As the West leaves Afghanistan, Kabul’s neighbours will need to work with the Taliban to bring stability to the region
Since the Taliban took control of Afghanistan the focus has been on the evacuation effort, as people scramble to leave a country which has been grappling with war for two decades.
Western forces have now left the country and thoughts will turn to what a post-Western Afghanistan will look like, with the Taliban in control.
In the short-term, neighbours will be watching, hoping for stability and the Taliban will be hoping for international recognition as they seek to establish a government after 20 years in the wilderness.
Chinese delegates have already met with representatives from the Taliban as Beijing looks set to support the country
There will be much soul-searching in Washington, London and other NATO capitals as the fallout of the last few weeks is scrutinised.
But in the cities, mountains and deserts of Afghanistan and Central Asia, the attention will turn to writing the history of the fallout of the Taliban’s victory.
Afghanistan, and the wider region, is a different place compared to 2001 when the US military intervention began after 9/11. The US had issued a threat to Pakistan at the time, telling it to sever ties with the Taliban or be treated like them by US forces.
It has never been clear whether Pakistan complied with this threat but Pakistan, like China and Iran, will be a key player in Afghanistan’s future simply because of their proximity.
All of Afghanistan’s neighbouring countries will react to the developments in the last week; Iran shares a long border with western Afghanistan; China has a comparatively small border to the northeast; while Tajikistan, Uzbekistan and Turkmenistan are to the north.
Could ISIS Khorasan cause a civil war?
Dr Afzal Ashraf, a visiting fellow at the University of Nottingham, suggests Afghanistan could be better without a US military presence in its territory.
“Over the last 20 years, the West has constantly indicated a complete lack of cultural and strategic intelligence. The West fails to understand that the Taliban came into existence to fight corruption, and it instead installed a government in a position that is known to be corrupt,” he told Sky News.
There is a concern from neighbouring countries that the Taliban could spread instability into its borders and Afghanistan slides back into a civil war.
Samir Puri, a senior fellow at the International Institute of Strategic Studies, believes the US military has taken the “brunt of the instability and with the US departure there will be an onus on the region to take the stability”.
“Many of these neighbouring states are in antipathy with the US, not a single one hosts a US military base,” he told Sky News.
“In the medium-term, the Taliban and Afghanistan’s neighbours all have the incentive to allow ISIS not to use Afghanistan as a breeding ground for extremism. They should work together; it would be smart for the Taliban by helping to not export the violence.”
The Taliban have offices in Doha, Qatar and could lean on their Middle Eastern allies for support in the short term
In varying degrees, Tehran and Beijing are each in dispute with Washington and even the government in Islamabad has grown weary of the US.
Prime Minister Imran Kahn was critical of the US last week when he said: “Pakistan is just considered only to be useful in the context of somehow settling this mess which has been left behind.” And Mr Puri suggests a “US failure is going to be a good thing” for the region.
But for all the neighbouring countries, the immediate worry could be one of civil war. ISIS Khorasan, who claimed the attack outside Kabul airport on 25 August, are sworn enemies of the Taliban and have a vested interest in stopping and disrupting the Taliban.
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The US is reported to have killed 10 members of one family after it tried to stop suicide bombers attacking Kabul airport.
The ISIS-K attack killed 182 people, including 169 Afghan civilians and 13 US service members.
In response, the US launched an airstrike against what the US military said was a vehicle carrying three ISIL-KP members and another drone strike was carried out on 29 August – allegedly killing 10 members of a family, including children.
But Dr Ashraf believes the threat of a civil war caused by ISIS-K is low. He said: “I doubt there will be a civil war because ISIS-K is too small in number and too dispersed for anything that can be identified close to a civil war.
Western forces have left Afghanistan after 20 years in the country
“The only part of Afghanistan where they have a significant rebellion involving fighting is in the Panjshir Valley and even that cannot be called a civil war.
“It would be interesting to see how the Taliban deal with ISIS. They potentially have the ability to deal with them more effectively than the previous government supported by the CIA and other western agencies. They will be keen to eliminate ISIS, but it is less certain as to how and when they can achieve that.”
While stability is uncertain, the Taliban should focus on its economy
In the short-term, the region’s focus, and that of the Taliban, will be on security but the new leaders will need to look at rebuilding the economy, something that will require corporation and support from its neighbours.
Dr Ashraf said: “The Taliban are hugely dependent on international support. What they are saying is our ‘country boys’ are great at facing and firing bullets, but they can’t do much anything else.
“That’s why they want a representative government and want to retain as many people as possible in government and elsewhere.
“What is different is they are a little more serious and savvier about the fact they won’t be able to live only on handouts, like the previous government.”
