On 26 December, 27 Afghan peace activists were released by Taliban insurgents after being held for 45 hours.
The activists from the People’s Peace Movement (PPM) were detained by the Taliban in Farah Province, western Afghanistan. Their six-car delegation was part of a national speaking tour urging all sides to agree to a ceasefire.
The PPM, which began in early 2018 in Helmand province, said this was the fourth time its peace marchers had been kidnapped by the Taliban.
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The US military, Afghan government forces and the Taliban have all escalated their deadly attacks during peace negotiations.
In early September, the Taliban insurgency and the US government reached an agreement in principle on the staged withdrawal of 14,000 US troops from Afghanistan by the end of November 2020.
The next US presidential elections are on 3 November 2020.
Borhan Osman, an analyst with the International Crisis Group, reported from Taliban…
At an April, 2017 Symposium on Peace in Nashville, TN, Martha Hennessy spoke about central tenets of Maryhouse, a home of hospitality in New York City, where Martha often lives and works. Every day, the community there tries to abide by the counsels of Dorothy Day, Martha’s grandmother, who co-founded houses of hospitality and a vibrant movement in the 1930s. During her talk, she held up a postcard-sized copy of one of the movement’s defining images, Rita Corbin's celebrated woodcut listing…
24 October 2015
Kabul - Tall, lanky, cheerful and confident, Esmatullah easily engages his young students at the Street Kids School, a project of Kabul’s “Afghan Peace Volunteers,” an anti-war community with a focus on service to the poor. Esmatullah teaches child laborers to read. He feels particularly motivated to teach at the Street Kids School because, as he puts it, “I…
Last year, it was reported that the ministry of defence (MoD) had tried to stop the publication of this book, written by a British army officer. The MoD argued that it was inappropriate for a serving officer (Martin has since resigned) to publish such a critical work about Britain’s 2006–2014 occupation of Helmand province in Afghanistan.
There is certainly much to embarrass the British military in Martin’s work, a reworking of his PhD thesis. Based on over 150 interviews with…
Sentenced last year to 35 years imprisonment for leaking thousands of classified files to Wikileaks, Chelsea Manning’s real crime was embarrassing the US government and exposing some of the brutal realities of the US wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.
Clark Stoeckley’s crudely-illustrated non-fiction graphic novel provides an accessible precis of Manning’s trial, taking us from her first pre-trial hearing in December 2011 through to her sentencing in August 2013. Along the way, we learn…
On 9 July, the UN reported a 24% increase in civilian casualties compared to the same period in 2013, noting that: ‘In 2014, the fight is increasingly taking place in communities, public places and near the homes of ordinary Afghans, with death and injury to women and children in a continued disturbing upward spiral’.
According to the report, these developments were, at least in part, a consequence of the closure of US/NATO bases and command posts, which has led to an increased…
On the 28th of March, 2014, at about 4 p.m., the Afghan Peace Volunteers heard a loud explosion nearby. For the rest of the evening and night, they anxiously waited for the sound of rocket fire and firing to stop. It was reported that a 10 year old girl, and the four assailants, were killed.
Four days later, they circulated a video, poem and photos prefaced by this note: “We had been thinking about an appropriate response to the violence perpetrated by the Taliban, other militia…
As I write, two of my friends are in Afghanistan visiting the Afghan Peace Volunteers (APV) – a community of young peace activists in Kabul whose writings and short films (‘love letters from Kabul’) are deeply poetic.
I was reminded of the APV when reading this book. In the late 1960s, the US carried out a massive secret bombing campaign over the Xieng Khoang region of Laos. In just five years, thousands of people were killed and an entire ancient civilisation wiped…
Two weeks ago in a room in Kabul, Afghanistan, I joined several dozen people, working seamstresses, some college students, socially engaged teenagers and a few visiting internationals like myself, to discuss world hunger. Our emphasis was not exclusively on their own country’s worsening hunger problems. The Afghan Peace Volunteers (AVP), in whose home we were meeting, draw strength from looking beyond their own very real struggles.
With us was…
Kabul: The fire in the Chaman e Babrak camp began in Nadiai’s home shortly after noon. She had rushed her son, who had a severe chest infection, to the hospital. She did not know that a gas bottle, used for warmth, was leaking; when the gas connected with a wood burning stove, flames engulfed the mud hut in which they lived and extended to adjacent homes, swiftly rendering nine extended families homeless and destitute in the midst of already astounding poverty. By the time seven fire trucks…
From Sherif in Egypt
My dear enemy, I kill you with love…
As my mind was growing, by reading and opening my eyes, my enemy took different shapes. At first, I thought he was the guy who beat the teenager pride out of me in a train fight over a girl, but that went by, forgotten and forgiven, leaving no scars, but rather a smile.
Then there was my neighbour on the farm land who was moving the border between us towards my land about five centimetres every year. He had the…
On the 16th of November, 2013, eight-year-old Hashim s/o Abdul Hamid and nine-year-old Zukoom s/o Abdul Majid were on the streets of Kabul polishing boots when a suicide bombing (in opposition to the U.S./Afghanistan Bilateral Security Agreement) killed them.
Johnny Barber, a peace activist from New York, and Ronya, an independent, freelance journalist from Germany, accompanied the…
On 12 October, Friends Meeting House on Euston Road, London, played host to a conference which aimed to examine the ongoing conflict in Afghanistan and explore practical ways to support the emergence of a nonviolent peace movement in the country.
Participants, including more than 80 peace activists and members of the Afghan diaspora, began by hearing from an Afghan woman who had recently won her asylum claim to stay in the UK. She underlined the importance of education for women…
