Islamic extremists burned down a girls' school south of the capital and have distributed letters threatening to kill anyone working for the US-backed Afghan government, a senior Afghan military official said on Friday.
The Abu Sofian girls' school, which was housed in a tent, was torched on Wednesday night in Logar province, about 50km south of Kabul, said General Hatiqulluh Luddin, a regional military commander.
He said authorities were still investigating the incident but blamed unnamed "extremists" in nearby villages.
Luddin said that two weeks ago another tented girls' school was burned down in a neighboring district.
The Abu Sofian school, which has about 250 students aged between seven and 13, would reopen as planned yesterday after nearly one month's holiday, he said. Schools across the country have been closed because of hot weather.
The former Taliban regime prohibited girls from attending school as part of its widely criticized drive to establish a "pure" Islamic state, before it was ousted by a US-led military force in late 2001. However, there is still opposition among some in Afghanistan's Pashtun ethnic majority to education for girls.
The Taliban and their allies have recently stepped up attacks on government targets -- particularly in eastern and southern Afghanistan -- in an apparent drive to undermine the administration of President Harmid Karzai.
Luddin said that in the past week, authorities in Logar have found 30 night letters -- fliers sometimes distributed by different extremist groups -- threatening anyone who cooperates with his government.
One letter, claiming to be from the Taliban, said that the group was active all over the country and did not want girls' schools. It threatened to kill anyone who worked with the "infidel" government.
Another letter from a group calling itself Mujahedeen Message said: "Nobody should work with the Americans. It is an infidel government, whose workings should die."
Swedish campaigner Greta Thunberg was deported from Israel yesterday, the Israeli Ministry of Foreign Affairs said, the day after the Israeli navy prevented her and a group of fellow pro-Palestinian activists from sailing to Gaza. Thunberg, 22, was put on a flight to France, the ministry said, adding that she would travel on to Sweden from there. Three other people who had been aboard the charity vessel also agreed to immediate repatriation. Eight other crew members are contesting their deportation order, Israeli rights group Adalah, which advised them, said in a statement. They are being held at a detention center ahead of a
A Chinese scientist was arrested while arriving in the US at Detroit airport, the second case in days involving the alleged smuggling of biological material, authorities said on Monday. The scientist is accused of shipping biological material months ago to staff at a laboratory at the University of Michigan. The FBI, in a court filing, described it as material related to certain worms and requires a government permit. “The guidelines for importing biological materials into the US for research purposes are stringent, but clear, and actions like this undermine the legitimate work of other visiting scholars,” said John Nowak, who leads field
Former Nicaraguan president Violeta Chamorro, who brought peace to Nicaragua after years of war and was the first woman elected president in the Americas, died on Saturday at the age of 95, her family said. Chamorro, who ruled the poor Central American country from 1990 to 1997, “died in peace, surrounded by the affection and love of her children,” said a statement issued by her four children. As president, Chamorro ended a civil war that had raged for much of the 1980s as US-backed rebels known as the “Contras” fought the leftist Sandinista government. That conflict made Nicaragua one of
NUCLEAR WARNING: Elites are carelessly fomenting fear and tensions between nuclear powers, perhaps because they have access to shelters, Tulsi Gabbard said After a trip to Hiroshima, US Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard on Tuesday warned that “warmongers” were pushing the world to the brink of nuclear war. Gabbard did not specify her concerns. Gabbard posted on social media a video of grisly footage from the world’s first nuclear attack and of her staring reflectively at the Hiroshima Peace Memorial. On Aug. 6, 1945, the US obliterated Hiroshima, killing 140,000 people in the explosion and by the end of the year from the uranium bomb’s effects. Three days later, a US plane dropped a plutonium bomb on Nagasaki, leaving abut 74,000 people dead by the
RSS