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Category: Afghanistan

Taliban captives ‘well looked after’ in Afghanistan’s Logar

A group of foreigners abducted on Monday by militants in eastern Afghanistan are being “well looked after”, officials and the Taliban say.

Up to 11 people, thought to include eight Turks, two Russians and an Afghan were taken in Logar province after their helicopter landed in bad weather.

Tribal elders who saw the captives said that they were being fed and looked after, local officials told the BBC.

The Taliban also told the BBC the captives were in good condition.

Taliban spokesman Zabihullah Mujahid said that the group were very tired and that “we could not talk to them a lot”.

“If they need any doctors for check up or other health related issues, we have good doctors and medical workers,” he said.

He added that Taliban leaders had yet to make a decision about their fate and denied reports that local officials or tribal elders had made contact in an effort to negotiate their release.

But officials in Logar earlier told the BBC that elders had seen the hostages. They added that the Taliban had made no demands so far, adding that they were concerned that the insurgents’ might want to take the group across the border into Pakistan.

Forced landing

The company responsible for the missing helicopter, Khorasan, said the aircraft was forced down in bad weather on Sunday evening while flying to Kabul from Khost, which is to the south-east of the capital.

Azra, the restive district where the helicopter made the forced landing, is close to the Pakistani border and local officials say that while there are some Afghan government forces there, the Taliban and other insurgents have a strong presence.

It said there were 10 people on board: one was an Afghan, two were Russian pilots, and the other seven were Turkish construction workers.

But Turkey’s foreign ministry later said that eight Turks were on board the aircraft.

The BBC’s David Loyn in Kabul reports that on any day there are an average of 100 civilian helicopter flights across Afghanistan.

They are a vital link for remote bases, carrying workers and supplies and are mostly contracted from Russian companies, our correspondent adds.

Turkey has around 1,800 soldiers serving with Nato forces in Afghanistan, but their mission is confined to patrols and Turkey has long had a close relationship with Kabul.

Several Turkish engineers have been kidnapped in Afghanistan in recent years, with some held for up to two years.

Numerous Western, Pakistani and Afghan hostages are being held in Afghanistan including US Army Sergeant Bowe Bergdahl, 25, who has been a prisoner for nearly four years.

via BBC News – Taliban captives ‘well looked after’ in Afghanistan’s Logar.

April 24, 2013
U.S. Embassy in Ankara, synagogue in Istanbul alleged al-Qaida targets

ISTANBUL, Turkey, April 12 (UPI) — The U.S. Embassy in Ankara was targeted to be bombed by an alleged Turkish al-Qaida cell whose members were trained in Afghanistan, Turkish police said.

Police seized nearly 50 pounds of plastic explosives with detonation systems attached, along with 10 rifles and guns, six laptop computers and other evidence, police said.

Twelve people — two Chechens, two Azerbaijanis and eight Turks — were arrested in two raids, police said.

The raids — which occurred in February but were only now reported — occurred in the northwestern city of Tekirdag and Istanbul, police said.

All 12 people were believed to be members of al-Qaida terrorist cells, the Dogan News Agency said.

The U.S. Embassy issued a travel warning at the time but said police had provided no specific threat information about the targets.

It had no immediate comment Friday.

The U.S. Embassy was the target of a suicide bomb attack in February that killed a Turkish security guard and severely injured a local resident. But that attack was attributed to an extreme left-wing organization, not Islamic militants.

The arrested alleged attackers also planned to bomb an Istanbul synagogue and the private Rahmi M. Koc Museum, police said. They additionally intended to attack Turkish TV personality-actor Acun Ilicali and author Adnan Oktar, also known as Harun Yahya, an Islamic creationist who speaks against evolution, the news agency said.

via U.S. Embassy in Ankara, synagogue in Istanbul alleged al-Qaida targets – UPI.com.

April 13, 2013
Turkey to invest in Afghan energy

Mr Taner Yildiz Turkish Minister for Energy and Natural Resources as saying that Afghanistan had great resources for production of electricity and announced plans to invest in Afghan energy industry.

TPAO, a Turkish petroleum corporation, won the tender for oil extraction at the Mazar i Sharif Province of Afghanistan and will invest about USD 100 million. Turkish companies won the tender for gold mining in Afghanistan.

Source – Vestnikkavkaza.net

via Turkey to invest in Afghan energy – 304759 – 2013-03-09.

March 10, 2013
Violence In Afghanistan Has No Religious Justification Say Muslim Clerics At A Conference in Istanbul

What the Mullahs Are Mulling

By ANDREW FINKEL

ISTANBUL — Midday in Istanbul’s historical Beyazit district and the air suddenly fills with the call to prayer from the many royal mosques nearby. It is a reminder that a part of the city that now bustles with shoppers, university students and tourists was once the heart of a great Islamic empire.

Istanbul is no longer home to the caliphate, but it still transmits to the faithful: At the beginning of the week, leading Muslim scholars from across the world — Indonesia, Britain, Pakistan — met in a modestly sized hotel conference room to hammer out the rights and wrongs of the conflict in Afghanistan.

