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Taliban’s New Leader Strengthens His Hold With Intrigue and Battlefield Victory

Mullah Akhtar Mansoor (Credit: cbsnews.com)
Mullah Akhtar Mansoor
(Credit: cbsnews.com)

KABUL, Afghanistan — If ever there was a Taliban bureaucrat who seemed set on a less than stellar career path, it was Mullah Akhtar Muhammad Mansour.

In the 1990s, he was the Taliban government’s chief of aviation while Afghanistan had few planes in the air. He also oversaw the tourism department for what was one of the world’s most sealed-off countries at the time.

In short, there was little hint back then that he would someday emerge as the Taliban’s supreme commander, and the successor to the group’s legendary founder, Mullah Muhammad Omar.

But in the years since the Taliban leadership was driven into exile in Pakistan in 2001, Mullah Mansour became central to the group’s reincarnation as a powerful insurgency that survived NATO offensives to pose a grave threat now to the Western-backed Afghan government.

Details of his rise, filled in through interviews with current and former Taliban commanders, Western and Afghan officials, paint a portrait of an insurgent leader with a distinct flair for intrigue.

As acting leader of the Taliban over the past few years, he closely kept the secret that Mullah Omar had been dead since 2013. And he wielded that edge powerfully, issuing orders in Mullah Omar’s name, moving against rival Taliban commanders and steadily consolidating power, according to Afghan and Taliban officials.

He has also benefited from a powerful alliance with the Pakistani military spy agency, Inter-Services Intelligence, the original sponsor of the Afghan Taliban insurgency. That relationship, along with a hefty dose of cash payouts to fellow commanders, was a crucial factor in his ability to manage the succession crisis this summer after news of Mullah Omar’s death finally got out, Taliban and Afghan officials said.

Pakistan’s role in Mullah Mansour’s rise and rule has offered a bit of hope to Afghan and Western officials that Pakistani officials might be persuaded to force the Taliban to accept a peace deal.

But it has also sometimes been a political liability for Mullah Mansour, embittering some Taliban figures who resent Pakistan’s influence on the leadership and who are not likely to forgive his deception about Mullah Omar’s death. Some alienated commanders have sought a new direction with the Islamic State offshoot that is growing in Afghanistan and Pakistan.

Mullah Mansour’s biggest mystery to Western and Afghan officials is wrapped up in the question of how he will try to shape Afghanistan’s future now that he has consolidated power: Will he attempt to return the Taliban to power as conquerors, or will he try to turn military victories into a strong hand in peace talks?

Riches in Exile

Mullah Mansour, a stout man believed to be just under 50, does not, unlike his famously reclusive predecessor, live in hiding. His circumstances are not those of a jihadist leader living a fugitive existence, fearing drone strokes and avoiding cellphones in case they are tracked — in fact, one person who knows him says the Taliban leader owns a cellphone company.

Some of the time, he lives in a southern neighborhood of Quetta, Pakistan, known as Satellite Town, in an enclave where he and some other Taliban leaders from the same Pashtun tribe, the Ishaqzai, have built homes, according to interviews with a range of people who know him, including high-ranking Taliban leaders. As with many of the people interviewed about Mullah Mansour, they spoke on the condition of anonymity to avoid offending or prompting revenge.

But Quetta is not his only option. Although he is on the United Nations no-fly list, Mullah Mansour has repeatedly taken flights in and out of Pakistan, according to a senior Afghan intelligence official. Often, his destination has been Dubai, in the United Arab Emirates, where he has a house and several investments under different names, the official said.

That freedom alone would support widespread claims that he enjoys special status from the Pakistani authorities. Also telling is the large detachment of plainclothes security officers in his part of Satellite Town that notably grew around the time he was announced as the Taliban’s leader, neighborhood residents say.

Although he has benefited from his Pakistani contacts, they come with strings. Intelligence officials say that Mullah Mansour is wealthy by any standard, partly because of his ties to Ishaqzai narcotics traffickers. But some of that wealth has occasionally been frozen by Pakistani officials, the Afghan intelligence official said. One such time came this year when Pakistan was seeking to broker a round of talks between the Taliban leadership and the Afghan government and wanted Mullah Mansour to go along with it, the official said.

Such details present, for the Taliban, an uncomfortable contrast to the austere lives their leaders supposedly lived when they governed the country. A biography of Mullah Mansour recently issued by the Taliban seemed intent on rebutting that impression.

“He likes and wears loose, neat and clean clothes,” the biography reads. “He dislikes and avoids extravagance and prodigality in dressing, eating and all other needs of everyday life.”

Mullah Mansour is one of the last senior members of Mullah Omar’s original government still with the insurgency. Of those still alive, some have reconciled with the Afghan government and now live in Kabul. To them, it is surprising that Mullah Mansour is what he is today.

Mullah Salaam Alizai, who was close to Mullah Omar during the Taliban government in the 1990s and later spent years as an insurgent commander, described Mullah Mansour as unpredictable and an opportunist. “The kind of person who doesn’t have his own ideology, the kind of person who doesn’t care about how much destruction occurs,” he said in a phone interview.

“If he is told to destroy one road, he will destroy 10, if he is told to kill one person, he will kill 100,” added Mullah Alizai, who reconciled with the government about eight years ago.

Maulawi Qalamuddin, who ran the Ministry for the Propagation of Virtue and the Suppression of Vice in the Taliban government, remembered Mullah Mansour as a hard-working administrator.

“Mullah Mansour was not a notorious figure and he was not fundamentalist, either,” said Maulawi Qalamuddin, who is now on the Afghan government’s peace commission. “People didn’t grumble or complain about him.”

A Violent Operator

Those seeking evidence that Mullah Mansour’s priority is to wage war rather than pursue peace talks will have no difficulty finding it. He was one of the early organizers of the insurgency after the United States toppled the Taliban government in 2001, becoming a major battlefield commander.

Leaked United States military intelligence logs present a snapshot of him sowing violence across southern Afghanistan in 2006 and 2007. They show that he attended strategy sessions where suicide bombings were planned, back when that was still a relatively new tactic for the Taliban.

If the boundaries between the Taliban and opium and heroin traffickers in Afghanistan are now blurred, that is in no small part because of Mullah Mansour. He was among the first major Taliban officials to be linked to the drug trade, according to a 2008 United Nations report, and later became the Taliban’s main tax collector for the narcotics trade — creating immense profits for the Taliban as opium and heroin exports soared.

The Taliban biography of Mullah Mansour on its English website relishes in tracing how the ferocity of the Taliban’s war against American and coalition forces seems to track each of Mullah Mansour’s promotions up the group’s ranks.

Despite his rising profile within the Taliban, he remained something of an unknown to his enemies. Of that there is no better measure than a bizarre episode in 2010, when an impostor claiming to be Mullah Mansour sought to engage in secret peace talks.

The Afghan government and the American-led military coalition were hopeful, especially when they heard the man’s modest demands for an end to the war: amnesty for Taliban leaders and jobs for Taliban soldiers. The military showered the man with money, flew him to Kabul for meetings, and struggled to keep expectations in check.

Then he simply disappeared, and both Kabul and Washington concluded they had been duped. And the real Mullah Mansour’s star continued to rise.

In 2010, Pakistani officials arrested Mullah Abdul Ghani Baradar, Mullah Omar’s top deputy. Afghan and Western officials later said he was detained because he had been negotiating with Afghan officials without Pakistan’s involvement.

