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Turkish institutions continue to stand with the Afghan people, who have recently suffered heavy losses due to earthquakes and floods, with their humanitarian aid activities in Afghanistan, especially with the "Kindness Trains."

In Afghanistan, where heavy losses were experienced due to the earthquake that occurred at the end of June and the flood that followed, the survivors are clinging to life with the help of Turkish institutions.

Institutions performing aid activities in disaster areas delivered humanitarian aid to thousands of Afghan families, both routinely and with the fifth "Kindness Train".

"We aim to continue our aid with the same determination in the coming period. In this context, we are planning to distribute the materials to be brought to Afghanistan by the sixth Kindness Train service to families in need in as many provinces as possible in September, again without discrimination, taking into account the regions in need of priority." the Turkish Ambassador in Kabul Cihad Erginay said.

Humanitarian Relief Foundation (IHH), Disaster and Emergency Management Authority (AFAD) and Turkish Red Crescent (Kzlay) cooperated with the Afghan Red Crescent to deliver aid to Afghanistan's disaster areas.

In these regions, in addition to food parcels containing products such as flour, oil, various legumes, sugar, salt, pasta, tomato paste for each family, tents, blankets, carpets, diapers and feeding sets, clothes, shoes, stationery items are also provided for those whose houses are damaged. Humanitarian aid materials were distributed in many items. The aid was planned to meet the needs of each family for several months. Institutions also contribute to the Afghan economy by purchasing aid other than materials from Trkiye through the "Kindness Trains" from the Afghan market.

In this process, IHH delivered 530 tons of food aid to 5,000 families in total with the fifth "Kindness Train". About 100 kilograms of food packages were delivered to each family.

In the coming days, the charity will also deliver over 400 tons of tents, blankets, carpets, clothing, fabrics, shoes, diapers and food, as well as stationery, to those in need, again with the fifth "Kindness Train".

In addition, IHH prepared hot meals for 1000 people every day for a month in the Giyan and Bermel districts of Paktika province, which was most severely affected by the earthquake, and provided food, tents, blankets, hygiene kits, tents and cash aid to hundreds of people.

Continuing the distribution of aid to a total of 15 thousand families in 10 provinces, IHH also provides aid for the development of agriculture in Afghanistan.

Accordingly, a total of 45 tons of saffron seeds and various agricultural kits were donated to 133 farmers in Kandahar and Herat.

IHH Afghanistan Coordinator Mcahid Kl stated that saffron seed aids will be an alternative to the cultivation of agricultural products such as poppy and hemp and have the potential to distract farmers from the drug trade.

"With the new government banning the cultivation of such products (poppy and hemp), most of the farmers became unemployed. We, as IHH, decided to distribute saffron seeds, which are an alternative to such products and have a high value, to orphaned and widowed farmer families in need. Because Afghanistan saffron is all over the world. It is shown as one of the most valuable and high-quality saffron."

Kl also noted that a protocol was signed between the Afghanistan Ministry of Education and IHH last week for an education complex to be established in the capital Kabul, where 1000 orphans will be sheltered and educated, and that the construction will begin soon.

AFAD, on the other hand, delivered a total of 515 tons of humanitarian aid to 3,500 families, the majority of whom were in earthquake and flood areas, and provided tents, blankets and carpets to 1200 families who suffered severe damage.

In addition to the aid, various items of aid were also delivered to orphanages and drug treatment centers.

AFAD Afghanistan Team Coordinator Serhat Grbz told Anadolu Agency (AA) that they successfully completed a difficult process to deliver the aid.

"Despite the difficult physical conditions in earthquake and flood areas, we were able to deliver humanitarian aid materials to those in need without any problems. We were extremely happy to be a little relief for the problems of families in need. From now on, our aid will reach Afghanistan in the near future. It will continue with the sixth Kindness Train."

The Turkish Red Crescent was one of the first institutions to run to the regions where earthquakes and floods occurred. In addition to the aid that covers thousands of families in these regions, the Turkish Red Crescent provided food aid to 1000 families last week.

Turkish Red Crescent, which has provided 200 tents to the disaster victims in the said regions, will deliver food aid to 3,500 families in need in the coming days.

Farid Ahmed Ziya, head of the Turkish Red Crescent Delegation to Afghanistan, stated that 350 tons of humanitarian aid will be distributed to families in need, together with the aid they have carried out and planned recently, and that the aid will continue.

Ambassador Erginay also stated that the humanitarian aid materials that have come with five "Kindness Trains", the last of which are predominantly disaster areas, have been delivered to families in need in all provinces of the country.

