The war in Afghanistan is at an “eroding stalemate” after more than 15 years of war, “tipping in the Taliban’s favor,” an unnamed senior administration official told The Washington Post (WaPo).
Sunni Saudi Arabia is reportedly investing nearly $600 million on erecting two higher education institutions in restive areas of Afghanistan.
Nearly 100 members of the corrupt U.S.-funded Afghan National Defense and Security Forces (ANDSF) were executed by the Taliban as they tried to flee a town near the besieged capital of Helmand, a province that has remained an important Taliban stronghold throughout the 15-year-old war and is currently at risk of falling back into the hands of the jihadists, reports Reuters.
The new chief of the Afghan Taliban Haibatullah Akhundzada “openly taught and preached” at the at the Al Haaj mosque in Pakistan for 15 years and left two days after he was named the jihadist group’s new leader in May, Reuters exclusively reports, citing the leader’s associates and students.
A former Guantánamo prisoner released in 2006 after he was extradited to Spain has reportedly been sentenced to 11 1/2 years in prison by Spanish court for leading a recruiting cell for al-Qaeda out of the European country’s capital.
The government of Pakistan has failed to take “adequate” action against the al-Qaeda and Taliban-linked Haqqani Network, which poses the “primary threat” to the American military and its allies fighting in Afghanistan, declared a top U.S. commander.
Over 250,000 Afghans who crossed into neighboring Pakistan illegally have been pressured into returning to their war and corruption-ravaged country along with their compatriots who were admitted into the country legally as refugees.
The Guardian, citing a Pakistani security source, has confirmed that New York and New Jersey bomber Ahmad Khan Rahami spent time receiving “Islamic education” at a Taliban-linked seminary in Pakistan during his extended stay there.
The father of Ahmad Khan Rahami, the suspect linked to the bombings in New York and New Jersey last weekend, claims the FBI ignored his appeal to “keep an eye” on his “terrorist” son who was interested in jihadi groups like al-Qaeda, the New York Times (NYT) learned during a series of interviews with the elder Rahami this week.
The sister of Ahmad Rahami, the U.S. naturalized citizen of Afghan descent believed to be behind last weekend’s bombings in New York and New Jersey, posted radical Islamic material online, including a quote from an al Qaeda (AQ) co-founder known as Osama bin Laden’s predecessor and the “father of global Jihad” as well as Muslim Brotherhood (MB) propaganda.
The vice president of Afghanistan, in his address to the United Nations General Assembly on Tuesday, only once alluded to his country’s widespread and endemic corruption that an independent U.S. watchdog agency recently determined may pose a bigger threat to the future of the country and America’s mission than the insurgency.
The father of the suspect in the weekend bombings in New York and New Jersey is from the southern Afghan province of Kandahar, a known stronghold of the Taliban and its ally al Qaeda, and like Osama bin Laden was part of the Afghan mujahedeen who fought the Soviet Army, reports The New York Times (NYT).
The Taliban in the northern Afghan province of Badakhshan are increasingly capturing weapons and other military equipment, including armored vehicles, from U.S.-trained and equipped Afghan National Defense and Security Forces (ANDSF) and using them against the troops.
Italian anti-drug units, over a 32-month period, intercepted 20 enormous freighters used to traffic a collective 280 tons of hashish valued at about $3.2 billion through territory near Libya believed to be controlled by the Islamic State (ISIS/ISIL), reports The New York Times (NYT).
Sporting beards and obsessed with death, a new generation of Italian Mafiosi is modelling itself on Islamic State jihadists in order to strike terror into the local population, according to Italian anti-Mafia officials.
Afghanistan has been plagued by increasingly deteriorating security conditions, widespread corruption, and a troubled economy since the Taliban regime was overthrown by the U.S. military soon after it invaded the country in response to the 9/11 attacks. The security situation
Since the U.S.-led invasion of Afghanistan in the wake of the 9/11 attacks, the area under opium cultivation in the country has increased 23 fold to an area nearly ten times the size of Washington, D.C., while production of the illicit drug has skyrocketed 18-fold, from 185 metric tons to 3,300.
Retired Navy SEAL and former Blackwater CEO Erik Prince thought it was “shocking indeed that Matt Lauer asked any question that wasn’t pre-scripted from the Clinton team” during Wednesday night’s national security forum.
Pakistani Christians were hit by two gun- and suicide-bomb attacks on Friday, leaving 12 dead and at least 54 wounded.