Two commanders rose to more prominence in the wake of Mullah Baradar’s arrest: One was Mullah Mansour, the other was Mullah Abdul Qayyum Zakir, a young former detainee at the American prison camp at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, who had a reputation as a tough commander in southern Afghanistan.

For a while, the two coexisted uncomfortably as co-deputies. But Mullah Mansour clearly gained the upper hand, becoming the acting leader of the Taliban, said Rahmatullah Nabil, the head of the Afghan intelligence agency, in an interview last year.

Afghan and Western officials said he had become the sole supposed conduit to Mullah Omar, in whose name annual announcements were made, but whom even senior Taliban commanders had not seen in years — to their growing anger and skepticism.

But Mullah Mansour was confident enough to begin placing his loyalists in important spots, and to move against those who doubted him.

In spring last year, Mullah Mansour served notice to Mullah Zakir that he was being fired because Mullah Omar was dissatisfied with the commander’s military strategy. But Mullah Zakir called his bluff, demanding proof that Mullah Omar was both alive and did in fact want him gone, three Afghan and Western officials said. Mullah Mansour showed a letter attributed to Mullah Omar, but could not produce compelling evidence. The gamble had failed, and the issue festered, giving wider circulation to rumors that Mullah Omar was dead and Mullah Mansour was deceiving his comrades.

A Power Struggle

Those rumors dogged Mullah Mansour through the first half of the year, when Pakistan began pushing the Taliban leadership to officially meet for the first time an Afghan government delegation, as a prelude to peace talks.

Until that meeting, in early July near Islamabad, the Taliban had long refused to meet with the Afghan government. But diplomats in attendance at the Pakistani-brokered talks were told that Mullah Mansour himself had authorized the meeting, one of the Afghan delegates, Hekmat Karzai, later said.

The senior Afghan official said that Mullah Mansour had, in fact, acquiesced to sending a delegation to the meeting, under heavy pressure from Pakistani officials. But as the talks were being prepared, he suddenly shifted tack, instructing several possible Taliban emissaries that they should refuse to attend. Then Mullah Mansour disappeared for a while.

“Mansour’s phones were turned off, he went missing,” one senior Afghan official said.

Why Mullah Mansour tried to sink the talks is unclear, but the Afghan intelligence official and a Western diplomat who had read intelligence reports on the issue said Mullah Mansour was probably worried he would lose the loyalty of Taliban commanders.

“It is not that Mansour is not obedient to Pakistan — it’s just that he is afraid of the movement falling apart,” the senior Afghan official said.

Pakistan was left scrambling to find Taliban figures who were willing to participate, leading to a smaller and less impressive delegation than the Afghan government had hoped for at the July 7 meetings. Still, the talks were hailed as the historic beginning of a long-sought peace process.

But Mullah Mansour’s apparent concerns were coming true. Within the Taliban, the talks — and Mullah Mansour’s perceived acquiescence to them — had cleaved the senior ranks. Senior Taliban figures began discussing the need for guidance from Mullah Omar, which in turn provoked renewed questions about whether he was even alive, two Afghan officials and a Western envoy said.

Deception Discovered

In July, word that Mullah Omar had long been dead suddenly began to circulate among commanders, according to Afghan officials. Precisely how the news broke was unclear, but one theory is that with peace talks looming, Mullah Omar’s son, Mullah Muhammad Yaqoub, began to confide to other senior Taliban leaders, according to an Afghan and a Western official.

On July 29, the Afghan government made it public, proclaiming that Mullah Omar had in fact died two years earlier in a hospital in Karachi, Pakistan.

Mullah Mansour immediately tried to get ahead of a potential succession struggle. In a few days of masterful constituency building — with the help of cash payouts and Pakistani influence, according to Afghan and Western officials — he secured the loyalty of possible rivals. In a series of shuras — consultative councils that his detractors claimed had been packed with his friends and tribesmen — he manufactured consent.

But others rallied behind Mullah Omar’s son, Mullah Yaqoub. Those supporters included Mullah Zakir and, reportedly, the leadership of the Haqqani network, an influential wing of the Taliban known for its brutal terrorist tactics and fund-raising mastery, according to members of the Taliban leadership council.

Then, Mullah Mansour let the world know that he had cut the heart out of his opposition.

The Taliban announced on July 31 that not only had Mullah Mansour been officially declared the new supreme leader, but that both of his deputies had also been chosen from the Haqqani network’s leadership, some of Mullah Yaqoub’s supposed backers. Two weeks later, the Taliban released a statement that Mullah Yaqoub and his family members had agreed to pledge their loyalty to Mullah Mansour’s leadership.

Mullah Zakir, however, would not go easily.

Officials with the National Directorate of Security, the Afghan intelligence service, said they had intercepted a message in which Mullah Mansour offered more than $14 million to Mullah Zakir through an intermediary in Helmand Province. The senior Afghan intelligence official claimed that after a payoff was made, of an unknown sum, Mullah Zakir demanded that he lead the Taliban military commission and that Mullah Mansour pledge not to engage in peace talks. However, those claims could not be confirmed in interviews with Taliban officials.

In any case, after he was anointed as Mullah Omar’s successor, Mullah Mansour had some consolidating to do. He disowned the July 7 peace meeting with the Afghan government, telling his supporters that they should dismiss talk of a peace process as propaganda — “the words of the enemies,” according to a recording the Taliban released.

Yet even then his speech was met with some degree of hope in Kabul, where diplomats noted that he had not explicitly ruled out future negotiations with the Afghan government.

“The doors of indirect meetings with the enemy in regards to independence of Afghanistan and the end of occupation were and still are open,” the Taliban said in another statement on their website.

Uncertainty Ahead

The deftness with which Mullah Mansour emerged as the new leader speaks to his political talents. But some Taliban leaders see it more as evidence of Pakistan’s support.

One of the insurgency’s most senior officials, Tayyeb Agha, resigned in August, saying he was dismayed that Mullah Mansour’s selection occurred outside Afghanistan.

In a lengthy statement, Mr. Agha, who was the Taliban’s chief foreign emissary, said choosing a leader in Pakistan was “a great historical mistake” and that Taliban leaders should relocate to Afghanistan from their exile in Pakistan to “preserve their independence.”

Within the insurgency, an aversion to peace talks and Mullah Mansour’s close ties with Pakistan remain potent issues for those who have not yet accepted his leadership.

But in recent days, Mullah Mansour has swept aside attention from internal tensions by presiding over the Taliban’s most consequential military victory since their government was ousted in 2001. After two years of steady infiltration into the north, and a patient encirclement campaign in Kunduz Province, Taliban fighters planted the white Taliban flag in the heart of Kunduz on Sept. 28.

The changes on the Afghan battlefield have for now made peace talks almost an afterthought. Afghan and Western officials hope that will not always be the case. But even those who have examined Mullah Mansour’s statements and career closely for clues are hard pressed to say what his long-term intentions might be.

“I’ll tell you who he isn’t,” Barnett Rubin, a scholar of Afghanistan who has worked in the United States government on Afghanistan policy, said in an interview. “He is not a moderate or extremist Talib, because his life is not lived according to our categories. People are trying to pigeonhole him into something they understand.”

Mujib Mashal, Ahmad Shakib and an employee of The New York Times contributed reporting. Alain Delaquérière contributed research.