He expressed that they support various institutions and women's groups in Afghanistan, adding: "We continue to carry out social support projects with the aid that comes with the fifth Kindness Train. In this context, we donate beds and wheelchairs to be used in hospitals and anti-drug clinics. Likewise, we provide support to women who earn their living from tailoring by donating sewing machines in Mazar-i-Sharif."

After the Taliban, while the world left Afghanistan materially and morally alone, Trkiye made a great contribution to alleviating the deepening humanitarian crisis.

In line with the instructions of President Recep Tayyip Erdoan, more than 6,000 tons of humanitarian aid, which came with five "Kindness Trains" sent from Trkiye to Afghanistan, was delivered to hundreds of thousands of people in need, considering the large family structure in Afghanistan.

Various kinds of food items, tents, blankets, wheelchairs, sewing machines and stationery items were prepared in many items, giving hope to the needy in 34 provinces of the country.

The first "Kindness Train," which departed from Trkiye to contribute to the mitigation of the humanitarian crisis that the Afghan people were in, arrived in Afghanistan on Feb. 7 and the distribution of aid to all provinces had begun.

Aid groups describe Afghanistan's plight as one of the world's most rapidly growing humanitarian crises. According to the United Nations, half the population now faces acute hunger, over 9 million people have been displaced and millions of children are out of school.

Previously, the U.N. and its partners launched a $4.4 billion funding appeal to avert a humanitarian catastrophe in Afghanistan in 2022. U.N. Secretary-General Antonio Guterres has also warned that millions of Afghans are on the verge of death, urging the international community to release Afghanistan's frozen assets and jump-start its banking system.

The Turkish government has taken a pragmatic approach to the events in Afghanistan, including the emergence of the Taliban after the chaotic withdrawal of U.S. forces. Underlining that new realities have emerged in the country, Ankara said it would move forward accordingly while keeping communication with all relevant leaders open.

NATO member Trkiye maintained its embassy in Afghanistan after Western countries withdrew following the Taliban takeover and have urged those countries to step up engagement. At the same time, it said it will only work fully with the Taliban if they form a more inclusive administration.

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Trkiye continues to lend helping hand to disaster-hit Afghanistan | Daily Sabah - Daily Sabah

MOORHEAD In August of 2021, as Taliban fighters made their way toward Kabul, Afghanistan, officials in charge of the U.S. embassy in Kabul began planning how they would evacuate the consulate.

However, the Taliban moved faster than anyone expected and a decision was made to empty the embassy in a single day, recalled Benjamin Dille, a Moorhead native who at the time was running the administration of the U.S. embassy in Kabul.

In short order, Dille said, embassy staff were transported by helicopter to the airport in Kabul and from there flown out of the country via transport planes.

"We got all 800 of our staff out, plus their families, probably 2,000 people," Dille said, adding that although they were not able to get all of the embassy's contract staff out of the country, U.S. officials are continuing to work on helping people who remain in Afghanistan who are believed to be at risk because of their connection to the U.S. embassy.

Dille was among a number of Americans who recently received the U.S. State Departments Award for Heroism for work done at Kabul's besieged airport.

The honor, presented by U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken, reads in part:

"For steadfast courage as core members of the leadership of the Department of State NEO (Noncombatant Evacuation Operation) team, enduring constant threats and danger to support the evacuation of over 124,000 Americans and Afghans from Kabul August 15-30, 2022."

Dille, who's worked for the U.S. Foreign Service for more than 30 years, grew up in Moorhead and graduated from Moorhead High School in 1978.

He is the son of the late Roland Dille, longtime president of what is now Minnesota State University Moorhead, and Beth Dille, who still lives in Moorhead.

Benjamin Dille is currently stationed in Turkmenistan, where he will serve as charg d'affaires for the month of August, essentially filling the role of acting ambassador.

In September, he will head to the Marine Corps War College in Quantico, Virginia, where he will teach Marine Corps officers about diplomacy and statecraft.

Dille said he is grateful to both of his parents for being supportive of his early interest in all things international, and he said the Fargo-Moorhead area's education-rich environment of colleges and universities helped, too.

"I really feel I had a really rich upbringing," he said, adding that he believes the education environment in the Fargo-Moorhead area "opened the world" to him.

See the article here:
Moorhead native recognized for role in evacuating US embassy in Afghanistan - INFORUM

Photo: Salam Watandar

The 12-year-old childs lifeless body was pulled up on Monday, according to local Taliban officials in the province of Ghazni in central Afghanistan. The boy had fallen into a deep well in the province and died as a result.

