Roberts-Smith at the battle of Tizak where Roberts-Smith won his Victoria Cross has told the federal court he killed one of the Taliban machine gunners credited to Roberts-Smith on his official VC citation.
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[Link] Roberts-Smith pressured me to lie about his affair, estranged wife tells court
Read: 14/2/2022 www.smh.com.au
The estranged wife of war veteran Ben Roberts-Smith has told the Federal Court she discovered her husband was having an affair when his girlfriend turned up at the couple’s Sunshine Coast home with a black eye and told her she had been pregnant with his child.
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[Link] What’s in a Name? Why Turkey Is Now Türkiye
Read: 31/1/2022 www.afar.com
Türkiye is the latest country to attempt a rebrand. What motivated the move? Türkiye wants its name back.
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[Link] Archeologists Discover Two Huge Sphinxes in Egyptian Ruins
Read: 23/1/2022 www.vice.com
Amenhotep III’s temple is packed with artifacts and was once a resplendent feature of Luxor. However, it has been eroded by thousands of years of floods and at least one ancient earthquake.
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[Link] Iran nuclear talks pulled back from brink as Tehran shifts stance
Read: 9/12/2021 www.theguardian.com
Efforts to revive the Iran nuclear deal have been hauled back from the brink of collapse as Tehran revised its stance after pressure from Russia and China and clear warnings that the EU and the US were preparing to walk away.
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[Link] The Taliban has Decreed that Men and Women ‘Should Be Equal’
Read: 6/12/2021 www.vice.com
The Taliban has banned forced marriage in Afghanistan, decreeing – for the very first time – that “both (women and men) should be equal,” that women should not be considered “property” and that “no one can force women to marry by coercion or pressure.
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[Link] The Taliban Are Blacklisted by Facebook. Then Why Are They Allowed to Post?
Read: 2/12/2021 www.vice.com
For years, Facebook has prohibited the Taliban from using its platform under its counter-terrorist and hate group community standards.
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[Link] National Geographic green-eyed ‘Afghan Girl’ evacuated to Italy
Read: 27/11/2021 www.theguardian.com
National Geographic magazine’s famed green-eyed “Afghan Girl” has arrived in Italy as part of the west’s evacuation of Afghans after the Taliban takeover of the country, the Italian government said on Thursday.
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[Link] We Spoke to the Unlucky Company With the Same Name as the Investor of Taliban’s Marijuana Center
Read: 25/11/2021 www.vice.com
On Wednesday night, the Twitter account for Afghanistan’s Ministry of Interior Affairs (MOI) announced that a foreign company was investing $450 million into setting up a hashish processing factory within the country.
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[Link] The deadly new risk Afghan women face: It starts with a strange phone call and can end with murder
Read: 22/11/2021 www.abc.net.au
Her body was found riddled with bullets alongside three other women who had also been killed. Ms Ayoubi is a journalist and activist who left Afghanistan over concerns for her own safety.
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[Link] Shooting at holy site in Jerusalem kills one and injures four
Read: 21/11/2021 www.abc.net.au
Israel says the shooting at a holy site for Jews and Muslims by a Palestinian gunman has left one dead and four injured. The attack took place near an entrance to a contested flashpoint shrine known to Jews as the Temple Mount and to Muslims as the Noble Sanctuary, police said.
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[Link] How This Extremist Political Party Got Itself Banned and Then Unbanned
Read: 13/11/2021 www.vice.com
After weeklong protests that led to violent clashes that killed 11 people and left over 250 others injured in the capital Islamabad, the extremist political group Tehreek-e-Labbaik Pakistan (TLP) found itself back in good standing with the government.
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[Link] The CIA’s Afghan Proxies, Accused of War Crimes, Will Get a Fresh Start in the U.S.
Read: 7/11/2021 theintercept.com
Before the Taliban took control of Kabul in August, the U.S.-backed Afghan commandos known as Zero units were the ghosts of the Afghan battlefield. Along with their CIA advisers, they were feared and, in recent years, virtually invisible.
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[Link] Afghanistan’s neighbours gather in Tehran to discuss its future
Read: 4/11/2021 www.aljazeera.com
Iran says the main goal of the event is to emphasise the call for the formation of an ‘inclusive’ government in Afghanistan.
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[Link] Behind a Billboard of Bowe Bergdahl, Khost Maintains Anti-Taliban Ways
Read: 4/11/2021 coffeeordie.com
KHOST, Afghanistan — It’s one of few stretches of road among these winding hills and twisting valleys that remains paved and intact, untouched by the two-decade war that crippled most of Afghanistan’s land arteries.
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[Link] The Taliban Have a Growing ISIS-K Problem
Read: 2/11/2021 www.vice.com
The Taliban face a growing insurgency from ISIS-K, a jihadist group inspired by Islamic State and founded by former Taliban fighters in early 2015.
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[Link] Reclusive Taliban supreme leader makes rare public appearance
Read: 1/11/2021 www.theguardian.com
The Taliban’s reclusive supreme leader, Haibatullah Akhundzada, made a rare public appearance in the southern city of Kandahar, Taliban officials announced on Sunday, contradicting widespread rumours of his death.