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UNGA speech: Nawaz proposes 4-point peace initiative with India

Nawaz Sharif at UN (Credit: tribune.com.pk)
Nawaz Sharif at UN
(Credit: tribune.com.pk)

Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif raised the issue of Kashmir, spoke about the continuing offensive against terrorism, and more importantly put the ball in India’s court by offering a new four-point peace initiative in his speech at the 70th UN General Assembly on Tuesday.

Nawaz proposes 4-point peace initiative with India

1. We propose Pakistan and India formalise and respect 2003 understanding of a  complete ceasefire in Kashsmir and LoC

2. We propose Pakistan and India reaffirm that they will not resort to the threat of force under any circumstances

3. Steps must be taken to demilitarise Kashmir

4. Agree to mutually withdraw troops from Siachen

Nawaz Sharif said the two countries should address and resolve the causes of tension and take all possible measures to avert further escalation.

“Wisdom dictates that our immediate neighbour refrains from fomenting instability in Pakistan. Cooperation, not confrontation, should define our relationship.”

The prime minister declared Pakistan neither wants to, nor is it engaged in, an arms race in South Asia.

‘Need a more democratic, transparent Security Council, not an expanded club of privileged and powerful’

“Pakistan supports a comprehensive reform of the United Nations, including that of Security Council, says Nawaz. “We need a Security Council that is more democratic, accountable, and transparent. A council that reflects the interests of all member states, in accordance with the principle of sovereign equality. Not a council that is an expanded club of the powerful and privileged.”

‘Three generations of Kashmiris have only seen broken promises’

“Three generations of Kashmiris have only seen broken promises and brutal oppression,” says PM Nawaz. “Over 100,000 have died in their struggle for self-determination. This is the most persistent failure of the United Nations.”

Pakistan to help promote peace, stability in Afghanistan

Pakistan will persist in the endeavour to help resume the dialogue process and promote peace and stability in Afghanistan,” says OM Nawaz.

“We can, however, do so only if we receive the required cooperation from the Afghan government. Tensions between Afghanistan and Pakistan are in neither country’s interests.”

The prime minister says global threat of terrorism cannot be defeated unless its underlying causes are addressed.

“Poverty and ignorance are part of the problem. Extremist ideologies must be opposed.”

‘Pakistan will continue to support the objectives of nuclear disarmament and non-proliferation’

“We have maintained the highest standards of nuclear security and have established an effective regime to ensure the safety and security of our nuclear facilities and stocks,” says Nawaz.

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India responds to Nawaz Sharif’s U.N. speech

India External Affairs Minister Sushma Swaraj (Credit: reuters.com)
India External Affairs Minister
Sushma Swaraj
(Credit: reuters.com)

India hits back after Pakistan Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif brings up the Kashmir issue at the U.N. Here is the full text of the statement by First Secretary, Permanent Mission of India to the United Nations:

Statement by Mr. Abhishek Singh, First Secretary, Permanent Mission of India to the United Nations exercising India’s Right of Reply during the General Debate of 70th session of UN General Assembly.

September 30, 2015

Mr. President,

It is regrettable that the delegation of Pakistan has once again chosen to misuse the High Level Segment of the UN General Assembly Session to distort reality and portray a false picture of the challenges in our region.

Pakistan claims to be the primary victim of terrorism. In truth, it is actually a victim of its own policies of breeding and sponsoring terrorists. Seeking to mask its activities as though an outcome of domestic discontent in the Indian State of Jammu & Kashmir carries no credibility with the world.

Mr. President,

It was stated that Jammu and Kashmir is under foreign occupation. It is, except that the occupier in question is Pakistan. In fact, India’s reservations about the proposed China-Pakistan Economic Corridor stem from the fact that it passes through Indian territory illegally occupied by Pakistan for many years.

Pakistan apparently regrets that the dispute over Jammu and Kashmir remains unresolved and that our dialogue has not progressed. If it is so, this is because Pakistan has chosen to disregard its commitments, whether it was under the 1972 Simla Agreement, the 2004 Joint Declaration forswearing terrorism, or more recently, the understanding between our two Prime Ministers at Ufa. On each occasion, it is India that has extended the hand of friendship. India remains open even today to engage Pakistan on outstanding issues in an atmosphere free of terrorism and violence.

Mr. President,

Reference was made to ceasefire violations and exchanges of fire along the Line of Control and the International Boundary. The world knows that the primary reason for firing is to provide cover to terrorists crossing the border. It needs no imagination to figure out which side initiates this exchange.

It is not uncommon for states, when confronted with serious challenges, to shift responsibility on others. That is the case with Pakistan and terrorism, reflecting the inability to recognize that this is a home grown problem that has begun to bite the hand that fed it. We agree that terrorism has underlying causes – in this case, poverty of wisdom and ignorance of consequences.

Mr. President,

The heart of the matter is a state that regards the use of terrorism as a legitimate instrument of statecraft. The world watches with concern as its consequences have spread beyond its immediate neighbourhood. All of us stand prepared to help, if only the creators of this monster wake up to the dangers of what they have done to themselves.

 

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Shaken by Taliban Victory in Kunduz, Afghans Flee Another Provincial Capital

KABUL, Sept 30 — The test facing the Afghan government now is not just whether it can quickly mount a counterattack and retake Kunduz, the northern city that fell to the Taliban on Monday, but whether it can prevent a nearby provincial capital from falling as well.

Accounts from the neighboring province of Baghlan on Wednesday showed that the collapse of government forces in Kunduz against less numerous Taliban forces was prompting a crisis of confidence in the neighboring province of Baghlan, where wealthier citizens and those with government connections have begun to leave for the relative safety of their hometowns.

In the midst of one of the gravest moments for the American-backed government in Kabul, military leaders spoke for a third day about launching a decisive counterattack against the Taliban in Kunduz. But it was becoming clear that most of the reinforcements for such an attack had been waylaid in Baghlan.

The reinforcements “will not be able to reach Kunduz without a big fight,” said Ted Callahan, a Western security adviser based in northeastern Afghanistan.

The Taliban have proven in the last few days just how tight a grip they hold on a stretch of northern Baghlan that abuts Kunduz Province. Reinforcements coming from either Kabul or the government stronghold in Mazar-i-Sharif must pass through the area to reach Kunduz city, and a number of convoys have been ambushed there.

It was not clear on Wednesday whether the front line in the north was still in Kunduz or was rapidly shifting south into Baghlan. That, at least, was how residents of Baghlan’s provincial capital, Pul-i-Kumri, were feeling.

“It is true, people are evacuating the city today,” Zabihullah Rustami, a former member of the provincial council, said by telephone. He had done so himself, he said, relocating to his rural district to the east. “People who are enemies of the Taliban are leaving,” he said, and the city was rife with “rumors that the Taliban might attack and take over the city.”

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Pul-i-Kumri, about 90 miles north of Kabul, could become the next flash point if the Taliban’s momentum in the north is not checked in the next few days.

Taliban fighters have been creeping up to the city’s outskirts over the last six months. Gun and mortar fire are frequently heard, and skirmishes have become regular occurrences on three sides of the city.

“In Pul-i-Kumri, the situation is not in the favor of the government,” Mr. Rustami said. “If any Taliban come out and shout ‘Allahu akbar,’ the city will fall. The Taliban are close to the city.”

