Abubakar Siddique, a journalist for RFE/RL's Radio Azadi, specializes in the coverage of Afghanistan and Pakistan. He is the author of The Pashtun Question: The Unresolved Key To The Future Of Pakistan And Afghanistan.
Taliban plans to build a dam on a major river in eastern Afghanistan have attracted criticism from neighboring Pakistan, which depends on the water.
A network of secret schools is educating around 1,000 teenage girls in southern Afghanistan, a largely tribal and conservative region that has long been the stronghold of the Taliban. The extremist group banned education for girls above the sixth grade soon after seizing power in 2021.
A deadly attack in northwestern Pakistan has further inflamed tensions between Islamabad and the Afghan Taliban.
In its quest for self-sufficiency, Afghanistan's Taliban government is building large infrastructure projects while frantically trying to exploit the country's vast natural resources. However, experts see the group's need for more legitimacy, recognition, and sanctions as significant impediments.
Afghan women's rights activists and the United Nations are continuing to express concerns about the treatment of women incarcerated for exercising their right to protest the Taliban's hard-line policies.
More than 400,000 Afghan refugees and migrants have been forced to return to their homeland from Pakistan in recent months. Around 90 percent of them are homeless, according to a British-based charity.
Relations between Pakistan and the Afghan Taliban, longtime allies, are at a crucial juncture. Islamabad has issued the Afghan extremist group an ultimatum: Stop sheltering the Pakistani Taliban or be considered an enemy of Pakistan.
Afghanistan's Taliban rulers and neighboring Pakistan have been engaged in an escalating war of words over Islamabad's mass expulsion of Afghan refugees from the South Asian country.
Welcome to The Azadi Briefing, an RFE/RL newsletter that unpacks the key issues in Afghanistan. I'm Abubakar Siddique, a senior correspondent at RFE/RL's Radio Azadi. Here's what I've been tracking and what I'm keeping an eye on in the days ahead.
Pakistani rights groups say the "forced repatriation" of 1.7 million undocumented Afghans fleeing persecution and humanitarian emergencies is unlawful.
Many members of the once-vibrant Sikh religious minority in Pakistan's northwestern province of Khyber Pakhtunkhwa have left the mountainous region bordering Afghanistan in recent years. The exodus comes after deadly militant attacks and growing religious intolerance.
Afghanistan's hard-line Islamist Taliban rulers have touted the recent signing of $6.5 billion in mining contracts as a major economic breakthrough. But experts see little prospect for the impoverished country to see any quick financial benefits.
A raid by the Pakistani Taliban into the remote northwestern district of Chitral surprised many. Experts see the incursion as a Tehrik-e Taliban Pakistan (TTP) effort to control territory to further boost its expanding insurgency in Pakistan.
Afghanistan has seen a surge in the number of female suicides since the Taliban takeover in 2021, making the country one of the few in the world where more women take their own lives than men.
Welcome to The Azadi Briefing, an RFE/RL newsletter that unpacks the key issues in Afghanistan. To subscribe, click here. I'm Abubakar Siddique, a senior correspondent at RFE/RL's Radio Azadi. Here's what I've been tracking and what I'm keeping an eye on in the days ahead.
The mysterious death of a popular YouTuber has spread fear among female online personalities and social-media influencers in Afghanistan. Some activists have blamed her death on the Taliban, which has attempted to erase women from public life.
Members of Afghanistan's Sikh and Hindu communities say the Taliban, a militant Islamist group, has imposed restrictions on their appearances and prevented them from marking religious holidays in public. Many Afghan Sikhs and Hindus have fled the country in recent years following targeted attacks.
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