Taliban

Ibrahim Nash'at was in an editing room helping acclaimed Syrian filmmaker Talal Derki complete his new documentary, Under the Sky of Damascus when news of the Taliban takeover of Kabul came in. "We stopped working and started watching the news on television," says Nash'at, a Berlin-based Egyptian documentary filmmaker about the cataclysmic events that unfolded on August 15, 2021, in Afghanistan following the withdrawal of American forces from the war-torn country. (Also Read | John Abraham recalls Taliban's threat while…

KABUL, Afghanistan — Late one night two months ago, a team of Taliban security officers assembled on the outskirts of Afghanistan’s capital to prepare for a raid on an Islamic State group hideout. As the zero hour approached, the men fiddled with their automatic rifles while their leader, Habib Rahman Inqayad, scrambled to get the exact location of their target. He grabbed his colleagues’ phones and called their superiors, who insisted they had sent him the location pin of the target to his WhatsApp. There was just one…

In 2021, Jordan Bryon took major steps to physically realize his identity as a transgender man, opposed by a society that often looked upon him with hostility and a government that neither understood nor respected him. As he started hormone injections in preparation for gender-affirming surgery, he soon found himself embroiled in a political firestorm over his basic right to exist. His precarious position has grown all too familiar as barbaric anti-trans laws spring up around the United States like invasive weeds, but…

TikTok has been making headlines as of late, but not for reasons pertaining to the content on the app. Instead, several governments across the globe have been looking into the app’s origins and even calling for bans in some cases. Currently, TikTok is in something of a state of limbo in a lot of regions as different governments work on creating litigation and inspecting its roots. Recently, the U.S. held a congressional hearing with TikTok CEO Shou Zi Chew over privacy and security concerns — causing many citizens to…

Image Source : INDIA TV Elon Musk It has been reported that some prominent Taliban members have subscribed to Twitter Blue and have further bought the verification badges too, as per the report of BBC. The report further states that at least two Taliban officials along with four supporters of the group were displaying the Blue Tick on their profiles on Twitter.  ALSO…

Having once harbored America’s biggest enemy and now returning to power in Afghanistan, the Taliban are reportedly paying for Twitter Blue checkmarks and praising Elon Musk’s takeover of the social media platform, per a report from the BBC. Several officials of the hard-line Islamist group boast hundreds of thousands of followers and have subscribed to Twitter Blue, or the blue-check subscription verification feature that costs either $8 or $11 per month, depending on the device it runs on.    Prior to Musk’s…

The Taliban’s 24 December 2022 decree barring women from working in national and international nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) is another devastating blow to women’s rights in Afghanistan. It also threatens to plunge a country beset by hunger and natural disasters even deeper into a public health crisis. The United Nations and its humanitarian partners are engaged in intense negotiations to persuade the Taliban to reverse the edict. But for now, many NGOs,…

Last Updated: January 15, 2023, 12:27 ISTEntop Mada 9 (Photo: Entop)The Taliban-ruled South Asian nation has developed its first indigenous supercar in the form of Entop Mada 9 and it will also be sold in global markets soonTaliban leadership has unveiled Kabul-based automobile manufacturer Entop’s Mada 9 – the country’s first indigenously made and developed supercar. A team of over 30 engineers from the company and the local Afghanistan Technical Vocational Institute (ATVI) worked together for over half a decade to come…

FP StaffJan 11, 2023 17:12:25 ISTIn a rather Kafkaesque moment for most people in Afghanistan, the Taliban leadership unveiled the country’s first indigenously developed and produced ‘supercar’. Of all the people in the extremist group in control of Afghanistan, the Taliban’s minister for Higher Education, Abdul Baqi Haqqani unveiled the Mada 9 prototype supercar, developed and made by a company called ENTOP. The prototype, which looks very sleek and aggressive, was built over a period of 5 years by a team of 30…

China has not formally recognised the Taliban administration but it has significant interests in a country at the centre of a region important for its Belt and Road infrastructure initiative. Chinese company National Petroleum Corp (CNPC) signed a contract with Afghanistan's previous, US-backed government in 2012…