Category Archives: Afghanistan
Child ‘Brides’ in Afghanistan
Reasonable laws in Afghanistan as in Egypt which appear to protect women and/or Minorities, are honored more in the breach than in the observance. Put more simply, they are pure bullshit for foreign consumption.
The Canadian Bar Association has a crush on Omar Khadr
This column written by Ezra Levant, appears in today’s National Post. It perfectly describes the left’s ongoing love affair with Canada’s #1 poster-boy of terrorism, Omar Khadr.
Ezra Levant: The Canadian Bar Association’s Khadr fetish
Posted: August 19, 2009, 9:45 AM by NP Editor Full Comment, Ezra Levant
The Canadian Bar Association (CBA) has a crush on Omar Khadr. The left-leaning lawyers’ club held its convention in Dublin last week, but even Ireland’s charms couldn’t get their minds off the accused terrorist, still detained in Barack Obama’s prison at Guantanamo Bay.
The spark for the CBA’s latest pronouncement on the matter was a decision of the Federal Court of Appeal, ordering the Canadian government to seek Khadr’s repatriation (the government is considering an appeal). But the CBA doesn’t need a reason to talk about their favourite cause. Khadr has been the subject of more CBA press releases than everyone else on the planet combined.
The CBA is obsessed. A search of its website yields 232 items about Khadr. What about other Canadians trapped overseas, such as Huseyn Celil, a Canadian citizen currently being held on trumped-up charges by China, or William Sampson, who was held and tortured in Saudi Arabia? They are non-persons to the CBA — no press releases for them, and no mentions on its website.
Taliban vow to bomb polling booths
The Times of India… KANDAHAR: The Taliban on Sunday threatened for the first time to attack Afghan polling stations, escalating their bid to derail key elections this week after striking Nato in the heart of Kabul. The threat was made in leaflets, dropped in villages in the south, and authenticated by a Taliban spokesman who said the militia would accelerate its bloody campaign of violence on the eve of polls.
“This is to inform respected residents that you must not take part in the polls so as not to become a victim of our operations, because we will use new tactics,” said one leaflet distributed in Kandahar. “All people are being informed that you must not rent out property to voting centres and if anyone did — even after elections — they may face problems”, they said.
Taliban spokesman Qari Yousuf Ahmadi confirmed the leaflets were authentic and that commanders were ordering the masses to boycott the vote. The leaflets marked the first direct threat from the rebels to attack polling sites.
The leaflets came even as supporters of the candidates came out in their thousands on Sunday. In his regional power base in the north, former foreign minister Abdullah Abdullah, President Hamid Karzai’s main challenger, was mobbed by thousands of supporters who stormed a gate to surge into the compound where his helicopter touched down.
He was hoisted onto a pickup truck and driven through the town of Taloqan, surrounded by crowds of adoring supporters. “I told the crowd we have already won,” Abdullah said.
Karzai disappointed thousands of people in the southern city of Kandahar who were hoping he would make an appearance at a rally addressed by one of his half-brothers, Ahmad Wali Karzai, Kandahar’s provincial council chief. Kandahar is Karzai’s home town as well as the heartland of the Taliban, whose fighters have vowed to disrupt the poll with attacks.
Sex-starved Afghans can deny food to wives: Report
From The Times of India:
Variant on the double decker?
LONDON: Afghanistan has enacted a new legislation empowering men of Shia sect of Islam to deny their wives food and sustenance if they refuse to obey their husbands’ sexual demands, a media report said on Saturday.
The new final draft of the legislation also grants guardianship of children exclusively to their fathers and grandfathers, and requires women to get permission from their husbands to work, The Guardian reported.
“It also effectively allows a rapist to avoid prosecution by paying ‘blood money’ to a girl who was injured when he raped her,” the report said quoting US charity Human Rights Watch.
In early April, US President Barack Obama and British Prime Minister Gordon Brown joined an international chorus of condemnation when the earlier version of the law legalised rape within marriage.
Although Afghan President Hamid Karzai appeared to back down, activists
said the revised law still contained repressive measures and contradicted Afghanistan’s constitution and international treaties it is signed up to.
According to the report, the new law has been backed by the hardline Shia cleric Ayatollah Mohseni, who is thought to have influence over the voting intentions of some Shias, who make up around 20 per cent of the population.
Karzai has assiduously courted such minority leaders in the run up to next Thursday’s election, which is likely to be close, a poll indicated.