In a worrisome sign, two units of the Afghan Local Police surrendered their bases just outside Pul-i-Kumri to the Taliban on Wednesday and joined the insurgents, while a third base there was overrun, said Mohammad Leqaa, a former general who commanded police forces in several provinces. Other military units in the area were also said to have fled.

Mr. Leqaa estimated that as much as 10 percent of the city’s population left on Wednesday alone. “The residents were influenced by waves of people fleeing Kunduz by way of Baghlan,” he said. “We tried to announce to people not to panic and don’t leave. They weren’t listening.”

Mr. Callahan, the security adviser, said he expected government forces to put up more of a fight in Pul-i-Kumri than they did in Kunduz.

“I think you’ll see much more resistance” from the police and pro-government militias, Mr. Callahan said. “Mind you, Baghlan is big, and most of the security forces are drawn from the eastern parts of the province, so there is a big pool of potential reinforcements.”

Even so, he said, a strong defense could not be taken for granted because if panic took root in Pul-i-Kumri, a Taliban victory could be “a self-fulfilling prophecy,” and a small Taliban force could sow enough fear “to more or less walk in” as security forces retreated.

“It would be the same movie we’ve seen in Kunduz,” Mr. Callahan said.

The Taliban’s resurgence in Baghlan over the past two years is a complicated story of ethnic rivalry and local politics as much as ideology. Baghlan’s sprawling and populous northern district, known as Baghlani Jadid, is largely Pashtun, Afghanistan’s largest ethnic group — from which the Taliban traditionally draws its members.

Pashtuns live in settlements across the north, but they are outnumbered in the region by Afghanistan’s second largest group, the Tajiks. In Baghlan, many Pashtuns have felt left out of the provincial power structure, especially after a leading Pashtun candidate failed to win the provincial council chairmanship in last year’s election. Since then, Pashtun support for the government appears to have waned in northern Baghlan and insecurity has been rising, especially along the stretch of national highway running through the province.

On Tuesday and Wednesday, convoys of reinforcements headed toward Kunduz were fighting pitched battles with the Taliban in two areas, said Abdul Shaker Urfani, a member of a community council in northern Baghlan.

By his count, more than 1,000 Afghan soldiers and police officers bound for Kunduz were stuck in the province on Wednesday. “They can’t break through the Taliban resistance,” Mr. Urfani said.

The capture of Kunduz, a city of 300,000 people, three days ago appeared to be the Taliban’s largest military victory in a war that has gone on for more than a decade. Kunduz is the first urban center the Taliban have held since 2001.

Soon after it fell, Afghan military officials spoke of using the city’s airport, five miles to the south, as a staging ground for a swift counterattack. Now, though, the airport is imperiled as well, caught between Taliban forces approaching from Kunduz and the insurgent-controlled countryside in every other direction.

By Tuesday night, Taliban fighters had pushed through the airport perimeter, threatening several hundred soldiers and at least as many civilians who had fled to the airport from the city. One police officer was killed and at least 17 were wounded defending the area, officials said.

Their situation improved somewhat when American warplanes struck Taliban positions at 11:30 p.m. and again at 1 a.m., an American military spokesman said. The Afghan Air Force also fired weapons.

Around the same time, American Special Forces soldiers and Afghan commandos left the airport headed for Kunduz, according to Afghan government officials. Whether the Americans were there to take Taliban positions or to call in airstrikes was not known. By morning, the Americans appeared to have returned, said people there who spoke by telephone.

An American military spokesman refused to discuss the matter.

It appeared that at least one American operation in the city ended in failure. An Afghan security official, speaking on the condition of anonymity, said that a group of 100 or more Afghan soldiers, trapped in an ancient fortress north of the city, had held the Taliban off for more than two days. But when American forces tried to airdrop ammunition and weapons to them, the official said, “they missed the base and dropped the weapons in the river.” It was not clear whether the weapons actually landed in the water of the nearby Kalagaw River or had merely missed the defenders’ position by a long distance.

That position fell Wednesday morning, and about 60 soldiers surrendered or were captured by the Taliban, although at least a few dozen managed to escape, the official said.

Questions about how thousands of army, police and militia defenders could continue to fare so poorly against a Taliban force that most local and military officials put only in the hundreds were hanging over President Ashraf Ghani’s government and its American allies.

The government forces and militiamen defending Kunduz Province were said to number more than 7,000 when the city fell. Some fell back to the airport, some fled to their homes, and some are unaccounted for.

Military officials in Kabul continued to promise an imminent counterattack, but an Afghan security official in Kabul who insisted on anonymity to discuss security matters said he was not aware that enough troops were in position to mount one.

“There is no counterattack,” he said, “not now, at least.”

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Abdullah Talks Poverty, Militancy at UN Summit

AA at UN (Credit: telegraph.co.uk)
AA at UN
(Credit: telegraph.co.uk)
Addressing The 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development at the United Nations in New York on Saturday, Abdullah Abdullah the Chief Executive Officer of National Unity Government (NUG) reaffirmed Afghanistan’s strong commitment to implementing long-term development projects across the country after 2015.

In his remarks, Abdullah highlighted the gains made by Afghanistan over the recent years, but said poverty still remains one of the biggest challenges in the country.

Abdullah also touched on the issue of peace and security in Afghanistan and asked Chinese leadership to use their influence convincing Pakistan to contribute honestly in restoring long standing peace in the country.

“China has been helping Afghanistan in the past 14 years, support for the reconstruction of the country, capacity building—at the same time showed some interest in investing in Afghanistan. Recently they also were facilitating or supporting the initiatives which were there for reconciliation,” he added.

The CEO addresses the UN summit at a time that the people of Afghanistan are still coping with serious security threats and poverty. However Abdullah pledged that NUG is determined to take measures in reducing poverty in the country.

“Afghanistan begun to pursue its MDGs almost half a decade later than other member states. Based on our 2005 to 2015 MDG report, we have a mixed achievements and setbacks, while poverty rate as remains more or less constant for several years, we have made considerable progress in primary education, gender equality, in women empowerment, child and maternal mortality rate are being reduced, ” CEO Abdullah said.

In addition, Abdullah talked on the issue of terrorism and reiterated that the militant groups are still operating inside the Pakistani soil.

It is expected that NUG will submit the evidences proving Pakistan’s support of terrorism to the UN general assembly.

A trilateral meeting between Afghanistan, Pakistan and the US is also scheduled to take place in New York on the sidelines of the general assembly meeting.

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U.S. Is Struggling in Its Effort to Build an Afghan Air Force

KABUL, Afghanistan — Col. Qalandar Shah Qalandari, Afghanistan’s most decorated pilot, recently took command of what was meant to be the building blocks of his country’s new air force: a squadron of shiny American-made attack helicopters, intended to solve the chronic lack of close air support for Afghan troops.

Sixteen of the armed MD-530 scout helicopters were rushed here this year to great fanfare, and a dozen more are to join them. But Colonel Qalandari was not impressed. “This plane is a total mess,” he said. “To be honest, I don’t know why we have this plane here.”

An Afghan public affairs officer tried to shush the colonel as he spoke to a journalist at the Afghan Air Force base at Kabul airport. A United States Air Force public affairs officer looked on aghast.

But Colonel Qalandari kept on: “I will tell the truth. This is my country, and these are my men, and they deserve the truth.”