The Taliban authorities said that the young child drowned in a well after inhaling gas, which is what caused the childs death. The child died as a result of gas poisoning, a high concentration of carbon dioxide gas in the well.

The childs dead body was pulled out of the well on Monday morning, August 22, in the Qarabagh district of Ghazni province by the provincial rescue team, according to Taliban officials.

Earlier this week, the body of a 15-year-old child was discovered after four days in a water well in the Grishk district of Helmand province in southern Afghanistan.

The child tumbled into a deep uncovered well in the Grishk district of Helmand province, and the dead body was discovered and pulled 4 days after.

Another 2-year-old child who fell into a 30-meter-deep well in the province of Helmand was ultimately rescued by the rescue crew after two days of uninterrupted effort.

Similar incidents have happened in other regions, mostly in the southern part of this country, and in the majority of these tragedies, children were brought up dead at the conclusion.

This comes as the Taliban Interior Ministry ordered that wells without a cover be covered since there had been more incidents of people falling into wells.

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Lifeless Body of Child Pulled Up from Well in Central Afghanistan - The Khaama Press News Agency - The Khaama Press News Agency

If it bleeds, it leads so goes the media expression and this is especially true of news out of Afghanistan, which made global headlines during the presence of US forces but few while lives are being lost to the climate crisis.

The main attention Afghanistan gets these days is when big international aid agencies put together posters of hungry women and children for donations, or when a calamity like the June 2022 earthquake hits.

But as you are reading these lines, many towns and villages in the war-ravaged country remain submerged by flash floods triggered weeks ago by a relentless spate of untimely rains and melting glaciers, claiming lives and destroying livelihoods of marginalised communities already surviving on small amounts of foreign aid.

Its currently peak summer harvest season when farmers gather fruits and collect staples for the approaching winter. But it snowed briefly in the central highlands after long and crippling dry spells, when farmers were desperately longing for the usual spring season rains.

Then came violent hail storms destroying orchards and eventually rain that ruined the wheat crops. None of these events are anywhere near normal in terms of the climate of this landlocked country of nearly 40 million people.

The glaciers in the Himalayas are melting at an unmatched pace, bringing the deadly floods from the mountains of the northern provinces all the way down to the plains in the south. These fast-depleting glaciers are the lifeline of Afghans who rely heavily on the natural streams and rivers. Despite this, there has been no development work on water preservation, storage and distribution over the past couple of decades on a national level. The underground levels are dropping at an alarming rate as it is the only way for locals to look for water.

Prior to the latest downpours, the drought was so severe and the heatwave so intense it led to multiple occurrences of forest fire in the countrys east and south. This was a grim tragedy. Locals in the fire-affected Khost and Nuristan provinces had to rely on youth from the local communities to put out the fires by carrying buckets of water and sand with their bare hands, day and night.

The climate crisis is so real in the country that it will likely trigger another food crisis in the months to follow. All this at a time when the delivery of aid is hampered and overshadowed by the Russian invasion of Ukraine, leading to supply chain disorders, inflation and donor fatigue.

Is the media solely to blame for this? No. Could they do more to help? Yes. Just as the major environment polluters must take responsibility for the miseries they have inflicted upon a population that has been left at the mercy of the Taliban.

Before Afghanistan plunged into the current crisis, the country was promised some funding from the Green Climate Fund, but with the fall of Kabul to the Taliban it seems the world has simply abandoned the country, turning a blind eye to the escalating disasters.

Amid all this, Afghanistans neighbours have manipulated the situation to their advantage with dodgy deals with the Taliban that would give them access to the countrys rich natural resources at throwaway prices, propping up a funding stream for the defecto regime.

China also has its eyes on Afghanistans rich and extensive lithium, iron and copper ore reserves while Pakistan has accelerated the import of high-grade coal at bargain prices, which is only going to accelerate the melting of the Himalayan glaciers as well as increasing global pollution levels. For Pakistan, a country grappling under tough financial conditions, a steady flow of coal will help fire up power plants and revive the ailing railway network.

The quest for coal even prompted Pakistani authorities to make non-stop border-crossing arrangements during the day and night a privilege that was not even offered during the peak of the war when thousands of war-weary Afghans were fleeing the country in all directions.

The search for Afghanistans untapped mineral wealth even attracted Australias richest man, Andrew Forrest, to the country just weeks before the Taliban takeover.

Reporting on environmental disasters in Afghanistan is important, as it would serve as a catalyst for the entire green movement around the world to hold deniers and polluters to account.

The local media the few surviving outlets post the Taliban takeover is unable or unwilling to critically report on all of this because of obvious fears of retaliation. And for the international media, the Afghanistan story seems to have hit a dead-end of sadness, with nothing new or exciting for the international media or its consumers.

