January 2012
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The woman who wants to rule Afghanistan →
Fawzia Koofi has survived ambushes and assassination attempt. Yet still she wants to become the first female president of Afghanistan
The Times Magazine By Jerome Starkey in Kabul
There is a large, imposing picture of Fawzia Koofi hanging on her sitting room wall. Dressed in a leopard-print headscarf, she stands next to Afghanistan’s President Hamid Karzai. Barely an inch apart, their hands...
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Old Volks in happy hippy home →
The Times Jerome Starkey in Kabul
It’s pure pleasure driving my Beetle around Kabul.
Originally painted in VW’s Toga White with a crank-operated sunroof and factory fitted with a then state-of-the-art Emden radio, she rolled off the production line in Germany on October 28, 1968 but exactly how she came to Afghanistan remains a mystery.
By the time we met, two years ago, the Gala red “permeable...
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Seven US troops die amid spike in Afghan violence →
The Times Jerome Starkey in Kabul
Eight Nato soldiers and seven Afghan civilians were killed in a spate of explosions across southern Afghanistan, as new Nato figures showed violence actually increased there last year — undermining earlier claims to have reversed the insurgents’ momentum.
In southern Afghanistan, the main Taleban heartland which absorbed most of Barack Obama’s surge, violence...
December 2011
7 posts
President Karzai called for Taleban office inside... →
President Hamid Karzai called for the Taleban to open a political office inside Afghanistan in a bid to retake control of secret US-led negotiations.
Huge loss for one family in ‘attack on all... →
Eight relatives from an extended family — three women and five children — were buried on a hillside overlooking Kabul yesterday after being killed in a single suicide attack.
Suicide attack and explosion kills 48 at Afghan... →
Twin explosions at Afghan shrines on the Shia holy day of Ashura left at least 48 people dead in Kabul and the northern city of Mazar-i-Sharif, according to police and a news agency photographer.
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WatchAn explosion ripped through a crowd of Shia worshippers outside a shrine in Kabul, killing at least 55 people and wounding at least 134 more, Dec 6, 2011.
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Carnage in the street as 55 Shia killed at shrine... →
The Times Jerome Starkey in Kabul
The bodies lay mangled in a circle, twisted and torn. Some were caked in blood and dust, others clean. A few were heaped together and hard to tell apart, others lay alone.
All around them was the debris of violent death: limbs, viscera and fragments of bone; sandals, hats, and a yellow plastic bag spilling powdered milk towards a lifeless, punctured hand.
At...
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WatchHerat’s refurbished citadel, bits of the Blue Mosque, a couple of shots of the city and a look inside the Burns Hospital which deals with horrific self-immolation cases. See more Afghan portraits here, images from a motorbike roadtrip to the Minaret of Jam here, and graphic pictures of an American Air Ambulance in Kandahar here.
Kazai overturns sentence of jailed rape victim →
An Afghan woman who was jailed for being raped and then told to marry her attacker by a judge has had her sentence overturned by the country’s president.
November 2011
16 posts
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FREE GULNAZ! Afghan woman jailed for adultery... →
Please sign this petition to help free Gulnaz. She was jailed for being raped in Afghanistan, she gave birth to her baby daughter on the floor of her prison cell, and the judge told her the only way to reduce her sentence was to marry her attacker.
She tried to tell the world her story, but the European Union censored a film which they commissioned to raise awareness about women’s rights.
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Monty gives Afghans a slice of golf expertise →
Firing ranges became driving ranges as soldiers in Afghanistan swapped their weapons for wedges to mark a morale-boosting visit by the Scottish golfer Colin Montgomerie.
Jailed rape victim told she is guilty of not... →
An Afghan woman who was jailed for being raped and then censored by the European Union when she tried to tell the world her story has had her sentence cut from twelve years to three after her ordeal…
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Crimes against Afghan women ‘ignored’: UN report →
Horrific crimes against Afghan women, including rape, murder and forced prostitution, are going unreported and unpunished because police and prosecutors either do not know or will not implement their…
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WatchMore than 250 labourers are excavating Mes Aynak, 20 miles south of Kabul.
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Gold rush: time running out to dig up Buddhist... →
The Times Jerome Starkey in Mes Aynak
The gold still glistened after a more than a thousand years underground; the gemstones glinted at their first touch of sunlight, undimmed by a millennium in the dirt. “It’s a necklace,” said a Polish archaeologist, breathless with excitement. “They’ve found a gold necklace!”
As the fine grey sand of Afghanistan’s sun-bleached mountains was gently sieved...
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From Helmand to the Home Counties →
A boy injured in a rocket attack that killed his brother is now a pupil at a British public school thanks to Jerome Starkey, our Afghanistan correspondent
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From Helmand to the Home Counties →
The Times Jerome Starkey in Kabul
The rocket sounded like screeching tyres as it hurtled over our heads and erupted at the crossroads.
I scrambled for cover in an open field, but Najib didn’t have time to think. He was pedalling along the empty streets of Lashkar Gah with his younger brother Hamid balanced on the back of the bicycle when the rocket hit the road right next to them.
It was 7.24am on...
Bomber killed before making suicide attack →
A would-be suicide bomber was gunned down outside a conference hall in Kabul yesterday as hundreds of tribal elders gathered inside for the first stage of a traditional national assembly.
Mother and daughter shot dead in Afghanistan for... →
A widow and her teenage daughter were dragged from their beds and shot dead by armed men in south-eastern Afghanistan after allegations that they had committed “moral crimes”, it emerged yesterday.