He tossed a map on the table, showing the effective range of the helicopter from its Kabul airfield: It cannot even reach areas where the Taliban normally operate. In summertime, its maximum altitude with a full load of fuel and ammunition is only 7,000 to 8,000 feet, he said — meaning it cannot cross most of the mountain ranges that encircle Kabul, which is itself at an elevation of about 6,000 feet.

“It’s unsafe to fly, the engine is too weak, the tail rotor is defective and it’s not armored. If we go down after the enemy we’re going to have enemy return fire, which we can’t survive. If we go up higher, we can’t visually target the enemy,” Colonel Qalandari said. “Even the guns are no good.”

Each helicopter carries two .50-caliber machine guns, mounted on pods on either side of the craft’s small bubble cockpit. “They keep jamming,” one of the colonel’s 10 newly American-trained pilots said.

Colonel Qalandari is not the first Afghan official to complain about the woeful state of efforts to build an air force to replace the Americans in carrying out airstrikes, medical evacuations and transport missions in a country with poor and dangerous roads. United States officials have long seen the aspirations as unrealistic, while Afghans have complained that their allies have ignored their views about what they need to fight the Taliban.
One of the Afghan Air Force’s primary assault vehicles is the MD-530 scout helicopter. Its range is about 83 miles. But it cannot operate above an elevation of 7,000 to 8,000 feet, which dramatically reduces the area it can patrol in Afghanistan’s mountainous landscape.

In the past, efforts were focused on reconstructing the air force left behind by the Soviets, or at least the helicopter transport and gunship parts of it. During the Soviet era, the Afghan Air Force even had MiG-21 jet fighters with Afghan pilots. What the Afghans have had lately is a fleet of prop-driven Cessna transport planes, and aging Russian MI-17 transport helicopters and MI-35 helicopter gunships, the kind Colonel Qalandari flew in the past.

American efforts to rebuild the Russian fleet stalled after the conflict in Ukraine brought Western sanctions on the Russians. That has made spare parts difficult to obtain and new Russian helicopters all but impossible to buy.

Of the Afghan legacy fleet of five MI-35 gunships — a fearsome aircraft well-suited to Afghan conditions — only one is still flying. “And that one won’t last much longer,” Colonel Qalandari said.

Some of the Russian MI-17s, normally used for transport, have been outfitted as gunships or medevac aircraft, but there are constant problems keeping them in service because of issues with maintenance and spare parts. Afghan V.I.P.s also tend to demand them for personal transportation when they travel around the country.

American officials hailed the MD-530 as a quick — and realistic — solution to Afghanistan’s air force needs.

Built by McDonnell Douglas, the two-seat helicopter has a 33-year history, serving as a Special Operations scout helicopter, and in the United States as a traffic and weather news helicopter, or for power line work.

It is simple to fly and repair, and could be put into action in Afghanistan quickly, American officials said. The first four of the MD-530 gunships to be battle-ready have already gone on two combat missions, in August, and Afghans and Americans both pronounced them a success.

American officers say that it would take much longer — many years — to train Afghan pilots to fly more advanced American military helicopters with advanced avionics and computerized controls. They are also extremely expensive to fly.

“This is a sustainable solution,” said Lt. Col. James Abbott, an Air Force trainer who put off retirement to help run the MD-530 program in Afghanistan. “You’re fighting guys with a gun in the back of a pickup truck: How much technology does that need?”

The new helicopters were procured and delivered, with enough Afghan pilots trained and ready to fly them, in less than a year. “It’s been pretty amazing what they’ve done in a short time,” Colonel Abbott said.
Some of the Afghan pilots have already qualified on the MD-530 as instructor pilots, and are training other Afghans. Training mechanics and maintainers will take longer, and American contractors are still doing most of that work.

The pilots inside the MI-17 helicopter. Spare parts for the Russian fleet are difficult to obtain, but many Afghans are dissatisfied with replacement American helicopters. Credit Andrew Quilty for The New York Times
Colonel Abbott said a lot of the Afghan criticism of the new aircraft was from pilots used to Russian equipment, and replacing that has become impossible. “It’s a tough sell for the legacy guys,” he said, “but the young pilots love it.”

As for the complaints about the helicopter’s troubles in the high altitudes and thin air of Afghan battlefields, he noted that those would be a problem for even most advanced aircraft.

Capt. Naiem Azadi — one of the new instructor pilots and a veteran of the MD-530’s first combat mission, in Jalalabad last month — is enthusiastic about the helicopter. But he wished it had gun sights, he said. As it is now, targeting is visual, and the twin .50-caliber machine guns are aimed by tilting the helicopter toward the target.

“If we don’t have ground controllers guiding us, it’s very hard to target safely,” Captain Azadi, 27, said.

Already, one of the new helicopters has crashed, while an American pilot was flying with an Afghan trainee near the 8,000-foot-high Lataband Pass, just east of Kabul.

Colonel Qalandari said the incident showed the limitations of the helicopter in Afghan terrain. After the helicopter landed, a recurring tail rotor problem, plus its light weight, caused it to tip over in a wind. While the crew escaped safely, the aircraft rolled down the mountainside, toppled off a cliff, and was completely destroyed.

“When my pilots fly in this, only God and I know what they’re going through,” the colonel said. “And I don’t know whether they’ll make it back.”

The MD-530 is not the only problem aircraft in the Afghan arsenal, according to Afghan officials.

They also have 25 C-208 transport planes, basically modified Cessna 12-seater prop planes, an aircraft the Americans praise for its simplicity and workhorse abilities.

The Afghan Air Force chief of staff disagreed. “The C-208 is not good for Afghan territory, it’s unacceptable to the geography of the country,” the senior officer, Maj. Gen. Mohammad Dawran, said in an interview. “We can’t keep them pressurized; they only have a 4,000- to 5,000-meter ceiling — no good in the hot weather. Only a single engine.”

General Dawran said that while he was grateful to the Americans for the help they had given, they had yet to accomplish nearly as much as the Russians did in creating an Afghan Air Force in the 1980s.

“Our international friends, especially the U.S.A., did a lot of good things to help the Afghan Air Force,” he said. “We began from zero, and now we’re in a better situation. But the Americans did not pay enough attention to what we wanted. They did not consult the Afghan side.”

The Afghan general was hopeful, however, about the planned delivery next year of 20 new Brazilian-made A-29 airplanes, a light attack aircraft purchased by the American military. Unlike the new helicopters, the A-29 will be able to drop laser-guided bombs and other high-tech arms.

“The nice thing about a laser-guided bomb,” said Colonel Abbott, “it doesn’t care what it gets dropped out of, it’s just as lethal.”

Brig. Gen. Chris Craige, the commander of the American Air Force training mission here, acknowledged that development of an Afghan Air Force had lagged behind other military training efforts. For one thing, the United States and its coalition allies did not even start working on training an Afghan Air Force until 2007, and efforts were complicated by the highly technical nature of air power and by the long periods of training needed for pilots and mechanics. Pilots in particular need English-language proficiency, which takes up most of the first year of their training.

The A-29, said General Craige, “is the absolutely right airplane for them. It will bring the next level of capability to them as far as not just machine guns and rockets, but also being able to drop bombs. And that’s where we really start getting the Afghan Air Force to a point where they can sustain themselves in those tough battles.”

Training on the A-29 does not begin until next year, and the full complement of 20 planes will not arrive until December 2018.

But Afghan ground forces are begging for air support as they face more determined ground challenges from the Taliban, who have boasted of how much easier it is to fight with fewer worries about American airstrikes.

