Steve McCurry has been photographing the landscapes and people of Afghanistan since the 1970s. A selection of his stunning pictures is going on show in London Steve McCurry's Afghanistan in pictures Afghanistan's spectacular beauty stuns most foreigners who visit primed to expect violence, suffering and terrible poverty, because that is mostly what gets on televisions and makes headlines. It was not...
Trucks full of food aid have arrived but no one has distributed the bags of rice, oil and other necessities, survivors say Lailema's soft wailing filters through the canvas of her tent, a 12-year-old's hopeless lament for her mother and a life that is gone forever. Her three younger siblings play on the dusty floor as her grandmother cries silently nearby and her uncle wonders how to feed his new dependents....
The bestselling author of The Kite Runner and And the Mountains Echoed on storytelling, family dynamics and his new relationship with the country he left in the 1970s Khaled Hosseini's debut novel, The Kite Runner (2002), was an unusual bestseller about a friendship between a young man and a servant, set against a violently unravelling Afghanistan and written in the early mornings before Hosseini went...
President Hamid Karzai declared Sunday a national day of mourning and ordered all flags flown at half-staff, after officials said they feared that more than 2,000 people were dead....
The body of civil law enacted with Western assistance and the classic Islamic code of Shariah protect the rights of women not to be forced into marriage. Tribal codes do not....
Hundreds of volunteers and rescuers continue to dig for up to 2,700 survivors and victims of landslide in remote north-east Afghan rescuers and hundreds of volunteers armed with shovels are continuing to dig through earth and mud in search of survivors or bodies of those killed by a massive landslide in the country's north-east. Figures on the number of people killed and missing in the disaster on...
Search goes on for survivors with hundreds feared dead after country's worst natural disaster in nearly two decades One minute there was a hill behind his picturesque village, and the next Ataullah watched helplessly as tonnes of mud split away and tumbled down towards the home where his children were playing and his wife was preparing lunch. He never saw them again, nor his parents seven of the hundreds...
Nato and US offer troops' help as rescuers scramble in desperate search for survivors At least 2,100 people were killed in massive landslides that struck a remote region of Afghanistan on Friday. Continue reading... ...
A landslide triggered by torrential rain in Ab Barak, Afghanistan, has killed at least 2,100 people and left thousands more missing. Residents from the mountainous northern village in Afghanistan have been displaced, with more than 4,000 left without homes. Officials worry another landslide could happen if another section of the mountain collapses Continue reading... ...
As many as 2,500 people were said to be missing in the disaster, one of the worst to hit the country in at least a decade....
Ruling, which was attacked by the defence secretary and chief of the defence staff, leaves MoD open to compensation claims The Ministry of Defence breached English law, Afghan law, human rights legislation and international law by allowing British troops to detain Afghans for long periods without trial, the high court has ruled in a judgment with potentially huge implications for military commanders....
Rescuers caught in second collapse after mudslide sweeps through village in remote corner of country Hundreds of people were buried alive in a remote northern corner of Afghanistan on Friday when a mudslide swept through a village and a second collapse then trapped neighbours who had rushed to help, according to local officials. Thousands of tons of soil and rocks broke off from a hill in Badakhshan...
A car bombing, whose victims included security force members, struck at the symbolic heart of resistance to the Taliban’s rule and the Soviet occupation....
Backed by western forces, assault is one of the biggest against Haqqani network as US attempts to deal lasting blow Afghan troops backed by western air forces have killed at least 60 militants near the Pakistan border, in one of the biggest assaults against the Taliban-linked Haqqani network, Afghan security officials have said. US officials say Washington has intensified its drive against the network...
Report by DC's Afghanistan war watchdog found opium cultivation unaffected by $7.5bn US spent to combat it Opium cultivation is estimated to be at an all-time high in Afghanistan, despite the US spending $7.5bn to combat it. A report released Wednesday by Washingtons Afghanistan war watchdog has found that the billions spent by the State and Defense departments on counter-narcotics since 2002 has...
State Department says 16 Americans killed out of 17,891 total Surge complicates sprawling counter-terrorism efforts led by US Terrorist attacks rose 43% worldwide in 2013 despite a splintering of al-Qaidas leadership and a sprawling global counter-terrorism campaign, according to new statistics released by the State Department on Wednesday. The exposure of Americans to terrorism abroad remained minimal...
A U.S.-financed network to connect Afghans across forbidding physical and cultural divides still survives three years after American funding ended....
We attribute nobility to animals such as the British army labrador killed in Afghanistan. But humans are the only species to memorialise what is lost Animals cannot really be "gallant". They cannot be cowardly either. Neither can they hate, murder, torture or campaign for peace. All these, like war itself, are unique to humans. That has not stopped an organisation called the PDSA giving its...
Exactly a year ago, the UK carried out its first drone strike from RAF Waddington in Lincolnshire. Like the more than 450 other remote weapon launches carried out by UK drones, no details about the strike or the resulting casualties have ever been made public. As British troops pack to leave Afghanistan at the end of 2014, information leaks suggest that the UK's armed Reaper drones will not be brought...
Amnesty International details journalists' claims of harassment, intimidation and attacks at the hands of military intelligence Amnesty International says it has "credible concerns" that Pakistan's powerful military spy agency kidnaps, threatens and even kills journalists who cross it. The allegations come amid an unprecedented public standoff between the Directorate of Inter-Services Intelligence...