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The Taliban in Afghanistan have maintained close ties with the al-Qaeda terrorist group, according to a report by independent monitors to the UN Security Council.

One of the US pre-conditions for theUS and Taliban sign historic deallandmark deal with the Taliban in Doha on February 29 was that the Afghan militant group sever all ties with al-Qaeda the terrorist outfit responsible for orchestrating September 11, 2001 attacks on US soil. At the time of the deal, the Taliban said they had cut off their relations with the international Islamist organization.

"The Taliban regularly consulted with al-Qaeda during negotiations with the United States and offered guarantees that it would honor their historical ties," the report stated.

One of the reasons behind the US invasion of Afghanistan in 2001 was that the Taliban, who ruled the country from 1996 to 2001, had provided shelter to al-Qaeda commanders.

"If the Taliban fail to keep its promise on the al-Qaeda issue, the US could end the Doha deal," Atiqullah Amarkhail, an Afghan security expert, told DW, adding that it would be a setback for the Afghan peace process.

"If the US-Taliban deal collapses, there will be no winner. Afghanistan will face a prolonged crisis, and all stakeholders, including the Afghan government, the Taliban and the US will lose," Jawid Kohistani, a Kabul-based expert, underlined.

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A hurried withdrawal?

It is unimaginable that Washington was not aware of the Taliban's continued connections to al-Qaeda while it was sealing an agreement with the Afghan insurgent group in Doha. But that has not deterred.

Western diplomats have told media that the US is likely to reduce the number of its troops in Afghanistan to 8,600 ahead of a timeline agreed with the Taliban in the Doha agreement.

According to the Doha deal, the US must bring down the troops from about 13,000 to 8,600 by mid-July, and completely exit by May 2021.American and NATO officials now confirm that the first stage of troops withdrawal may well be achieved by mid-June.

Read more:Afghan peace process: Is Washington running out of patience?

Experts say this could be a result of the coronavirus pandemic in the US, which has killed over 100,000 people in the country so far. The Trump administration is grappling with an unprecedented public health crisis, as the US economy has been badly hit due to the COVID-19 lockdown. Also, the US troops stationed in the war-torn country could also be infected with the disease.

But some analysts say there is more to the withdrawal urgency than the COVID-19 pandemic.

"The Afghan government is not making enough progress in the peace process and the US is running out of patience," Amarkhail said.

"Washington wants to send a clear message to Afghan leaders that it will leave the country irrespective of the situation on the ground," he added.

The US-Taliban agreement, which does not involve Kabul, has faced several hurdles in the past three months. President Ashraf Ghani's government is reluctant to release all Taliban prisoners, and the Taliban have not halted their attacks on the Afghan security forces.

Read more:Afghanistan: Journalist killed in Kabul roadside bombing

"If the peace process doesn't move forward and the intra-Afghan talks don't begin, then I imagine the Trump administration will give up its mediation efforts, scale down its engagement, and potentially even expedite its withdrawal of troops from Afghanistan," Michael Kugelman, a South Asia expert at the Washington-based Wilson Center, told DW.

"President Trump could use the coronavirus as a pretext, declaring that he can't keep his troops in conditions where they face the risks not only of Taliban attacks but also of a deadly pandemic," he added.

Read more:India-Pakistan tug-of-warjeopardizesAfghan peace process

Is the US pressure finally working?

It seems that the US pressure on the Afghan government and the Taliban is yielding some results Kabul and the insurgent group have recently taken some surprising confidence-building measures.

Read more:Afghanistan: Taliban prisoner exchange an 'important step,' says US envoy

In May, the Taliban announced a three-day ceasefire to mark the Eid celebrations. Afghan President Ghani lauded the move and released around 2,000 Taliban prisoners as a "goodwill gesture."

Ghani has also been able to iron out differences with his political rival Abdullah Abdullah, who had claimed victory in last year's presidential elections and formed his own government parallel to Ghani's. After months of international mediation, Ghani and Abdullah last month signed a power-sharing agreement, which mandates Abdullah to lead Afghanistan's High Council for Peace while Ghani remains president.

The Afghan government has also formed a team for negotiations with the Taliban. Abdullah says Kabul is "ready to start talks at any moment."

Read more:US troops begin withdrawal from Afghanistan

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Why is the US in a rush to pull out troops from Afghanistan? - DW (English)

NEW DELHI: Thousands of Pakistani nationals from LeT and JeM continue to support the Taliban against the Afghan government, according to a recently released report by a UN monitoring team.

The report referred to Pakistans double game of claiming to fight terrorism while backing terror groups that enhance its foreign policy goals.

One Member State reported that the total number of Pakistani nationals fighting with terrorist groups in Afghanistan may be as high as 6,000 to 6,500, said the 11th report from the U.N.s Analytical Support and Sanctions Monitoring Team.

