Nationwide protests if Afghan girls' schools stay shut: activists

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Written by northsouth

Category: Asia

Published: 27 March 2022

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KABUL - Women's rights activists pledged Sunday to launch a wave of protests across Afghanistan if the Taliban fail to reopen girls' secondary schools within a week.

Thousands of secondary school girls had flocked to classes on Wednesday after the hardline Islamists reopened their institutions for the first time since seizing power last August.

But officials ordered the schools shut again just hours into the day, triggering international outrage.

"We call on the leaders of the Islamic Emirate to open girls' schools within one week," activist Halima Nasari read from a statement issued by four women's rights groups at a press conference in Kabul.

"If the girls' schools remain closed even after one week, we will open them ourselves and stage demonstrations throughout the country until our demands are met."

The Taliban should be building more schools for girls in rural areas rather than shutting existing facilities, said the statement, which comes after several women's activists were detained in recent months.

"The people can no longer tolerate such oppression. We do not accept any excuse from the authorities," it said.

On Saturday, about two dozen schoolgirls and women staged a protest in Kabul demanding the reopening of the schools.

"Women, teachers and girls should come out on the streets and protest," said student Zarghuna Ibrahimi, 16, who attended the press conference.

"The international community should support us."

The education ministry has so far not given a clear reason for its policy reversal, but senior Taliban leader Suhail Shaheel told AFP that some "practical issues" were still to be resolved before reopening the schools.

Since storming back to power the Taliban have rolled back two decades of gains made by Afghanistan's women, who have been squeezed out of many government jobs, barred from travelling alone, and ordered to dress according to a strict interpretation of the Koran.

The Taliban had promised a softer version of the harsh Islamist rule that characterised their first stint in power from 1996 to 2001.

But many restrictions have still crept back, often implemented locally at the whim of regional officials.

Some Afghan women initially resisted the curbs, holding small protests where they demanded the right to education and work.

But the Taliban soon rounded up the ringleaders, holding them incommunicado while denying that they had been detained.

Since their release, most have gone silent.

On Sunday, the Ministry for Promotion of Virtue and Prevention of Vice ordered that men and women should not visit parks in Kabul on the same days.

Women are now permitted to visit parks on Sunday, Monday and Tuesday, while the remaining days were reserved for men, a ministry notification said.

"It is not the Islamic Emirate's order but our God's order that men and women who are strangers to each other should not gather at one place," Mohammad Yahya Aref, an official at the ministry, told AFP.

"This way women will be able to enjoy their time and freedom. No man will be there to trouble them," he said, adding that religious police were already implementing the order.

Death toll climbs to 63 in deadly Pakistan IS mosque attack

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Written by northsouth

Category: Asia

Published: 06 March 2022

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By KATHY GANNON and RIAZ KHAN

PESHAWAR, Pakistan — Officials vowed Saturday to hunt down and arrest the masterminds behind a deadly mosque attack in Pakistan a day earlier claimed by an Islamic State affiliate. The assault killed 63 people and wounded nearly 200.

IS said in a statement the lone suicide bomber was from neighboring Afghanistan. He shot two police guarding the Shiite Muslim mosque in northwest Peshawar before entering inside and exploding his device, it said. The attack took place as worshipers knelt in Friday prayer. The IS affiliate, known as IS in Khorasan Province, is headquartered in eastern Afghanistan.

The Taliban rulers in Afghanistan, who have been fighting IS, condemned the attack. IS has proven to be the Taliban’s greatest security threat since sweeping into power last August.

“We condemn the bombing of a mosque in Peshawar, Pakistan. There is no justification for attacking civilians and worshipers,” Taliban Deputy Minister for Culture and Information Zabihullah Mujahid tweeted. He refused to comment on the IS claim that the suicide bomber was Afghan.

The death toll was likely to continue to rise, said Asim Khan, spokesman for Peshawar’s Lady Reading Hospital. At least four of 38 patients still hospitalized are in critical condition, he said.

Late into Friday night and early Saturday, Pakistanis buried their dead amid heavy security, with sniffer dogs deployed. Police carried out body searches of mourners who were then searched a second time by security provided by Pakistan’s Shiite community.

Hundreds of mourners crying and beating their chests attended funeral prayers for 13 victims late Friday and for another 11 on Saturday at Peshawar’s Kohati Gate. The coffins were covered with shrouds, some with Quranic sayings. They were lined up on open ground, made visible by bare light bulbs.

“These were human beings and worshipers inside the mosque, and they were brutally killed at a time when they were busy praying to God,” Hayat Khan told The Associated Press late Friday night as he buried a relative.

One of the police officers who was shot outside Kucha Risaldar mosque died immediately and the second died later from his wounds, police officials said.

Pakistan Information Minister Fawad Chaudhry said in a statement that three investigation teams were established to study forensic evidence and closed-circuit TV footage to track down the attack’s organizers.

An investigator involved in the case told The Associated Press that the footage has revealed the attacker arrived at the site in a motorized rickshaw along with two other people, who are being sought. Sketches have been made of the individuals, he said asking not to be identified because he was not authorized to speak to the media..

A spokesman for the provincial government, Mohammad Ali Saif, told reporters the rickshaw driver had been apprehended and the search was ongoing for the accomplices.

