Taliban

India closed a consulate and sent a plane to retrieve its citizens this week. The US military and State Department this week accelerated plans to evacuate the well-staffed American embassy if the situation in Kabul dictates it, US officials said. The latest US intelligence assessment said, Kabul could fall to militants in as soon as a month.

The last few days have seen deadly escalation in fighting in Helmand, Kandahar, Herat, Kunduz and Nimroz provinces, adding untold sufferings to the people in a country where over 5 million people have already been displaced internally, IOM said. In an earlier report, IOM had said that more than half of children aged 5-7 in Afghanistan are engaged in work of some kind.

Qureshi said that while efforts are being made to hold Pakistan responsible for the situation in Afghanistan, he believed some faction outside Afghanistan is spoiling the peace process. As per media reports, the Afghan Foreign Ministry in its statement said that the terrorists are benefiting from safe havens, which are being used to make Afghanistan insecure.

The newly-appointed ambassador of Afghanistan to the UN has called on the international community to be mindful and press the Taliban's centres in Pakistan, media reports said. US Defence Secretary Lloyd Austin had earlier asked Chief of Staff of the Pakistan Army, Qamar Javed Bajwa, to eliminate the safe havens of terrorists along its border with Afghanistan.

The two-minute video clip, shared by a Pakistani journalist on social media, the TTP chief Mufti Noor Wali Mehsud is seen threatening the Pakistani security forces. Mehsud calls upon all terrorist Jihadi organisations to join TTP against its fight against the Pakistani government. The video was made by the Umar Media, the propaganda wing of the outfit.

US Special Representative for Afghan Reconciliation Zalmay Khalilzad left for Doha on Sunday, where he help formulate a joint international response to the rapidly deteriorating situation in the war-torn counyru. A negotiated peace is the only path to ending the war, and the US will continue to work with all parties and with regional and international stakeholders to advance a consensus on a political settlement.

As per media reports, provincial in charge of Nai (Open Media Advocate in Afghanistan), Abul Sami Ghairatmal said that Hemat was taken out of his home in Nawa district on Monday. The Taliban are now controlling all the districts of Helmand province and have been fighting the Afghan National Defense and Security Forces in the provincial capital, Lashkargah.

By describing the Taliban as a "pivotal military and political force" in Afghanistan but remaining silent about the latter's association with terror, amid reports that members of several Pakistan-based terror groups are at present fighting on its side against the Afghan national forces, China has sent a disturbing message to the world about its political ethics.

"Taliban militants took control of all government offices roughly at the evening on Sunday in Taluqan. They also broke the provincial prison and released the inmates," resident Mohammad Salim told Xinhua news agency on Sunday. The security forces retreated to areas on the outskirts of the city, he said.

The Mail newspaper on Sunday reported that whenever the extremists capture a new town or district, they issue orders through the speakers of local mosques for the names of wives and widows of all local government and police personnel to be handed over. The group has rounded up hundreds of young women to be married off to their militants as a "war booty", local residents told the newspaper.