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Runaway child bride: ‘They will give me a terrible... →
The Times Jerome Starkey in Kabul
Sonia stole some money from her mother’s dresser and fled the house in such a panic that it was only in the road outside that she realised her shoes were different colours. But by then it was too dangerous to turn back.
Shrouded in a burka and with tears streaming down her face, the 14-year-old was fleeing an arranged marriage to a Taleban insurgent.
“All I had...
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The fairytale world of ‘poppy palaces’ ends in a... →
The Times Jerome Starkey in Kabul
If it were not for the tank traps and grey blast-walls, the extravagant mansions in Kabul’s most expensive neighbourhood would not look out of place in a fairytale.
Ornately gilded pillars hold up pastel-hued balconies; brightly coloured domes crown mosaic walls made of mirrored tiles. Yet Sherpur district, which 130 years ago hosted General Frederick Roberts’s...
October 2011
5 posts
Exclusive: Britain to hand over Nad-e Ali →
A former Taleban stronghold where at least 38 British soldiers have died since 2008 is to be handed over to Afghan forces within the next three weeks, The Times has learnt.
Three dead as insurgents attack Afghan UN compound →
Insurgents attacked a United Nations compound in southern Afghanistan today, killing at least three people and injuring dozens more, in the latest deadly assault against a high-profile civilian…
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Britons killed in Kabul suicide bus attack →
The Times Jerome Starkey in Kabul
Two British electricians were among 17 people killed when a car carrying a bomb rammed an armoured bus in Kabul, in one of the deadliest insurgent attacks of the ten-year war.
Witnesses said that the heavily armoured Rhino bus was thrown sideways by the force of the explosion and was engulfed in flames. At least 13 people on board the bus, including five...
Forces accused of crushing rights ready to train... →
It is not surprising that Afghanistan’s security forces, still reeling from allegations of rape and torture, need more training.
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September 2011
11 posts
How spin has hidden the true cost of Afghanistan →
THE bodies were barely cold and the air still smelled of cordite when the US ambassador in Afghanistan dismissed a 20-hour battle, which killed 16 people and brought Kabul to a standstill, as “minor…
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‘Pakistani insurgents’ blamed for Taleban Kabul... →
The Times Jerome Starkey in Kabul
An Afghan policeman picked up a bag of cashew nuts from next to a congealed pool of blood where six insurgents had fought a 20 hour battle with Afghan and Nato Special Forces - and threw a handful in his mouth to taste them.
“Pakistani,” he declared, with some contempt, before strolling off towards the corpses, and snacking on his spoils of war.
It was, for...
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Nato forces battle Taleban gunmen in the heart of... →
The Times Jerome Starkey in Kabul
A Taleban suicide squad brought Kabul to a standstill yesterday after seizing control of one of the city’s tallest buildings and firing rocket-propelled grenades into the American Embassy, Nato’s headquarters and swaths of the diplomatic district.
Helicopter gunships, British special forces and Macedonian snipers were all drafted in to fight off the...
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US-backed militiamen accused of abusing local... →
The Times Jerome Starkey in Kabul
American plans to harness tribal militias in Afghanistan are backfiring because poorly trained and barely vetted gunmen are raping, murdering and stealing with impunity — turning ordinary people into the arms of insurgents, according to a damning new report.
In one case documented by Human Rights Watch (HRW), US-backed militiamen, known as Afghan Local Police...
Afghan insurgent group plans to attend Bonn peace... →
One of Afghanistan’s largest insurgent groups sent a delegation to Kabul last week for a second round of high-level peace talks with the Government, Afghan officials have told The Times .
The Taleban brought in from the cold a decade on... →
America has given its blessing for the Taleban to be brought in from the cold with a critical step towards reconciliation as the world paused to mark the tenth anniversary of the 9/11 attacks.
Reporter shot by soldier after he was mistaken for... →
American soldiers killed a reporter in southern Afghanistan during a botched operation to retake control of a compound overrun by insurgents, US officials admitted last night.
Torture claims stop Nato handing prisoners over to... →
Nato troops have been ordered to stop transferring prisoners into Afghan custody amid allegations of routine torture and “gross human rights violations”.
Times Dispatches: leprosy and a life of rejection →
Jerome Starkey reports from Afghanistan on the plight of those disfigured by leprosy and stigmatised by society, where the condition is still viewed by many as a punishment from God rather than as a…
August 2011
21 posts
Stylish leader’s words are emperor’s new clothes →
President Karzai has shown himself unwilling or unable to address the rot of nepotism and corruption within his regime
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Afghan leprosy sufferers victims of ignorance more... →
When Zahra hobbled back to the hospice, she was carrying a handwritten letter from her son-in-law which she didn’t know how to read. It fell to her doctor to decipher the scrawl - and it broke the…
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Vital time lost to bickering in rescue of British... →
The Scotsman Jerome Starkey in Kabul
AN SAS raid to rescue British hostages in Kabul was delayed more than four hours because Afghan officials were squabbling over which general was in charge.
Two female teachers and their British bodyguard were left cowering in a panic room as four suicide bombers tried to kill them because Special Forces called to the rescue were sent home. Friday’s...
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Bungled rescue attempt left UK hostages at... →
A raid by the New Zealand SAS to rescue British hostages in Kabul was delayed by more than four hours because Afghan officials were arguing about who was in charge of the operation.