One can dispute matters of politics in the country, but the climate calamity Afghanistan is facing is imposed from outside. Its time the world, and neighbouring and regional polluters, take responsibility.

The rest is here:
Afghanistan is facing a climate calamity its time the world took ...

Taliban fighters guard the site of an explosion in Kabul, Afghanistan. Last month, several explosions and gunfire ripped through a Sikh temple in Afghanistan's capital. Ebrahim Noroozi/AP hide caption

Taliban fighters guard the site of an explosion in Kabul, Afghanistan. Last month, several explosions and gunfire ripped through a Sikh temple in Afghanistan's capital.

A year ago, India was not happy about the state of affairs in Afghanistan. The U.S. was negotiating its exit, the Taliban was consolidating power, and decades of India supporting anti-Taliban forces was evaporating.

But just last month, Indian officials went to Kabul to meet with Taliban leaders. India has also partially reopened its embassy in Kabul to coordinate humanitarian aid.

So, why is India reopening dialogue with the Taliban now? Asfandyar Mir, an expert in international relations and counterterrorism at the U.S. Institute of Peace, says that the interests for all parties involved have a long and complicated history.

He joined All Things Considered to explain the dynamic between India, the Taliban, and Pakistan, as well as India's interests in providing aid to Taliban-controlled Afghanistan.

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

On what the meeting between Indian and Taliban officials last month focused on

In recent weeks, the Taliban have been making a series of public moves to India, which was really an unlikely prospective partner country, given that the Taliban have been allied with Pakistan, which is an arch rival of India. So in many ways, this is a stunning development.

There are some real tensions between the Taliban and the Pakistani government. For one, the Taliban have taken a position which is contrary to Pakistan's expectation on the international border between Afghanistan and Pakistan.

Another reason is that the Taliban are protecting one of the most significant anti-Pakistan insurgent groups, by the name of the Tehrik-i-Taliban Pakistan, also known as the TTP.

So, watching that, the Indian policymakers seem to have concluded that perhaps there is enough distance between their arch-rival Pakistan and the Taliban, that the Taliban after all are not a mere proxy of the Pakistanis, and that there might be some room for them to forge a working relationship with the Taliban.

On why the Taliban would turn to India for help now

For years, they [Taliban] bemoaned India's support for the former Afghan government republic. And then India's embassy was blown up by the Taliban in 2008. So there was a lot of bad blood between the two sides.

So the question is, why are the Taliban so interested now? And economics might be one big reason. The Taliban are really struggling to govern the country. The fact that they are not diplomatically recognized is making it difficult for them to just fund their government: it's short on resources, there's a humanitarian crisis in the country, there are issues of food security.

Policemen attend a ceremony to receive new uniforms from the Taliban authorities in Kandahar in July. Javed Tanveer/AFP via Getty Images hide caption

Policemen attend a ceremony to receive new uniforms from the Taliban authorities in Kandahar in July.

The Taliban are hoping that the Indians would increase their supplies of wheat to the country. And over the medium term, the Taliban seem to be interested in India reviving its development projects in Afghanistan.

India built a lot of hospitals, so the Taliban appear to be interested in India reviving some of those activities as well.

On why India might be interested in aiding Afghanistan again

It seems like the Indians and the Taliban have been talking about counterterrorism. So one concern the Indians had, in the lead up to the Taliban's rise to power, was that much like the 1990s, Afghanistan under the Taliban would become a safe haven for terrorists and not just anti-U.S., anti-Western terrorists, but also anti-Indian terrorists.

It appears that now the Indian government has gone to the Taliban, and said, "Look, if you want a relationship with us, we have to talk about these terrorism concerns." So the Taliban for their part have reciprocated with some guarantees similar to what they have provided to the United States government, that they will not allow Afghan territory to be used against India, that the Taliban are telling the Indians they are even ready to take action on any intelligence that the Indians might provide.

On whether there is something for the United States to gain from this new potential alliance

If the Taliban are responding to India, if they are talking about terrorism, if they open up to a human rights conversation with the Indians, that might be good news. In addition, I would say that if the Indians can really figure out a counterterrorism pact with the Taliban, I think that would also be a significant positive step, and could provide a channel for the international community and the U.S. in particular.

It's a complicated situation, and my view is that the U.S. should really be coordinating with India to maximize the counterterrorism benefit and any other benefits that can be had from India's engagement.

This story was adapted for the web by Manuela Lopez Restrepo.

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India and the Taliban are working towards forming a relationship. Here's why - NPR