The report referred to three major Pakistan-based groups active in Afghanistan -- the Movement of the Taliban in Pakistan (Tehrik-e-Taliban Pakistan or TTP), Lashkar-e-Taiba (LeT) and Jaish-e-Mohammed (JeM). All three groups operate inside Afghanistan with support of the Taliban.

The presence of these groups is centered in the eastern provinces of Kunar, Nangarhar and Nuristan, where they operate under the umbrella of the Afghan Taliban, the report stated.

LeT approximately has 800 fighters and JeM has 200 in Afghanistan.

The U.N. report provided details on the locations of LeT and JeM inside Afghanistan.

LeT and JeM fighters are co-located with Taliban forces in Mohmand Darah, Dur Baba and Sherzad Districts of Nangarhar Province. [TTP] also maintains a presence in Lal Pura District, near the border area of Mohmand Darah, Pakistan. In Kunar Province, [LeT] retains a further 220 fighters and has a further 30, all of whom are dispersed within Taliban forces."

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Thousands of Pakistan nationals from LeT & JeM fighting alongside Taliban in Afghanistan: UN - Economic Times

FUKUOKA -- Following the December 2019 fatal shooting in Afghanistan of Japanese humanitarian Dr. Tetsu Nakamura, his eldest daughter Akiko has started helping with work at his former organization.

June 4 marked half a year since the death of 73-year-old Nakamura, who devoted around 30 years of his life to developing health care and farming in Afghanistan. Speaking to the Mainichi Shimbun from the office of the nongovernmental group Peshawar-kai, where a picture of her father hangs, 39-year-old Akiko said calmly, "I want to do what I can as a member of the organization."

One of five siblings, Akiko lives with her mother Naoko at their home in the Fukuoka Prefecture city of Omuta where Dr. Nakamura would stay during periods when he was back from Afghanistan. In January, she started heading into the group's office in the city of Fukuoka.

There, 30-plus full-time employees and volunteer workers support the group's activities by coordinating contact with some 100 staff members working in Afghanistan, and engaging in fundraising and newsletter publication, among other tasks. Akiko works for the organization about twice a month while also being employed as clerical staff at a medical institution, and is learning about the group's business and activities in Afghanistan.

Akiko said that she had had a vague interest in the organization's activities before joining. When her father was alive, she would read his books, and also secretly attended his lectures even though he told her not to because he felt embarrassed. But she put herself at a distance from the group partially due to reservations about a father and daughter working together. She also said that she didn't want to be in her father's way.

Her feelings changed when she went to Afghanistan for the first time with Naoko and others to attend Dr. Nakamura's funeral. They were welcomed by President Ashraf Ghani, and a portrait of her father was drawn on the plane. Despite his profession as a doctor, he often said, "One irrigation canal is needed more than 100 clinics," and would drive excavators himself to build waterways in the drought-stricken country.

"The people of Afghanistan recognized my father's efforts. I got a new sense of how amazing the things my dad did are," Akiko said. Once things had calmed down after the funeral and other parts of the process, she got in touch with the Peshawar-kai to ask if there was anything she could do to help them.

Her father would spend almost all year in Afghanistan, and was home in Japan for about a quarter to a third of the year. When he was home, he would talk about how it had been living in Afghanistan, but he rarely spoke about the work itself.

Akiko remembers seeing him at home drawing blueprints for waterways. He once asked her to lend him a math textbook, because he needed to learn about calculus for his work; she gave him one from her high school days. "When it was time for him to go back, I'd feel I just want him to take care, whatever happens," she said.

Whenever Dr. Nakamura returned, the family would eat his favorite dish, pork cutlet curry. Now when it's served at home, everyone talks about how he used to love it. Akiko said that while "there is a loneliness that comes when thinking about him," since becoming involved with the group's activities, she feels "like I have a sense that I'm closer to who Tetsu Nakamura was."

"Even now, I feel like he'll just reappear back home. It's as if he's just been away for a much longer time." In the garden of their home, the blueberries Dr. Nakamura planted will soon be ready for picking.

***

Peshawar-kai

To support Dr. Tetsu Nakamura's work in the northwestern Peshawar region of Pakistan, the Peshawar-kai was established as an international nongovernmental group in the midst of the Afghan Civil War in 1983. In 1991 it opened its first medical office in Afghanistan. The group expanded medical facilities in mountainous regions in areas that had no doctors. From the 2000s, the organization began to engage in activities to make irrigation canals and support farming.

(Japanese original by Keiko Yamaguchi, Kyushu News Department)

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Daughter of murdered Afghanistan activist Dr. Nakamura begins taking on his work - The Mainichi

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Growing up in Canada, Oscar-nominated filmmaker Ariel Nasr was always "hungry for imagery" of his father's home country of Afghanistan, but nothing was available.