Given 20 years of war, it is going to be politically difficult for the western governments to be seen to be funding and supporting a Taliban-led government, even if they wanted to.
They could indirectly provide assistance through the significant work of the United Nations in the country but it is likely that most support comes from other sources in the region.
In the last week, the focus has been on evacuating those on the ground. Soon it will turn to what a Taliban-led Afghanistan looks like Pic: @DefenceHQ
“They will want to invest any support on becoming self-sufficient. They could possibly have some investment from Qatar and other Middle Eastern governments for economic and social development,” Dr Ashraf adds.
Unlike in 2001, the region has greater corporation capability through the multinational Shanghai Cooperation Organisation (SCO).
All but one country, Iran, hold membership status to the SCO and at the latest summit in July 2021, the instability in Afghanistan was discussed.
Afghanistan has held observer status since 2012, and while formal membership may be delayed, it offers a diplomatic mechanism to coordinate a regional response to the ever-changing realities of Taliban rule.
ISIS-K, who carried out the attack outside the airport on 26 August, are sworn enemies of the Taliban and will seek to disrupt them
The SCO was formed in 1996 as a reaction to the civil war in Afghanistan and the dissolution of the USSR.
It offered ways to foster economic cooperation in the region for its founders China and Russia, as well as a way to track security threats.
While the SCO will look at how they can help the Taliban bring stability, Afghanistan’s neighbours will have their own bilateral responses.
China’s foreign minister met with representatives of the Taliban earlier this week and according to Dr Hongyi Lai, an associate professor at the University of Nottingham in China, Beijing will “see it as a positive development”.
From a Chinese point of view, aligning themselves with Afghanistan will allow them to use it as a bargaining chip on the global stage
“They [China] will be aware of the political and security challenges for them but it is an opportunity for China to play out its influence with the Taliban as a diplomatic tool with the US and Joe Biden,” he said.
“They will use it as a bargaining chip and initially the Taliban will need to gain international recognition with the help of China.
“Chinese mentality regarding stability is they will focus on the economic solution rather than government, which is postulated by the West.”
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Dr Lai and Dr Ashraf both suggested mining rare metals could give the potential for both sides to corporate and build up Afghanistan’s economy.
Dr Ashraf adds that Afghanistan has the potential the develop its economy through agriculture, something that is relatively cost-effective and offsets the potential for radicalisation through the creation of jobs.
Mr Puri also suggests a potential bilateral trade deal between China and Kabul and Dr Ashraf is “confident initially it will be a bilateral” agreement with China.
The Taliban has long-established existing relationships with Qatar and the United Arab Emirates – they have offices in Doha and both countries have supported the group financially in recent years.
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General Lord Richard Dannatt ponders the future for Afghanistan now that the Taliban have gained control.
Neither Doha nor Abu Dhabi will want the Taliban to fall into old habits and use the drug trade as a way to survive financially and Dr Ashraf suggests that this will stop senior Taliban officials from investing in the trade and potentially risk important funding now 80% of aid has been cut by the United States.
While it isn’t clear yet whether it is bilateral or multilateral ties that bind Afghanistan to its neighbours, it is evident regional cooperation without western involvement is much more developed now than it was 20 years ago.
Afghanistan’s neighbouring states will be initially looking to shore up their border against any threat of the instability spilling over but once the dust has settled, they will seek to work together to minimise the impact of the US departure.
World
Video emerges of aid workers being fired on in Gaza – contradicting Israeli account of deadly attack
Footage has emerged of the moment 15 aid workers were killed in Gaza last month – showing their ambulances and fire insignia were clearly visible when Israeli troops are believed to have opened fire on them.
The bodies of 15 aid workers – eight medics working for the Palestine Red Crescent Society (PRCS), six civil defence members, and one United Nations employee – were found in a “mass grave” after the incident, according to the head of the UN Office for Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs Jonathan Whittall.
The Israeli military said it is investigating – claiming before the video came to light that its initial inquiry found its troops opened fire on vehicles without headlights or emergency signals, which therefore looked “suspicious”. It also says there was an evacuation order in place in the area at the time of the incident.
But video footage obtained by the PRCS – and verified by Sky News – shows ambulances and a fire vehicle clearly marked with flashing red lights.
Vehicles are seen with red flashing lights in the footage
Sky News has used aftermath video and satellite imagery to verify the location and timing of the footage.
It was filmed on 23 March north of Rafah. It shows a convoy of marked ambulances and a fire-fighting vehicle travelling south along a road towards central Rafah. All of the vehicles visible in the convoy have their flashing lights on.
It was filmed early in the morning, with a satellite image seen by Sky News taken at 9.48am local time on the same day showing a group of vehicles bunched together off the road.
The PRCS first posted about losing contact with its crews just before 7am local time.