Why Taliban leaders prefer dead diplomats
The Guardian.co.uk…According to a Taliban spokesman the real target of the suicide bombing in Kabul was the American embassy
According to Taliban spokesman Zabihullah Mujahid, the target of Saturday’s explosion in Kabul was not the headquarters of the International Security Assistance Force (Isaf) in Afghanistan but the American embassy. This careful clarification reveals the insurgents’ strategic logic.
For weeks analysts have been puzzled by the apparent lack of a effort to disrupt the polls. The Taliban have, after all, made assaults on relatively poorly protected Afghan government officials a key element of their strategy. Yet other than a couple of raids and a few bombings nothing on the scale of the operations that the Taliban could launch if they wanted has been seen. The next few days may see this change but all the activities associated with the election have passed off with little interference.
Mullah Omar, the leader of the Taliban, has not made any confirmed public declarations about the election and the insurgents have limited themselves to a statement posted on their internet site which calls on Afghans to boycott the polls. There are some reports of local intimidation and some leaflets in mosques dissuading potential voters but little else. It is as if the Taliban high command has decided to make their presence felt but not fully engage.
There are several reasons for this. Continue Reading →
Turncoat Karzai bargains away Afghan women in deal for votes
” Karzai has made an unthinkable deal to sell Afghan women out in return for the support of fundamentalists in the August 20 election. So much for any credentials he claimed as a moderate on women’s issues”. Brad Adams, Asia director, New York-based Human Rights Watch.
From The Ottawa Citizen.
Karzai ‘sells out Afghan women’ over law
By Jonathon Burch, ReutersAugust 14, 2009 11:01 AM
A woman listens to presidential candidate Ashraf Ghani Ahmadzai at a rally in Kabul on Wednesday. Afghanistan’s presidential election will be held on August 20.
Photograph by: Lucy Nicholson, Reuters
KABUL – A leading rights group accused President Hamid Karzai on Friday of selling out Afghan women by ratifying a Shiite law, which has drawn wide condemnation over its harsh provisions on women, before next week’s election.
Karzai, who approved the law earlier this year, was forced to review the decision after Western leaders and Afghan women’s rights groups expressed dismay at provisions on women’s rights some people said were reminiscent of Taliban-era restrictions.
An amended version of the Shiite Personal Status Law was submitted last month and published in the official gazette on July 27, bringing it into effect weeks ahead of the Aug. 20 presidential poll, New York-based Human Rights Watch (HRW) said.
“Karzai has made an unthinkable deal to sell Afghan women out in return for the support of fundamentalists in the August 20 election,” said Brad Adams, Asia director for HRW.
“So much for any credentials he claimed as a moderate on women’s issues,” he said in a statement. Continue Reading →
On the death of a top Taliban leader. Stratfor video
CTV: Honour killings in Canada. Kingston Ont.
Short video on use of kidnapped children as soldiers and terrorists
From Global, and The National Post:
Short piece on use of kidnapped children as suicide bombers and soldiers for Islamic terror. Really, what is it going to take before moronic western people begin to understand that Islam is not some weird form of Christianity. Islam is a psychotically violent, mysoginistic, hateful ideology which intends, and actually may, take over the world.
European gang trained for terror
By CNN Senior International Correspondent Nic Robertson and Paul Cruickshank
Editor’s note: This story is based on interrogation reports that form part of the prosecution case in the forthcoming trial of six Belgian citizens charged with participation in a terrorist group. Versions of those documents were obtained by CNN from the defense attorney of one of those suspects. The statement by Bryant Vinas was compiled from an interview he gave Belgian prosecutors in March 2009 in New York, and was confirmed by U.S. prosecutors as authentic. The statement by Walid Othmani was given to French investigators, and was authenticated by Belgian prosecutors.
(CNN) — An American who says he went to fight U.S. forces in Afghanistan told interrogators that about the time he became an al Qaeda member he came across several Belgian and French militants.
Belgian counter-terrorism sources said the group traveled to Pakistan’s tribal areas at the beginning of 2008, also intent on fighting in Afghanistan.
The Europeans — four Belgians and two French citizens, all of North African descent — were recruited, Belgian police say, by Malika el Aroud and Moez Garsallaoui, a married couple who had long enjoyed a notorious reputation among European counter-terrorism services.
El Aroud’s previous husband, Abdessattar Dahmane, had assassinated Ahmed Shah Massoud, the head of the anti-Taliban Northern Alliance, in a suicide bombing attack ordered by Osama bin Laden two days before 9/11.
When CNN interviewed the couple in 2006, El Aroud showed how she administered a pro-al Qaeda Web forum called Minbar SOS, which included pro-al Qaeda postings and propaganda videos. Read how al Qaeda is now operating
Belgian investigators say the Web site played an important role in the radicalization of members of the French-Belgian group.