Most American airstrikes in support of Afghan forces have to be approved on a case-by-case basis by Gen. John F. Campbell, the American commander in Afghanistan, and not all are.

One exception has been Musa Qala, a district of Helmand Province that fell to the Taliban on Aug. 26. Heavy American airstrikes rained down almost continuously on the district for weeks after that, according to Afghan officials and local residents.

But over all, General Craige said, “this is the first year where the coalition hasn’t come in and said, ‘We’ll take care of it.’”

That has been difficult for Afghans to accept. As another American general put it, speaking on the condition of anonymity while criticizing an ally, the heavy American use of air power in previous years has made Afghan government forces feel excessively dependent on it.

“The Taliban doesn’t complain about not getting air support,” the general said, “but they get it done.”

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A HISTORY OF INDIAN ART THROUGH FIVE MASTERPIECES

Ajunta caves (Credit: planetden.com)
Ajunta caves
(Credit: planetden.com)
In the early summer of 1819, a British hunting party was heading through thick jungle near Aurangabad, in the hilly ghats of south central India, when the tiger they were tracking disappeared down into the chasm of a deep ravine.

Leading the hunters was Captain John Smith, a young cavalry officer from Madras. Beckoning his friends to follow, he tracked the pug marks down a semi- circular scarp of steep basalt, and crossed the rocky bed of the Wagora river, then made his way slowly up through the bushes at the far side of the steep horseshoe- shaped amphitheatre of cliffs. Half way up, Smith stopped dead in his tracks. The pug marks led straight past an opening in the rock face. But the cavity was clearly not a natural cave or a river-cut grotto. Instead, despite the long grass and the all-encroaching pepper vines, Smith could quite clearly see that he was looking onto a man-made façade cut straight into the rock face. The jagged slope had been painstakingly etched away into a perfect portico. It was clearly a work of great sophistication. Equally clearly, it had been abandoned for centuries.

A few minutes later, the party made their way inside, crunching over a human skeleton. Smith held aloft a torch of burning dried grass and his companions clutched their muskets. A long apsidal hall led right into the living rock, flanked on either side by 39 octagonal pillars. All over the walls, the officers could see through the gloom the shadowy outlines of ancient murals: figures of orange and yellow- robed monks with green haloes standing on blue lotuses.

In the decades to come, word spread that in this most remote spot lay 31 caves which collectively amounted to one of the great wonders of the ancient world. The murals told the Jataka stories of the Lives of the Buddha in images of such elegance and grace that the murals of Ajanta are now recognised as the finest picture gallery to survive anywhere from any ancient civilisation. Even today, the colours glow with a brilliant intensity: topaz-dark, lizard green, lotus-blue.

I first saw these murals in 1984 as a young backpacker, on a first, long six-month journey across India that completely changed my life. It was my first close encounter with Indian art, something that has obsessed me ever since. I was 18 then. I am 50 now. In this short series, I hope to convey how and why the art of India has the power to fascinate, hypnotise and even make you fall in love.

The murals of Ajanta that I saw that winter morning in 1984 embraced subject matter that was at once both profoundly spiritual and strikingly sensuous. Although the images were originally intended for a monastic audience and the occasional passing pilgrim, what puzzled the 19th century Orientalists who first worked on them was this unexpected yet heady mixture of two worlds normally considered incompatible. Yet it was clear that the artists of Ajanta clearly saw nothing odd in this juxtaposition of monk and dancing girl. There are no panels or boundaries in the Ajanta paintings beyond the physical borders of the cave, and the artists likewise move from the world of the ascetic’s cave to the pleasure gardens of the royal court and back again without recognising any essential separation between the two.

Here the Buddha tends to be shown not just in his monastic milieu, after his Enlightenment, but in the princely environment in which he grew up. He takes his place among handsome princes and bare-chested nobles, as princesses with tiaras of jasmine and raat-ki-rani, Queen of the Night, languish love-lorn on swings and couches. Close by, swan-necked, heavy-breasted and narrow-waisted dancing girls of extraordinary sensuousness, dressed only in their jewels and girdles, perform beside lotus ponds, swaying to unheard music, ringing their silent ghungroo anklets. These women wear only spinels and chrysoberyl cat’s eyes; they hold nothing but empurpled ebony flywhisks of burnished gold; gleaming rubies the colour of peacock’s blood flash against their dark skin. The features of these palace women conforms closely to the ideas of feminine beauty discussed by the great fifth century playwright Kalidasa, who writes of men pining over portraits of their lovers, while straining to find the correct metaphors to describe them: ‘I recognise your body in liana vines; your expression in the eyes of a frightened gazelle; the beauty of your face in that of the moon, your tresses in the plumage of peacocks; and the play of your eyebrows in the faint ripple of flowing water… alas! Timid friend—no one object compares to you.’

Nearby are painted very different images of stark ascetic renunciation—a shaven-headed orange-robed monk lost in meditation, a hermit seeking salvation in the gloom of a rock-cut grotto, or a group of wizened devotees straining to hear the words of their teacher. Dominating everything are portraits of Bodhisattvas of otherworldly elegance and compassion, eyes half-closed, inward-looking, weightlessly swaying on the threshold of Enlightenment, caught in what the great historian of Indian art, Stella Kramrisch, described, wonderfully, as ‘a gale of stillness’.
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From almost the beginning, scholars working on the site came to the realisation that there actually were two quite distinct phases of work at Ajanta. Most of the Ajanta caves, and almost all the murals, date from around 600 CE. This was at the height of India’s classical Golden Age, when Kalidasa was writing his great work, The Cloud Messenger, and the Buddhist university library of Nalanda, then the greatest repository of knowledge east of Alexandria, was at its scholarly apex, its wisdom and learning sought by scholars and pilgrims from across the world. The murals left by this Ajanta Renaissance included many of the most striking picture cycles, notably fabulously elegant and other-worldly depictions of the beautiful lotus-holding Bodhisattvas Padmapani and his bejewelled companion, Vajrapani.

Such was the celebrity of these 5th century masterworks that almost all modern accounts of the Ajanta caves have more-or-less ignored the earlier 1st and 2nd century BCE picture cycles in caves 9 and 10. These earlier paintings were always more fragmentary and smoke-blackened than the almost pristine later murals, and perhaps for this reason seemed, blackboard-like, to invite the attention of tourists who wanted to leave an inscribed record of their visit. By the time the Nizam of Hyderabad sent the art historian Ghulam Yazdani, to produce the first photographic survey of the murals in the late 1920s, the murals of Caves 9 and 10 had already been irreparably damaged.

At the same time, the Nizam also sent two Italian conservationists to help restore them. Unfortunately their efforts only obscured the murals further: they coated the pigments with shellac varnish which attracted grime and dried bat dung and quickly obscured the images from both travellers and scholars. Less than a century after being rediscovered, the figures of caves 9 and 10 were lost again. For the entire length of the 20th century they remained hidden, invisible to the naked eye, forgotten by all.

It has taken a slow and painstaking restoration of the paintings by Manager Singh of the Archaeological Survey of India to bring these images out of darkness. Manager Singh has recently succeeded in removing 75 per cent of the layers of shellac and grime from 10 sq m of the murals, revealing for the first time since the 1920s the extraordinary images which lay beneath.