In CCTV footage seen by the AP the lone attacker concealed his bomb beneath a large black shawl. The footage showed the bomber moving quickly up a narrow street toward the mosque entrance. He fired at the police protecting the mosque before entering inside.

Within seconds, there is a powerful explosion and the camera lens is obscured with dust and debris. The crudely made device was packed with ball bearings, a deadly method of constructing a bomb to inflict maximum carnage because it sprays deadly projectiles over a large area. The ball bearings caused the high death toll, said Moazzam Jah Ansari, the top police official for Khyber Pukhtunkhwa province, where Peshawar is the capital.

Immediately after the bombing, Pakistan’s minority Shiites slammed the government for lax security arrangements demanding greater attention to their safety.

Friday’s attack in Peshawar’s congested old city was the worst in years in Pakistan. The country has seen renewed militant attacks after several years of relative quiet that followed military operations against militant hideouts in the border regions with Afghanistan.

The attacks have mostly been carried out by the Pakistani Taliban since last August when the Afghan Taliban swept into power and America ended its 20-year involvement in Afghanistan. The Pakistan Taliban are not connected to the new Afghan rulers. However, they are hiding out in Afghanistan and despite Pakistan’s repeated request to hand them over, none have yet been found and expelled.

The Islamic State affiliate, often referred to as IS-K, is an enemy of the Afghan Taliban and has carried out successive operations against them since coming into power last year. Pakistani security officials have insisted IS has little presence in Pakistan, yet in their statement claiming responsibility for the mosque attack, IS vowed to carry out more attacks in both Pakistan and Afghanistan.

“Islamic State fighters are constantly targeting Shiites living in Pakistan and Afghanistan despite the intense security measures adopted by the Taliban militia and the Pakistani police to secure Shi’a temples and centers,” said the IS statement carried on its Amaq News Agency site.

Muslims fear more repression as Indian mega-state votes

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Written by northsouth

Category: Asia

Published: 11 February 2022

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NEW DELHI - Almost all the 23 people believed to have died when police cracked down on a wave of protests in India's most populous state Uttar Pradesh little more than two years ago were reportedly Muslimshttps://english.alaraby.co.uk/features/elections-imminent-who-do-frances-muslims-turn.

Now, many members of the major religious minority fear more repression if Yogi Adityanath, a firebrand monk from the ruling Hindu nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), wins another term in state elections that began this week.

Shahbuddin is a 26-year-old man who says his brother Aleem was shot dead by police during the 2019 crackdown just metres (yards) from his home in the Muslim quarter of the town of Meerut.

"We are scared that if this government stays it will kill our brothers, our kids and us just like this," he tells AFP outside his home in the narrow alleys of the town, declining to give his family name for fear of reprisal.

Adityanath "is a murderer, a terrorist", Shahbuddin says.

Adityanath, 49, is the poster boy of a muscular Hindu nationalism that has gone from strength to strength in recent years, culminating in Prime Minister Narendra Modi and the BJP winning power in 2014.

Like Modi, 71, he has been a lifelong member of the militaristic Hindu-nationalist Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS), whose rallies and outfits are reminiscent of 1930s fascist organisations in Europe and which is the ideological parent of the BJP.

But in Uttar Pradesh, the BJP's agenda has gone the furthest, with curbs on slaughterhouses - cows are sacred in Hinduism - and on the use of loudspeakers for the Muslim call to prayer.

Adityanath's government brought in a law against "love jihad", an alleged conspiracy by Muslims to hoodwink Hindu women into marriage to convert them to Islam.

Deadly 'encounters'

But what really scares the state's Muslim minority - around 20 percent of the population of more than 200 million - is what they see as Adityanath's disregard for the rule of law in the vast and poor state in northern India.

Since Adityanath took office in 2017, more than 100 alleged criminals, most of them Muslims or low-caste Dalits, have reportedly died in "encounters" with police that rights groups say were extrajudicial killings, a charge the government denies.

Adityanath's administration has been an enthusiastic user of colonial-era "sedition" charges and anti-terror laws allowing suspects to be held for six months without charge. The aim, critics say, is to silence any dissent.

What opponents say is the ruthless brutality of Adityanath's regime was laid bare in late 2019 during protests around India against the Modi government's Citizenship Amendment Act (CAA).

This legislation gives citizenship to refugees in India, but not if they are Muslim, which critics said was discriminatory and revealed the BJP's anti-Muslim bias. The government denies this.

After some of the protests turned violent, Adityanath vowed "revenge".

Riot police went on the rampage in several cities, in particular in Muslim areas, barging into houses, assaulting the inhabitants and smashing up their belongings, witnesses said.

Most of the 23 fatalities were from bullet wounds, according to media reports. The police have denied that anyone was shot.

'Injustice'

More than two years later, Shahbuddin says his family are yet to see justice.

"During court hearings (for this case), our brother Salahuddin is made to sit for hours and then is just asked to go home with another date in hand," Shahbuddin said.

"They think we are weak and there is a complete effort that is made to suppress us."

Nafisa Begum, 52, says her 28-year-old son Mohsin was also among those killed.

"There was nothing that day which suggested bullets could be fired here. It was a normal day, everyone was going about their daily activities," Nafisa told AFP.

"There is a lot of injustice (against Muslims under this government). A lot of injustice," she said.