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[Link] Hackers Disrupt Gas Stations in Iran and Deface Billboards to Blame Supreme Leader
Read: 27/10/2021 www.vice.com
It’s unclear who is behind the attack. But the methods and impact are reminiscent of a hack in July that paralyzed Iran’s train system.
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[Link] ‘Hard Not To Respect That’: Why White Nationalists Are Toasting the Taliban
Read: 21/10/2021 www.vice.com
When the Taliban captured Kabul in August, sealing a remarkable victory in its nearly 20-year war of attrition against the world's leading superpower, jihadist networks around the world erupted in jubilation.
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[Link] ‘The court of God will be waiting for him’: Iraqis react to Colin Powell’s death
Read: 19/10/2021 www.theguardian.com
For many Iraqis, Colin Powell was the face of the US invasion which caused an estimated 200,000 deaths, unleashing nearly two decades of domestic chaos and precipitating chaos throughout the region.
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[Link] Colin Powell’s UN speech: a decisive moment in undermining US credibility
Read: 19/10/2021 www.theguardian.com
Colin Powell will be most remembered for the act he most regretted, his 2003 presentation to the UN security council laying out US evidence of Iraqi weapons of mass destruction, which turned out not to exist.
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[Link] Afghan embassies don’t recognise the Taliban
Read: 19/10/2021 www.economist.com
THE TALIBAN prevent girls from going to secondary school in Afghanistan. Yet the country’s ambassador to America is a woman. That is not because the group has decided that women’s rights are a good thing after all. It is just that they cannot replace her.
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[Link] Australia expresses ‘sorrow’ after Afghan army deserter Hekmatullah, who killed three ADF soldiers, set free
Read: 11/10/2021 www.theguardian.com
The Australian government has expressed “sorrow” after a former Afghan soldier convicted of murdering three Australian soldiers in Afghanistan was released from custody in Qatar.
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[Link] The Taliban says US will provide humanitarian aid to Afghanistan
Read: 11/10/2021 www.abc.net.au
The US has agreed to provide humanitarian aid but refused to give political recognition to Afghanistan's new rulers, the Taliban says. The statement came at the end of the first direct talks between the former foes since the chaotic withdrawal of Coalition troops at the end of August.
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[Link] Afghanistan Fears Literal Darkness As Taliban Fails to Pay Electric Bills
Read: 5/10/2021 www.vice.com
There are fears Kabul could face a mass blackout, and a subsequent humanitarian crisis, if the Taliban don’t start collecting money for utility bills and paying the city’s electricity suppliers.
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[Link] TikTok Now Has ‘Vulgarity’ Moderators in Pakistan
Read: 27/9/2021 www.vice.com
He went viral because of his slapstick comedy, funny music transitions, and social commentary. But on TikTok, he’s known as Famous “Maulvi,” the South Asian term for Muslim preacher.
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[Link] With No U.S. Support, Leaders of Afghan Resistance Flee the Country
Read: 22/9/2021 theintercept.com
Ahmad Massoud, son of the late Northern Alliance leader Ahmad Shah Massoud, fled to Tajikistan shortly after the Taliban seized control of the Panjshir Valley on September 6, according to a senior U.S. intelligence official, a Pentagon consultant, and two former senior Afghan government officials.
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[Link] Police Uncover Secret Torture Room in Hospital
Read: 20/9/2021 www.vice.com
Police say leaked videos show the abuse had been going on for at least three months in the largest and oldest public hospital in Lahore, Pakistan. It is unclear why the alleged torture was filmed. Police suspect it may have been filmed for entertainment purposes or for record-keeping.
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[Link] With just two ways to flee Afghanistan, this is what it's like at one exit
Read: 16/9/2021 www.abc.net.au
As Rohulla Sediqi and his wife and son emerged from a tunnel and squinted into the sun, they felt the tension slightly lift from their shoulders for the first time in a month.
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[Link] Taliban to give Al-Qaeda covert, not overt support: analysts
Read: 6/9/2021 www.france24.com
The Taliban will offer support to Al-Qaeda in Afghanistan more discreetly than during their first period in power when they openly embraced the terror network, analysts say.
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[Link] Biden sets himself apart by placing Afghanistan blame at predecessors’ feet
Read: 1/9/2021 www.theguardian.com
Victory speeches are easy; conceding defeat is much harder. On Tuesday, Joe Biden tacitly blamed his predecessors for the failure of America’s longest war but implied that, against all odds, one winner had emerged: him.
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[Link] Does the fall of Kabul increase the terror threat to the west?
Read: 1/9/2021 www.theguardian.com
In three days in earlier this month Islamist militants killed more than 120 civilians in a series of attacks in the Sahel, a belt of increasingly anarchic and violent territory across Africa, where such groups have gone from strength to strength in recent years.
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[Link] The Palestinian Authority’s crackdown on protest shows it will never serve its own people
Read: 1/9/2021 www.theguardian.com
On 24 June, Nizar Banat, a longtime activist and outspoken critic of the Palestinian Authority (PA), was reportedly arrested and beaten outside his cousin’s home in Hebron by the authority’s security forces – he died in custody shortly after.