On the façade of Cave 10 there is a panel which mentions a prince of the Satavahana dynasty, which controlled the Deccan between the second century BCE and the first century CE. The murals within are therefore not only the oldest images at the site, and indeed the oldest Buddhist paintings in existence—dating from only 300 years after the death of the Buddha—but with the exception of a few pictograms of stick men left by Paleolithic hunters at Bimbedkar in the wilds of Madhya Pradesh, they are also the oldest pictures of Indian people. The murals of Caves 9 and 10 represent nothing less than the birth of Indian painting. The best preserved of these early murals—and undoubtedly my personal favourite—are the images from the Shyama Jataka, an early Buddhist text which tells of Shyama, a virtuous forest dweller who was fatally hit by the poisoned arrow of the King of Varanasi who was out hunting. Because he was sinless, his blind parents were able to call him back to life and he becomes the King’s guru in the virtuous ways of Dharma.

In illustrating this story, the early artists of Ajanta open wide a window on an age which remains otherwise dark and shadowy to us. We see the costumes of this very early period: the King of Varanasi, for example, wears a white cotton tunic of strikingly Central Asian appearance, wrapped around the waist with a cummerbund, while on his head he wears a very Indian turban cloth wound around his hair and twisted into a top knot. He has a bow and a full quiver of arrows. His guards are bare- chested but wrap a lungi around their hips and are armed with spears and bows and bell-shaped shields decorated with the emblems of half-moons and shining suns.

The intimacy, classicism, and striking realism of these figures, combined with the haunting wistfulness of the features of these faces, is not a million miles away from the melancholy world of the first century CE encaustic wax mummy portraits from the al-Fayum region of Greco- Egyptian Egypt. As with the painted mummy covers, we are in a world so astonishingly realistic and lifelike that even today, even in reproduction, they can still make you gasp as you find yourself staring eyeball to eyeball with a silently watching soldier who could have fought the Bactrian Greeks, or a monk who may have attended the great Buddhist university of Nalanda.
So realistic are the faces of the people depicted, so direct are their expressions, that you feel that these have to be portraits of real individuals, glowing still with the flame of eternal life. There is something deeply hypnotic about the soundless stare of these silent often uncertain Satavahana faces. Their fleeting expressions are frozen, startled, as if suddenly surprised by the King’s decision to lose his arrow or by the nobility of the great elephant breaking through the trees. The viewer peers at these figures trying to catch some hint of the upheavals they witnessed and the strange sights they saw in ancient India.

But the smooth, clean humane Indo-Hellenistic faces stare us down.
Perhaps the most disconcerting thing about the people in these murals is that they appear so astonishingly familiar. Two thousand years after they were painted, these faces convey with penetrating immediacy the character of the different sitters: the alert guard, the King caught in the excitement of the hunt, the obedient son fetching water. Indeed, so contemporary are the features, so immediately recognisable the emotions that play on the lips, that you have to keep reminding yourself that these sitters are not from our world, that they are pigments attached to the wall of a cave, and depict a court and jungle world of hunters and hunted, and Buddhist monks and devotees, that vanished from these now bare Deccan hills more than two millennia ago.

Yet these are self-evidently the same people who inhabit Western India today: looking at these images, you cannot help but feel the great distance of time separating them from us; and yet we find in their eyes an emotional immediacy that is at once comprehensible. Some of them look like the guards who admit you to the caves: indeed while the glass coverings were being removed to allow me to photograph the images, the guards joked among themselves about which painted king looked most like which guard. The women on the cave walls wear the same bangles that the Banjara tribes of these hills still stack along their forearms, and their dupattas are decorated with fringes of Paithani still popular in Maharashtra today, as are the fish-scale kham textiles which clothe the hunters in the Shyam Jataka.

It is odd and eerie to stare into the eyes of men and women who died more than 2,000 years ago, but odder still to feel that their faces are reassuringly familiar.

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Pope warns about fight against extremism

Pope Francis & President Obama (Credit: thedailybeast.com)
Pope Francis & President Obama
(Credit: thedailybeast.com)
Pope Francis on Thursday warned members of Congress and the American public not to be consumed by their opposition to religious extremism.

“Our world is increasingly a place of violent conflict, hatred and brutal atrocities, committed even in the name of God and of religion,” Francis said before a rapt joint meeting of Congress.

A delicate balance is required to combat violence perpetrated in the name of a religion, an ideology or an economic system, while also safeguarding religious freedom, intellectual freedom and individual freedoms,” he said. “But there is another temptation which we must especially guard against: the simplistic reductionism which sees only good or evil; or, if you will, the righteous and sinners.”

“We know that in the attempt to be freed of the enemy without, we can be tempted to feed the enemy within,” Francis said. “To imitate the hatred and violence of tyrants and murderers is the best way to take their place.”

Though Francis never mentioned Islam during his historic address — the first ever by a pontiff before a joint meeting of Congress — the comments appear to refer to ongoing global struggles against extremist groups such as the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria (ISIS). Some critics have worried that efforts to crack down on radicalism around the world end up limiting people’s rights and subjecting them to constant surveillance.

Francis’s speech on Thursday captured the attention of all of Washington.
In addition to the comments on extremism, the address largely focused on immigration, climate change and efforts to protect the poor.

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Hajj Stampede Near Mecca Leaves Over 700 Dead

BEIRUT, Lebanon — In streaming ribbons of white, great masses of Muslim pilgrims made their way between cities of air-conditioned tents toward the next stop on their holy tour of Mecca in Saudi Arabia.

Then something went disastrously wrong, trapping the crowds in narrow streets and touching off a mass panic and crushing stampede that left the asphalt covered with lost sandals, crumpled wheelchairs and piles of white-robed bodies.

It was the deadliest accident during the Hajj pilgrimage in a quarter-century, with at least 717 pilgrims from around the world killed and more than 850 wounded. And it posed yet another challenge for the country’s new leader, King Salman, who is already coping with low oil prices, a war in Yemen and an increasingly fierce rivalry with Iran.

The stampede was the latest in a series of crises that have plagued the pilgrimage this season: Just two weeks ago, a crane collapse killed more than 100 visitors, and hotel fires have injured others. The missteps have embarrassed the insular Saudi monarchy, which considers itself the global guardian of orthodox Islam and takes great pride in protecting the holy sites and their millions of annual visitors.

King Salman — who bears the title of “the custodian of the two holy mosques,” giving him personal responsibility for Mecca and Medina — expressed his condolences for the dead in an address aired on Saudi state television and ordered a review of the management of the pilgrimage. A commission was formed to investigate.

Other officials appeared to blame the dead. The Saudi health minister, Khalid al-Falih, said in a statement that the stampede may have been caused by “some pilgrims who didn’t follow the guidelines and instructions issued by the responsible authorities.”

But some present in the area at the time said security forces had temporarily closed exits from an area packed with pilgrims, causing the crowding that led to the stampede.

Khalid Saleh, a Saudi government employee who rushed to the site when he heard screams and sirens, said he had found “huge numbers of people on the ground either dying or injured.” Pilgrims there told him that some of the area’s exits had been closed so that V.I.P. cars could pass, he said.

The Saudis’ main regional rival, Iran, blamed the tragedy on Saudi mismanagement. The head of Iran’s Hajj organization, Said Ohadi, said two paths near the site of the accident had been closed for “unknown reasons.”

“This caused the tragic incident,” he told Iranian state television. “Saudi officials should be held accountable.”