One of them was a 25-year-old Frenchman, Walid Othmani. He was arrested on his return to Europe from Pakistan and is now in French custody. Belgian prosecutors told CNN Othmani has been charged in France with participation in a criminal conspiracy with the aim of preparing a terrorist act.
“I don’t think I would have left to fight jihad without viewing these videos [on Minbar] … it made me aware that the European media were hiding things about the situation in Palestine, Iraq and Afghanistan,” Othmani told French interrogators, according to Belgian legal documents obtained by CNN.
According to Belgian counter-terrorism officials, Garsallaoui, a Tunisian citizen, recruited some of those who traveled to Pakistan in person in Brussels, but relied on the Internet to recruit others. Continue Reading →
Danish snipers explain their work. Very interesting video.
‘Honour killings’ of females on rise in Canada: Expert
From Canada.Com:
By Shannon Proudfoot, Canwest News ServiceJuly 23, 2009 8:46 PM
As many as 5,000 women and girls lose their lives — most at the hands of family members — in “honour killings” around the world each year, according to the United Nations.
Up to a dozen have died for the same reason in Canada in the last decade, and it’s happening more often, says Amin Muhammad, a psychiatrist who studies honour killings at Memorial University in Newfoundland.
“There are a number of organizations which don’t accept the idea of honour killing; they say it’s a Western-propagated myth by the media, but it’s not true,” he says. “Honour killing is there, and we should acknowledge it, and Canada should take it seriously.”
Kingston, Ont., police are now investigating that as a motive in the deaths of three teenage sisters and an older female relative who were found in a car submerged in the Rideau Canal in Kingston on June 30. The girls’ mother, father and brother were arrested on Wednesday and charged with first-degree murder.
“In our Canadian society, we value the cultural values of everyone that makes up this great country, and some of us have different core beliefs, different family values, different sets of rules,” Kingston Police Chief Stephen Tanner said at a news conference on Thursday. “Certainly, these individuals — in particular, the three teenagers — were Canadian teenagers who have all the freedom and rights of expression of all Canadians.”
He added that he’d received an e-mail from an extended family member of the girls, suggesting honour killing was to blame for their deaths. Continue Reading →
‘honour’ killings murders video. Charges allege family planned daughters’ murders
Family members charged with first-degree murder in Kingston canal deaths
From The Ottawa Citizen:
KINGSTON, Ont. — Three family members from Montreal were charged Thursday in the deaths of three young sisters and a woman last month in Kingston, Ont.
The girls’ father Mohammad Shafii, mother Tooba Mohammad Yahya and 18-year-old brother, Hamid Mohammed Shafii, were each charged with four counts of first-degree murder and four counts of conspiracy to commit murder, Kingston police said at a news conference Thursday.
“It was a needless and sensitive loss of human life,” said Kingston police chief Stephen Tanner. ” . . . They had their lives cut short by members of their own family.”
The bodies of three sisters — Zainab Shafii, 19, Sahar Shafii, 17 and Geeti Shafii, 13 — and their female relative Rona Amir Mohammed, 50, were discovered in a submerged car, near the Kingston Mills locks on the Rideau Canal June 30. The older woman has now been confirmed to be the girls’ father’s first wife.
While Kingston police have always referred to the deaths as suspicious, they revealed Thursday that they had been looking at this case as a homicide all along.
A coroner’s investigation has been completed but police say they will not release the cause of deaths of the four women until they are before the courts.
The three accused had told police the family were returning to Montreal after vacationing and visiting relatives in Niagara Falls.
The family, travelling in two cars, stopped at a hotel late at night during the trip and, according to Yahya, the girls’ mother, that her eldest daughter had asked for the keys to their Nissan Altima.
Yahya said she assumed her daughter wanted to practise driving and took the car without permission before it somehow ended up in the canal.
Police said Thursday that the three accused were actually the ones who “operated” the Nissan.
The second vehicle, a Lexus, which had been driving back to Montreal by the girls’ brother, has been linked to the crime scene, police said.
Investigators said it took three weeks to make the arrests because it was a “unique” case involving information coming in from overseas. Tanner confirmed that an email was received by police by someone who claimed to be a relative. He would not say if it was from Diba Masoomi, a woman living in Niort, France who claims to be the older woman’s sister. He said that would be revealed at a later date.
Three children aged 8 to 15 have been taken in child protection services in Montreal.
The three sisters were all born in Kabul, Afghanistan. Their family moved to Dubai in the 1990s and to Canada two years ago.