"All his photographs, all the kind of visual heritage of my family was lost in the war, which is quite a common story there," Montreal-based Nasr told The Current's Matt Galloway.

On top of that destruction of personal effects, the Taliban had decreed many forms of cultural expression to be heretical when they took power in the mid-1990s. They burned books and films and destroyed the country's museums and collections of art.

But after Nasr moved there to make documentaries in 2008, he discovered that a treasure trove of Afghan films dating back to the 1920s had escaped the Taliban's pyres.

Those films and how they survived are the subject of his film The Forbidden Reel, airing online this week as part of the Hot Docs film festival.

He told Galloway that in 1996, a Taliban official named Isaac Nezami secretly tipped off the country's national film production institute, Afghan Film. He warned them that radical fighters were on their way to destroy the archive.

"[The archivists] were able to hide the films, and what they did as an act of subterfuge was actually offered them films that were less valuable," said Nasr.

While those substitute films copies of U.S. and Bollywood films ended up on a bonfire, while the Afghan originals were secreted behind a false wall.

"They burned those films and thought that they had destroyed Afghanistan's film heritage," he said.

But he said the films that survived are "beautiful works of art, and they're shot on the background of Afghan history."

"They show images that you would never see images that just weren't documented by Western cameras."

Two decades later, he tracked down the official, who was still living in Kabul, and brought him back to the film institute, where he was given a "hero's welcome."

"He said'I did not agree that the films should be burned. Whether they were good or bad, they're part of history, they're part of our heritage,'" said Nasr, recalling the visit.

"He felt that whether their contents were religiously orthodox or not, he felt strongly that heritage should not be destroyed."

Both the official and the Afghan Film workers were risking their lives, and would have been killed if they had been discovered, he said.

He thinks it's an example of people overcoming their differences that he sees recurring in Afghan history.

"Even though there's different ideologies, people from different sides were still able to co-operate over things that were essential to them."

The collection of films that were saved "really runs the gamut," Nasr said.

"There's historical films about an Afghan queen, for example, who many centuries ago was persecuted for having an affair with her slave," he said.

"There's even a musical film that looks very much like Bollywood."

There are also documentaries, painting Afghanistan as "at one time a place where violence was not part of the everyday experience," he said.

The films also show a time where women had a very different role in society, with "women officials giving speeches in front of hundreds of people you see women soldiers, you see women bus drivers," he said.

"I think overall, what you learn is that Afghan history is much more complex than what we've been led to believe," he told Galloway.

He hopes that his film "will help them complicate the picture, by bringing images that were shot by Afghans that show a much more complex reality."

Now, the films are "locked away" in an archive within the presidential compound, but Nasr wants them to be digitized and made available to the public.

"They should be a click of a mouse away, ideally," he said.

"I really feel strongly that in order to kind of imagine a future for Afghanistan, it's really powerful and really important to have some visual evidence of the past."

Written by Padraig Moran. Produced by Julie Crysler.

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How the Taliban tried to destroy Afghanistan's film heritage, and the secret plan to stop them - CBC.ca

WASHINGTON: Battle losses and desertions have reduced the strong Daesh militant force in Afghanistan to a rag-tag group of about 200 fighters, said a UN report released this week.

The eastern province of Nangarhar has been the main stronghold of this group known as the Islamic State of Khorasan or ISIL-K ever since it came to Afghanistan more than a decade ago.

From September to November 2019, the number of ISIL-K operatives in Nangarhar was reduced from 1,750 armed fighters and a leadership council of 22 spread over seven districts, to fewer than 200 fighters [living] under siege in the Takhto area of Achin District, it stated.

The report prepared by UN monitors and their Afghan interlocutors reviews the current situation in Afghanistan in the backdrop of a peace agreement between the United States and the Taliban, which hopes to bring Taliban militants into the Afghan mainstream.

In addition to their handling of any threat posed by al-Qaida, the Talibans credibility as a counter-terrorism partner for the international community will rest on their success in countering the threat from ISIL-K, the UN report observed.

The number of foreign terrorist fighters in search of a purpose and livelihood in Afghanistan, including up to 6,500 Pakistanis, will render this a complex challenge, which will require careful monitoring, the report added.

Most of these Pakistanis are associated with Tehreek-i-Taliban Pakistan (TTP) and ISIL-K and used their bases in Afghanistan for attacking targets inside Pakistan. In December 2014, six TTP terrorists attacked a public school in Peshawar, killing 149 people, including 132 children.

The UN report noted that Pakistani militant groups have their bases in the eastern Afghan provinces of Kunar, Nangarhar and Nuristan, where they operate under the umbrella of the Afghan Taliban.

Published in Dawn, June 5th, 2020

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Foreign fighters still have presence in Afghanistan: UN - DAWN.com