Although I was told not to identify participants without their permission for fear of reprisals by the Taliban, no one seemed afraid to call a spade a spade. Much effort was spent debunking the notion that the struggle in Afghanistan is a holy war rather than a straightforward tussle for power.

The conference, “Islamic Cooperation for a Peaceful Future in Afghanistan,” was the brainchild not of a cleric but of Neamatollah Nojumi, a professor of conflict resolution at George Mason University who came to the subject the hard way. At the age of 14 he was a mujahid fighting the Soviets in his native Afghanistan.

Simply by gathering people of good will in one room, the organizers believe they have succeeded where national authorities have failed.

Now his mission is to stop Afghans from fighting Afghans. The method is straightforward. Senior Afghan clerics meet with the world’s leading Islamic theologians to discuss suicide bombings, the targeting of civilians, the destruction of historical artifacts — even domestic violence.

This week’s conference culminated in a detailed and strongly worded resolution that reaffirmed Islam’s compatibility with universal human norms and called on religious institutions in Afghanistan, Pakistan and neighboring countries to end violence. The document will be circulated to more than 160,000 mosques in Afghanistan so that its findings may trickle into individual consciences there.

The meeting was the third of its kind, and the overall effort has started to make a difference, according Ataur Rahman Salim, director of the Scientific Islamic Research Center in Kabul. It is now easier to oppose the men of violence. “The majority of Islamic scholars are not afraid to speak out,” he said.

But “some are sitting on the fence,” he added. Indeed. Several speakers supported the Taliban over the Afghan government and were more critical of NATO bombings than of suicide attacks by insurgents.

I sat next to the Indian scholar Aijaz Arshad Qasmi, who is closely associated with the ultra-orthodox Deoband community. He believes that NATO, not Pakistan, is complicating the situation in Afghanistan and that government is supported by a mere 10 percent of the population. And yet he parts company with the Taliban when it comes to the use of violence. “Conflict will not solve conflict,” he told me. “Islam does not mean war.”

Nor does Islam mean denying women access to education and health services, according to the draft of the final resolution. The document also states that the violation of women’s rights contradicts the tenets of Islam.

Participants did not expect this process to solve Afghanistan’s main problem — “government without governance,” according to Nojumi — but it does allow a burgeoning civil society movement to call both the Afghan government and insurgents to account and to put pressure on interfering neighbors to back off.

ANDREW FINKEL

Simply by gathering people of good will in one room, the organizers believe they have succeeded where national authorities have failed. Whereas four clerics from Pakistan attended this conference, the Afghan and Pakistani governments have tried and have not managed to organize a meeting of clerics since the beginning of the year.

Given the diversity of participants, the degree of unanimity was remarkable. The recourse to violence in Afghanistan had no religious justification, speaker after speaker said. Or, in the words of the final declaration, “A crime committed in the name of Islam is a crime against Islam.”

Andrew Finkel has been a foreign correspondent in Istanbul for over 20 years, as well as a columnist for Turkish-language newspapers. He is the author of the book “Turkey: What Everyone Needs to Know.”

via Violence In Afghanistan Has No Religious Justification Say Muslim Clerics At A Conference in Istanbul – NYTimes.com.

March 7, 2013
Former Guantanamo Bay Detainee Resettled to Turkey

By JONATHAN KAMINSKY Associated Press

February 27, 2013 (AP)

One of six Chinese nationals held by the U.S. at its Guantanamo Bay prison and released to Palau in 2009 has resettled in Turkey, the tiny island republic’s former president confirmed Wednesday.

Johnson Toribiong, reached by phone from the U.S., said Adel Noori left Palau shortly before Toribiong’s term ended late last year.

A U.S. official familiar with the situation who asked not to be identified said Toribiong’s administration informed the U.S. that Noori, 43, had made arrangements on his own to leave the country.

Noori and the five other men — all of them Uighurs, an ethnic minority that has clashed with China’s central government — were released to Palau after spending nearly eight years at Guantanamo Bay. They were captured in Afghanistan and Pakistan in 2001.

The Pentagon determined in 2008 that they were not “enemy combatants” and they were released to Palau on what was billed as a temporary basis the following year.

“I guess the term temporary is a term of ambiguity,” said Toribiong.

Uighurs are from Xinjiang, an isolated region of China that borders Afghanistan, Pakistan and six Central Asian nations. They are Turkic-speaking Muslims who say they have long been repressed by the Chinese government.

Noori and his compatriots have said they fear they would be arrested, tortured or executed if sent back to China.

China has said that insurgents are leading an Islamic separatist movement in Xinjiang and wants the men returned.

Ian Moss, a U.S. State Department spokesman, declined to confirm Noori’s location.

“We are aware of Mr. Noori’s departure from Palau,” Moss said. “We are not going to comment on diplomatic discussions with another government or the whereabouts of a private individual.”