Satellite imagery shows the area on 26 March, three days later. Tyre tracks are visible, as are groundworks likely created by military vehicles.
Pic: Planet Labs PBC
The footage is first filmed from inside a moving vehicle, through the windscreen a convoy of vehicles is visible – including ambulances and a fire truck with flashing emergency signal lights.
When the convoy stops, a vehicle is seen having veered off the road to the left-hand side.
The vehicle where the video is being filmed from stops and the aid workers get out. Intense gunfire then breaks out and continues for around five minutes.
The paramedic filming the video is heard saying in Arabic that there are Israelis present – and reciting a declaration of faith used before someone dies.
Hebrew voices are also heard in the background but it is not clear what they are saying.
The footage was filmed from a moving vehicle
Israel conducting ‘thorough examination’
In a fresh statement on Saturday, the Israel Defence Forces (IDF) said the incident is “under thorough examination”.
“All claims, including the documentation circulating about the incident, will be thoroughly and deeply examined to understand the sequence of events and the handling of the situation,” it added.
In its statement on Saturday, the PCRS said the clip was “found on the phone of martyred EMT Rif’at Radwan, after his body was recovered” and that it “clearly shows that the ambulances and fire trucks they were using were visibly marked, with flashing emergency lights on at the time they were attacked”.
“This video unequivocally refutes the occupation’s claims that Israeli forces did not randomly target ambulances, and that some vehicles had approached ‘suspiciously without lights or emergency markings’,” it added.
‘They should have been protected’
Speaking at the United Nations on Friday, PRCS president Dr Younis Al Khatib said the organisation has “asked for an independent investigation”.
He added: “Something I can release, I heard the voice of one of those kids. I heard the voice of one of those team members who was killed and his phone was found with his body and he recorded the whole event.
“His last words before being shot, ‘Forgive me, mom. I just wanted to help people. I wanted to save lives’.”
Pic: Palestine Red Crescent Society (PRCS)
Dylan Winder, permanent observer of the International Federation of the Red Cross (IFRC) said it is “outraged at the deaths of eight medics from the Palestinian Red Crescent Society killed on duty in Gaza“.
“They were humanitarians. They wore emblems that should have been protected. Their ambulances were clearly marked, and they should have returned to their families. They did not,” he said.
“Even in the most complex conflict zones, there are rules. These rules of international humanitarian law could not be clearer: civilians must be protected, humanitarians must be protected, health services must be protected.”
In a statement issued before the footage of the incident emerged, the IDF said it condemned “the repeated use of civilian infrastructure by the terrorist organisations in the Gaza Strip, including the use of medical facilities and ambulances for terrorist purposes”.
It claimed that several members of the militant groups Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad were killed in the incident.
It did not comment directly on the deaths of the Red Crescent workers but later told the Reuters news agency it had allowed the bodies to be recovered from the area, which it described as an active combat zone.
Fifteen people died in the incident on 23 March
Bodies found in ‘mass grave’
The bodies of the missing aid workers were found in sand in the south of the Gaza Strip in what Mr Whittall, called a “mass grave”, marked with the emergency light from a crushed ambulance.
He posted pictures and video of Red Crescent teams digging in the sand for the bodies and workers laying them out on the ground, covered in plastic sheets.
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Bodies of aid workers found in Gaza
Philippe Lazzarini, head of the UN agency for Palestinian Refugees (UNRWA), said that the bodies had been “discarded in shallow graves” in what he called “a profound violation of human dignity”.
According to the UN, at least 1,060 healthcare workers have been killed in the 18 months since Israel launched its offensive in Gaza after Hamas fighters stormed southern Israel on 7 October 2023.
The UN is reducing its international staff in Gaza by a third because of safety concerns.
Palestinian health authorities say more than 50,000 people have been killed since Israel launched its campaign in Gaza in response to the 7 October assault, when Hamas militants crossed the border into southern Israel, killing more than 1,200 people, and taking some 250 hostage.
Gaza’s health ministry records do not distinguish between civilians and combatants.
Gaza’s health ministry has removed 1,852 people from its official list of war fatalities since October, after finding that some had died of natural causes or were alive but had been imprisoned.
The list of deaths currently stands at 50,609 following the removals. Gaza’s health ministry records do not distinguish between civilians and combatants.
Almost all of the names removed (97%) had initially been submitted through an online form which allows families to record the deaths of loved ones where the body is missing.
The head of the statistics team at Gaza’s health ministry, Zaher Al Wahidi, told Sky News that names submitted via the form had been removed as a precautionary measure pending a judicial investigation into each one.