Afghanistan is combating forces of the “devil and darkness” intent on destroying humanity, declared the country’s Chief Executive Officer (CEO) Abdullah Abdullah as he called for increasing support to the U.S.-backed Afghan National Defense and Security Forces (ANDSF).
A new video purports to show an American woman and her Canadian husband, who were taken hostage by the Afghan Taliban in 2012, pleading for help from their respective governments and warning that their captors will kill them, their family, and other prisoners, including women and children, unless the Afghan government stops executing Taliban prisoners.
A group of militants left at least 13 people dead and 36 others wounded after they stormed the American University of Afghanistan (AUA) located in the Afghan capital of Kabul.
Al-Qaeda chief Ayman al-Zawahiri is urging fellow jihadists to back his Taliban allies and reject his Islamic State (ISIS/ISIL) rivals in Afghanistan.
Afghan officials have confirmed reports of an attack on the American University of Afghanistan Kabul campus, with various reports on social media suggesting a number of professors and students are still stuck inside.
One American service member was killed and another injured in southern Afghanistan’s Taliban stronghold of Helmand province a day after the U.S. military announced it was deploying nearly 100 troops to the same region in response to recent “tactical victories” by the jihadist group.
A Florida Imam with close ties to Omar Mateen, the Islamic terrorist who killed 50 people at an Orlando gay nightclub, says Sharia Law is not only “the best law,” but claims it is “already in the Constitution.”
U.S.-backed Afghan security forces in eastern Afghanistan’s Nuristan province killed a group of 27 terrorists, including two young girls equipped with suicide vests, according to the country’s Ministry of Defense (MoD).
U.S. troops fighting the Islamic State alongside their Afghan counterparts in eastern Afghanistan were forced to leave behind military equipment and weapons, along with the identification cards of a fellow soldier, when they came under fire last month, according to Gen. Charles Cleveland, an American military spokesman.
When Seddique Mateen, the father of Orlando mass murderer Omar Mateen, turned up at a Hillary Clinton rally in Florida on Tuesday, the Clinton campaign scrambled to tell the media he wasn’t an invited guest, and they didn’t even know he was there, although he somehow managed to get a plum seat close to the candidate.
Anti-narcotics and intelligence officials from India have accused “overlapping groups” of drug smugglers, criminals, and jihadists from neighboring Pakistan of trafficking “anti-India Muslim extremists, counterfeit currency and weapons” into their country, reports the Wall Street Journal (WSJ).
An Afghan Taliban spokesman reportedly told an Iranian state-controlled media outlet that his fellow jihadists are “committed” to the annihilation of the Islamic State (ISIS/ISIL) branch in the Afghanistan-Pakistan region known as the Khorasan Province (IS-KP/ISIL-K).
The leader of the Islamic State’s branch in the Afghanistan-Pakistan region, Hafiz Saeed, has been killed, according to regional Afghan military commander Gen. Mohammad Zaman Waziri.
Up to five gunmen, reportedly dressed as members of the Afghan National Defense and Security Forces (ANDSF), kidnapped two professors Sunday night in the Afghan capital of Kabul — one from the United States and the other from Australia.
Jihadists from the Islamic State (ISIS/ISIL) branch in Afghanistan have released several photos that purport to show the identification card of a U.S. soldier, along with weapons and other military equipment confiscated from American troops in eastern Afghanistan.
A jihadist of the Taliban Islamic terror group blew himself up Monday morning in a hospital in Quetta, the capital of the volatile Balochistan province in southwestern Pakistan, killing at least 70 and wounding 120 more.
Khizr M. Khan has published papers supporting the supremacy of Islamic law over “man-made” Western law — including the very Constitution he championed in his Democratic National Convention speech attacking GOP presidential nod Donald Trump.
The U.S.-backed Afghan government has lost control of more than one-third of Afghanistan, reveals an American watchdog agency appointed by Congress, citing U.S. Forces in Afghanistan (USFOR-A).
Civilian casualties in Afghanistan reached 5,166 during the first half of this year, an all-time high, with children paying a heavy toll, reports the United Nations.
Contents: ISIS claims responsibility for attack on Shia Hazaras in Kabul Afghanistan; Kabul attack targeted Afghanistan’s repressed Hazara minority
The expanded military authorization granted by President Barack Obama last month, which allows American troops supporting their Afghan counterparts to offensively target the Taliban rather than waiting for the terrorist group to attack first, is leading to progress on the battlefield, the top U.S. commander in Afghanistan told USA Today.