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[Link] Women can continue working in Afghan government, say Taliban
Read: 1/9/2021 www.theguardian.com
Women can continue to work in government in Afghanistan but are not guaranteed cabinet or other senior positions, a Taliban spokesman has said.
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[Link] Israel says US plan to reopen Jerusalem consulate is ‘bad idea’
Read: 1/9/2021 www.theguardian.com
Israel has said a US plan to reopen its consulate in Jerusalem that was traditionally a base for diplomatic outreach to Palestinians is a “bad idea” and could destabilise the prime minister’s new government.
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[Link] Afghanistan’s neighbours offered millions in aid to harbour refugees
Read: 1/9/2021 www.theguardian.com
Countries neighbouring Afghanistan have been offered millions in aid if they are prepared to temporarily harbour tens of thousands of refugees, prior to security checks clearing them for transit to Europe and the US, but Pakistan and other bordering states have warned they will not take more refugee
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[Link] Taliban Carry Coffins Draped With US Flag in Celebration of Their Victory
Read: 1/9/2021 www.vice.com
August 31 has been declared “Freedom Day” in Afghanistan by members of the Taliban, who celebrated the final departure of the United States by parading through the streets with coffins draped in American and NATO flags.
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[Link] The Taliban Captured Lots of Very Expensive Aircraft in Kabul. None of Them Work.
Read: 31/8/2021 www.vice.com
America’s longest war is over after 20 years following the final withdrawal of US troops from Afghanistan.
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[Link] US Marines officer relieved of duties after video seeking ‘accountability’ over Afghanistan
Read: 28/8/2021 www.theguardian.com
A US Marine Corps lieutenant colonel who posted a video demanding accountability from military leaders over the evacuation of Afghanistan has been relieved of his duties and will leave US service, the Marines and the officer involved said on Friday.
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[Link] ‘Unprecedented’ numbers crossing from Afghanistan to Pakistan
Read: 28/8/2021 www.theguardian.com
An “unprecedented” number of people are travelling from Afghanistan to Pakistan through the official border crossing, according to local officials, as the carnage in Kabul after the airport suicide attack has driven more to try to flee the country.
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[Link] ‘We Will Hunt You Down’: Biden Promises U.S. Retaliation for ISIS Attacks in Kabul
Read: 27/8/2021 www.vice.com
President Joe Biden has indicated that the United States will retaliate against the ISIS-affiliated suicide bomb attacks at Kabul’s international airport on Thursday afternoon – promising to “hunt down” the terrorists responsible. At least 90 Afghans and 12 U.S. Service Members – 11 U.S.
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[Link] Who is ISIS-K, the Islamic State offshoot in Afghanistan that has the Taliban worried?
Read: 27/8/2021 www.abc.net.au
Deadly explosions have rocked the edge Kabul's Hamid Karzai International Airport overnight killing and injuring locals wanting to flee Afghanistan after the Taliban's takeover, as well as US military personnel trying to help the evacuation effort.
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[Link] The Unexpected Places the Taliban Got Rich From Before Taking Over Afghanistan
Read: 26/8/2021 www.vice.com
The extremist group made a staggering $1.6 billion last year, a key factor that helped them gain control of Afghanistan at lightning speed. On the streets of Kabul after the Taliban takeover, Afghans were running from one empty ATM to the next. Prices soared, the U.S. froze $9.
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[Link] Afghan Soldier Killed As Unknown Sniper Opens Fire at Kabul Airport
Read: 26/8/2021 www.vice.com
An unknown sniper opened fire on US and German troops guarding the entrances to Kabul airport killing an Afghan soldier and wounding three others on Monday.
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[Link] We Were With Afghan Soldiers as the Taliban Took Kandahar
Read: 26/8/2021 www.vice.com
Since the Taliban took control of Kabul earlier this month, a lot of the focus has been on the failures of the U.S.-trained Afghan military—why they seemed to put up little resistance to the Islamist extremists in some of the provinces, and then, finally, in the capital.
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[Link] YouTube says it bans accounts believed to be owned by the Taliban
Read: 26/8/2021 www.reuters.com
Aug 17 (Reuters) - Alphabet Inc's (GOOGL.O) YouTube said on Tuesday it bans accounts believed to be owned and operated by the Taliban, as U.S. social media companies scrambled to publicly clarify their rules on the group that is in control of Afghanistan. After U.S.
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[Link] Twitter Refuses to Ban Taliban Accounts, Vows to Remain ‘Vigilant’ Moderating Content
Read: 26/8/2021 www.yahoo.com
Twitter will allow Taliban-affiliated accounts to continue using its platform despite its policies against glorification of violence and threats.
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[Link] WhatsApp Can’t Ban the Taliban Because It Can’t Read Their Texts
Read: 26/8/2021 www.vice.com
The Taliban have effectively taken control of Afghanistan, entering the capital Kabul as U.S. diplomats and allies flee the country.
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