At least 131 Iranians were among the dead, according to Iranian news agencies.

Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, the supreme leader of Iran, blamed “misconduct and improper acts” by Saudi officials and declared three days of public mourning.

The Saudi government has spent billions of dollars on construction in Mecca in recent years aimed at enlarging the grand mosque, adding accommodations and facilitating movement between the sites. Those investments followed a number of high-casualty accidents, including the 2006 deaths of 360 people on a bridge that had long been identified as a dangerous choke point.

Nevertheless, Thursday’s stampede is likely to renew criticism that Saudi Arabia lacks the management skills to protect one of the world’s largest regular human migrations.

Irfan al-Alawi, the executive director of the Islamic Heritage Research Foundation and a critic of how the Saudi government has developed Mecca and another holy city, Medina, said by telephone from Mecca that the stampede had been a result of “poor management” by the government, given the number of past disasters.

The stampede occurred early Thursday, the first day of the Muslim Eid al-Adha holiday, near a T-shaped intersection of narrow streets in Mina, about six miles east of Mecca, where many pilgrims stay in air conditioned tents.

The area is close to Jamarat, where pilgrims gather to throw pebbles at walls in a ritual that represents the stoning of the devil.

Maj. Gen. Mansour Turki, a spokesman for the Saudi Interior Ministry, told reporters that large groups of pilgrims had run into each other and started shoving, causing the stampede, which was exacerbated by extreme heat and fatigue.

General Turki and other officials said they would not comment on how the streets had become so crowded before the official investigation was complete.

And Saudi officials confined reporters given official access to the pilgrimage for hours after the accident, preventing them from reaching the site and investigating its cause.

Survivors described a nightmare situation of getting trapped in a crush of bodies and feeling other people walk over their backs in an effort to escape.

“I saw someone trip over someone in a wheelchair and several people tripping over him,” said Abdullah Lotfy, a pilgrim from Egypt, according to The Associated Press. “People were climbing over each other just to breathe.”

Cellphones and cameras are prohibited from the main sanctuaries, but can be used in the surrounding areas, and videos of the aftermath shared on social media showed scores of lifeless bodies in the street, many covered with the simple white garments pilgrims wear during the hajj.

One video showed a heap of men lying atop one another, while rescue workers in fluorescent yellow vests worked to free struggling survivors trapped between lifeless bodies.

The stampede was the deadliest incident during the hajj — and in the entire kingdom — since 1990, when 1,426 pilgrims perished in a stampede in a tunnel linking Mecca and Mina.

It occurred less than two weeks after a large construction crane toppled over and crashed through the roof of the Grand Mosque in Mecca, killing at least 111 people and injuring 394 others. The Saudi authorities have faulted the Saudi Binladin Group, a construction conglomerate working on the mosque expansion, denying it future contracts and banning some of its executives from leaving the country.

The accidents have occurred as the Saudi government spends billion of dollars on the construction of new buildings — including the world’s largest hotel — that critics say have destroyed the sites’ natural setting and cater only to the wealthiest pilgrims.

But accidents that kill large numbers of visitors have become less common than they were during earlier eras. The last was the stampede in 2006, along with a building housing pilgrims collapsed, killing at least 73 people.

Sami Angawi, a Mecca-born architect who has spent decades studying the pilgrimage, said the Saudi government faces a huge logistical dilemma in welcoming so many people and cycling them through a series of specific sites in a limited amount of time. Some two million pilgrims from 180 countries are performing the hajj this year.

He said the pilgrims’ diversity and lack of a common language added to the challenge. “With a huge number like this and all the diversity that is in it, it is hard to communicate and do orientation,” he said.

But he criticized the Saudi government for seeking to build its way out of the problem instead of improving crowd control.

“There is a lot of money spent, but the solution is not in making more roads or bridges,” he said. “It is in how to organize the management of people to have a flow from one area to another.”

Madawi al-Rasheed, a Saudi anthropologist at the London School of Economics, accused members of the royal family of profiting handsomely from the construction boom.

“The renovation and expansion are done under the pretext of creating more space for Muslim pilgrims, but it masks land grabs and vast amounts of money being made by the princes and by other Saudis,” she said. “There is no accountability.”

Dr. Rasheed said that officials in the kingdom had avoided responsibility in part by citing the belief that anyone who dies during the pilgrimage — one of the five pillars of Islam, and a duty for all able-bodied Muslims with the means to make the trip — goes to heaven.

Saudi state television reported the deaths in text banners on its screen during normal pilgrimage programming, only briefly showing footage of rescue workers putting injured pilgrims into ambulances.

“That is among the things that happen at any large gathering,” one presenter said.

He closed his program by reminding viewers that it is a “virtue” to die while performing the pilgrimage and that the tragedy was only “temporary.”

Reporting was contributed by Mona Boshnaq from London, Kareem Fahim from Cairo, Thomas Erdbrink from Tehran, Christine Hauser from New York, and Sheikha al-Dosary from Alexandria, Va.

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Afghan women soar out of burqas into open skies

The Burqa Generation
The Burqa Generation
KABUL, Sept 21: Zakia Mohammadi, a woman in Afghanistan’s first national paragliding team, waited on a hilltop on the outskirts of Kabul for a wind to lift her craft into the sky, as dozens of watching teenagers clapped and cheered.

She is one of a group of young Afghans taking to the skies of a capital where military helicopters and surveillance balloons are a far more familiar sight.

“When I went up to the sky, I thought I was a bird which had just been freed from a cage,” said Mohammadi, one of two women in the newly established team of 15 that includes two trainers.

“I really enjoyed it.” Women in Afghanistan’s conservative Muslim society are increasingly entering areas such as education, sports and the workplace, but most still wear the head-to-toe garment, the burqa.

“When women see me they don’t believe that an Afghan woman can do this,” said Leeda Ozori, the other woman in the team. “The situation is not good, there is no security, but I am brave and I can do it.”

During the rule of the militant Taliban in the 1990s, Afghan women were kept out of schools, universities and public life. They could not leave their homes unless accompanied by a male family member.

“When we first came here, children were pelting us with stones,” paragliding trainer Mehran Rahbari told Reuters at the top of the hill in Kabul.

“But later, when they found out that we were coming here for sports, they stopped throwing stones at us. Now they love us.” Paragliding is an expensive pastime, however, in a city where the average wage is about $200 a month.

Even a middle-class Afghan will find it tough to afford the $500 cost of two weeks of training, while paragliding equipment costs $5,000.

Getting to the tops of hills takes hours of climbing in a four-wheel drive vehicle, in the absence of proper roads. An army vehicle carries the team’s equipment, with a police escort to fend off possible attacks.

But the team’s biggest concern is their vulnerability when aloft. “We fly for around 20 minutes in the sky and sometimes we fly over people’s houses,” said Naweed Popal, who pooled his cash to set up the group just over three years ago.
“We are concerned if something happens and we find ourselves with no means of defence.” Each craft has a steering mechanism to avoid collisions, and every team member is given a radio to maintain contact.

Although the team hopes to expand operations to other Afghan provinces, security worries now restrict it to Kabul.

“We cannot go anywhere outside Kabul,” said Iranian trainer Rahbari. “We are afraid if we go out and get attacked, one bullet can end all our efforts.” But the women on the team are undeterred.

“Our idea is to show to the world that Afghan women, although living in war and insecurity, have the ability to improve and become developed,” said Mohammadi.