Afghanistan

Thousands of Afghans are still desperate to leave and international governments are keen to get them out. It would all have been so much easier if NATO had held onto Bagram air base outside Kabul.

In today’s episode, we chat with our International Editor about where this leaves the West’s status as defenders of freedom and liberty, and we ask, what was the point of the last 20 years of bloodshed?

For Afghans living here, the events of the last two weeks have been traumatic. We went to meet Dr Waheed Arian, who spent his childhood in Afghanistan in the middle of the Soviet conflict. His family fled during the fighting. We also spoke to Hammasa Kohistani, an Afghan model who moved to the UK when…

Boris Johnson faced angry criticism from his own backbenchers, as parliament met for an emergency debate on Afghanistan. In the Commons, which was packed for the first time since the start of the pandemic, he denied the government had not been prepared for the sheer speed of the Taliban takeover, while Labour accused him of…

Pashtana Durrani runs the charity Learn in Kandahar which focuses on getting girls into education. She has moved location a number of times to keep safe as the Taliban have taken one region after another in Afghanistan.  She spoke with Jon Snow about the heightened sense of fear felt by people in her community.  ‘People…

Taliban fighters have fired warning shots and attacked people with batons to break up a protest in the eastern city of Jalalabad, leaving several people dead or injured. There’s been more chaos outside the airport in the capital Kabul, as thousands of people tried to flee the country with one report claiming several people were…

We spoke to Professor Andrew Pollard, director of the Oxford Vaccine Group, and began by asking him why a vaccine against the plague is needed.

We spoke to Najla Ayoubi, an Afghan lawyer, former judge and women’s rights advocate who was ultimately forced to flee the country in 2015, and Kate Clark, a former correspondent who now works as an analyst in Kabul. She was evacuated yesterday. 

The first iteration of the Taliban saw a brutally repressive regime for all people, but for women especially. 

We spoke to Peymana Assad, who is a Labour councillor for the London borough of Harrow. 

We spoke to Democrat Congressman John Garamendi, and began by asking him about President Biden’s promise of an orderly exit from Afghanistan.

A new report by the Afghanistan Reconstruction watchdog has said that there was no coherent strategy to rebuild the country. 

Ambassador John Bolton served as US ambassador to the UN under President George W Bush and as national security adviser to President Donald Trump.

In a surreal press conference beamed around the world earlier, the Taliban stated that all Afghans would be safe and all women would have a right to education in accordance with Sharia law. What those promises mean in reality is far less clear. 

When the decision to begin the withdrawal from Afghanistan was announced in June, the government said it would rapidly accelerate applications made under its Afghan Relocation and Assistance Policy – many by former interpreters for British forces.