“We realised that a lot of people [submitted via the form] died a natural death,” Mr Wahidi said. “Maybe they were near an explosion and they had a heart attack, or [living in destroyed] houses caused them pneumonia or hypothermia. All these cases we don’t [attribute to] the war.”
Others submitted via the form were found to be imprisoned or to be missing with insufficient evidence that they had died.
Some families submitting false claims, Mr Wahidi said, may have been motivated by the promise of government financial assistance.
It is the largest removal of names from the list since the war began, and comes after 1,441 names were removed between August and October – 54% of them originating in hospital morgue records rather than the online form.
Mr Wahidi says his team audited the hospital data after receiving complaints from people who had ended up on the list despite being alive.
They found that hospital clerks, when operating without access to the central population registry and lacking full names or dates of birth for the dead, had marked the wrong people as dead in their records.
In total, 8% of people who were listed as dead in August have since been removed from the official death toll. Many of those may later be added back in, as the judicial investigations proceed.
‘It doesn’t look like manipulation’
Gabriel Epstein, a research assistant at US thinktank The Washington Institute for Near East Policy, said there’s no reason to think the errors are the result of deliberate manipulation intended to inflate the share of women and children among the dead.
“If 90% of the removed entries were men aged 18-40, that would look like manipulation,” he said. “But it doesn’t look like that.”
Of those entries removed since the start of the war and whose demographic information was recorded, 41% are men aged 18 to 60, while 59% are women, children and elderly people.
By comparison, 44% of remaining deaths are working-age men. This means that the removals have had the effect of slightly reducing the share of women and children in the official list.
Names were previously added to the list without verification
Until October, Mr Wahidi said, names submitted via the online form had been added to the official list of registered deaths before undergoing a judicial confirmation process.
The publication of unverified deaths submitted via the form had previously led to issues with the data, with 1,295 deaths submitted via the form being removed from the list prior to October. This included 474 people who were later added back again.
Sky News previously understood that names from the form were only published after undergoing judicial confirmation. However, Mr Wahidi says this practice only began in October.
“This does cause me to downgrade the quality of the earlier lists, definitely below where I thought they were,” said Professor Michael Spagat, chair of Every Casualty Counts, an independent civilian casualty monitoring organisation.
Read more:
Analysis: Gaza aid workers’ deaths
What happened to the ceasefire?
A Ministry of Health document from July 2024 confirms that names submitted through the online form were, at the time, included in the official fatality list before being verified.
These names “are initially included in the final count of martyrs, but verification procedures are undertaken afterward”, the document says.
“They basically said that they were posting these things provisionally pending investigation,” said Prof Spagat.
“There may have been literally zero people, including us, who actually absorbed this message, but they weren’t hiding it either.”
More than 1,200 Israelis have been killed in the 7 October attack and ensuing war.
The Data and Forensics team is a multi-skilled unit dedicated to providing transparent journalism from Sky News. We gather, analyse and visualise data to tell data-driven stories. We combine traditional reporting skills with advanced analysis of satellite images, social media and other open source information. Through multimedia storytelling we aim to better explain the world while also showing how our journalism is done.
World
Global markets have given Trump a clear no-confidence vote – and his fickleness is making the problem worse
Global financial markets gave a clear vote of no-confidence in President Trump’s economic policy.
The damage it will do is obvious: costs for companies will rise, hitting their earnings.
The consequences will ripple throughout the global economy, with economists now raising their expectations for a recession, not only in the US, but across the world.
Tariffs latest: FTSE 100 suffers biggest daily drop since COVID
Financial investors had been gradually re-calibrating their expectations of Donald Trump over the past few months.
Hopes that his actions may not match his rhetoric were dashed on Wednesday as he imposed sweeping tariffs on the US’ trading partners, ratcheting up protectionism to a level not seen in more than a century.
On Wednesday, Donald Trump announced global tariffs, ratcheting up protectionism. Pic: Reuters
Traders at the Frankfurt stock exchange watched the DAX plummet on Friday. Pic: Picture-alliance/dpa/AP
Markets were always going to respond to that but they are also battling with another problem: the lack of certainty when it comes to Trump.
He is a capricious figure and we can only guess his next move. Will he row back? How far is he willing to negotiate and offer concessions?
Read more:
No winners from Trump’s tariff gameshow
Trade war sparks ‘$2.2trn’ global sell-off
These are massive unknowns, which are piled on to uncertainty about how countries will respond.
China has already retaliated and Europe has indicated it will go further.
Vehicles destined for export, like these in Yantai in eastern China, face massive US tariffs. Pic: Chinatopix/AP
Container ports like Oakland in California might expect activity to fall. Pic: AP
That will compound the problems for the global economy and undoubtedly send shivers through the markets.
Much is yet to be determined, but if there’s one thing markets hate, it’s uncertainty.
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