A local newspaper, Tia Belau, reported earlier this month that Noori had made his way to Turkey to be with his wife and baby. The report also said Noori had transited through Japan, but Foreign Ministry officials in Tokyo said they had no information about that.

Toribiong, who was voted out of office in November, said he feels “a little anxious about the fact that the next president (of Palau) has had to be responsible” for the remaining five Uighurs and their families. There are 14 or 15 of them now living on the island.

“I assumed that I would be able to take care of them and by the end of my term find them a permanent place to go to,” he said.

via Former Guantanamo Bay Detainee Resettled to Turkey – ABC News.

February 28, 2013
Afghan refugees leave Iran for Turkey

ISTANBUL // A dark and damp basement of an Istanbul mosque is home to about 30 people who have nowhere else to go, victims of a new and largely unnoticed refugee crisis in Turkey.

Most of the inhabitants of the basement, which used to serve as the mosque’s morgue, are Afghan refugees. They are new arrivals, not from Afghanistan directly, but from Turkey’s eastern neighbour Iran, where conditions for refugees have started to worsen.

There are about 20,000 Afghan refugees in Turkey, most of whom have arrived in recent months, according to the Ankara office of UNHCR, the UN refugee agency.

At the mosque in the neighbourhood of Zeytinburnu, just outside the ancient city walls, a local charity has been providing shelter, food and clothes for the Afghans and several Iranians, who have also moved into the basement.

“What else can we do,” Kiyaz Aras, the deputy chairman of the charity that runs the mosque, said this week. “They would be out on the street otherwise.”

One of the refugees, Sajjad Ramizani, 18, son of a family of Afghan refugees in Iran, said his parents decided to send him to Turkey with his grandmother and an uncle half a year ago.

He and other refugees say there is increasing pressure on Afghans in Iran to leave, as Tehran is facing growing economic difficulties, caused in part by western sanctions in response to Iran’s nuclear programme.

Mr Ramizani’s parents remain in Iran. “But they want to come as soon as they have the money,” he said.

In the past two years, efforts to help refugees in Turkey have focused on the region bordering Syria, where close to 180,000 Syrians are sheltered in government-run camps. But in the shadow of the Syrian crisis, the number of Afghan refugees in Turkey has started to rise dramatically.

Only 7,000 Afghans are officially registered, the UN agency said in a written response to questions this week. “As a result of a sharp increase from June 2012 onwards an additional 13,000 have approached UNHCR.”

Most of the Afghans arriving here come not straight from their homeland, but from Iran, home to around 820,000 Afghan refugees.

The UNHCR said the increase was “due to many factors, including the fear of Afghans for what will happen in Afghanistan after the international troops pull out in 2014 and the economic situation in Iran which makes it very difficult for many Afghans in Iran to be able to survive”.

Abdulriza Sagagi, a spokesman for the Iranian embassy in Ankara, denied that his country was pushing the Afghans out.

“There is no pressure whatsoever,” Mr Sagagi said by telephone. He suggested that such complaints came from Afghans who wanted to improve their chances of being accepted by a western country.

But refugees, such as Mr Ramizani, said the pressure was real.

Born into a family of Afghan refugees in the Iranian city of Isfahan, Mr Ramizani said his family was suddenly confronted with a hostile attitude by Iranian authorities last year.

“We had a shop there, and we had a car,” Mr Ramizani said. “Then the police came and closed down our shop and took away our car.”

Mr Ramizani now works as a helper at a car park in Istanbul and tries to keep in touch with his parents by calling them from one of the phone shops in Zeytinburnu that advertise cheap telephone calls to Afghanistan, Iran and central Asian countries.

Up the road from the mosque, Aci Nusrat, another newly-arrived Afghan refugee, was taking a walk in the warm February sun.

Mr Nusrat, 60, fled Afghanistan shortly after the Soviet invasion of 1979 and settled in the Iranian city of Shiraz, where he worked as a teacher in a karate school. Then, about two months ago, the life he had known for 30 years came to an abrupt end.

“All of a sudden, they refused to give new papers to Afghans,” he said about Iranian authorities. Mr Nusrat and his family of seven decided to go to Turkey, which they reached after a trek over the mountains. After arriving in Zeytinburnu, his son found work at a construction company so the family can afford its own apartment.

Since coming to Istanbul, Mr Nusrat, whose crushing handshake betrayed the lifelong athlete, has been trying to keep fit by working out on gym machines in a public park on the shore of the nearby Sea of Marmara. Although he entered Turkey illegally and lacks valid identity papers, he said he was not concerned about being extradited from Turkey.

“The police here are good, they are bad in Iran,” he said. “I want to stay here.”

Turkey does not grant refugee status to Afghans, but agrees to let them stay in the country while UNHCR officials try to find countries willing to take them in, a process that can take years.

Taner Kilic, director of the Association for Solidarity with Refugees (Multeci-Der), an NGO, said Afghan refugees in Turkey had to wait up to four years before getting their first interview at the UNHCR to talk about a possible move to another country.

via Afghan refugees leave Iran for Turkey – The National.

February 17, 2013