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It was reported recently that the USA and the Taliban have reached a peace agreement on Afghanistan that will allow US forces to leave that country 17 years after they invaded it on October, 2001, less than a month after 9/11. Al Qaeda..... A large number of the terrorists that filled the country were killed, some were captured and some escaped to other countries. The impression left by the swift operation was that the Taliban would never gain back its strength and that Afghanistan would never again be a terror state. And then last week it was reported that America...

The United States on Tuesday offered a reward of up to $3 million for information about a former Tajik special operations colonel whom it trained in counter-terrorism before he joined the Islamic State militant group. The U.S. State Department announced the reward for Gulmurod Khalimov in a statement that made no mention of his training, which included attending five U.S.-funded courses in the United States and Tajikistan between 2003 and 2014....

DUSHANBE, December 11, 2013, Asia-Plus – The first deputy head of the Committee for TV and Radio-broadcasting under the Government of Tajikistan, Saidali Siddiqov, has confirmed information about banning Farther Frost from New Year’s broadcasts in Tajikistan. “Father Frost, his maiden sidekick Snegurochka (Maiden Snow), and New Year’s tree will not appear on the state television this year, because these personages and attributes bear no direct relation to our national traditions, though there is no harm in them” Siddiqov told Asia-Plus in an interview on December 11. According to him, there was no any order on that point from above....

WASHINGTON — When the U.S. State Department announced this week that it finally is going to designate the Haqqani network as a foreign terrorist organization, it was a nonevent for most of our countrymen. That's because few Americans know how deadly the organization is. For that we can thank those at Foggy Bottom who are wedded to the naive hope of a near-term "diplomatic breakthrough" in Afghanistan. Couple that misguided belief with the Obama administration's self-deception that the radical Islamic jihad against the West ended with the demise of Osama bin Laden and it's understandable why the Haqqani network...

In Dushanbe, a young man, dressed as Santa Claus, was killed by a mob of young people, shouting accusations of "infidel," as a senior source in the Tajik Interior Ministry disclosed. "The young man had decided to congratulate his relatives dressed up in a Santa Claus outfit. When he approached the door of his house, he was attacked by a mob of about 30 young people, shouting, "Tu kofiri" ("Infidel"), who inflicted on Parviz numerous stab wounds from which he died in the hospital," - said the source. The authorities have admitted the fact that 24-year old Parviz Davlatbekov had...

DUSHANBE, Tajikistan (AP) — Russia began deporting Tajik migrants Tuesday, the first in a wave of expulsions in apparent retaliation for the jailing of a Russian pilot in the Central Asian nation, officials in Tajikistan said. The spat threatens to imperil the livelihood of thousands of Tajik laborers and stir discontent in a country struggling to protect its border with Afghanistan. The former Soviet nation's economy relies heavily on the remittances provided by the many hundreds of thousands of Tajiks working in Russia. Over the past year, Moscow has been attempting to strong-arm Tajikistan into permitting Russian border troops to...

SNIPPET: The Supreme Court of Tatarstan found 12 activists of the Kazan division of the international terrorist organization Islamic Liberation Party (Hizb ut-Tahrir) guilty of extremism. "Seven men, including Tajik citizen Dzhurayev and six Russians, have received four to eight years in a penal colony," court press secretary Natalya Loseva told Interfax. Four other Kazan residents have received suspended sentences of three years and six months to five years in prison." SNIPPET: ""The accomplice Gimaliyev was found insane and is exempt from criminal liability. He will be forcibly treated," Loseva said."

Countries around the world have expressed their support to the Chinese government on its handling of the recent riots in Lhasa, capital city of China's Tibet Autonomous Region. A spokesman of the Foreign Ministry of the Democratic People's Republic of Korea (DPRK) on Thursday strongly denounced the unsavory elements of their moves to seek "the independence of Tibet" and scuttle the upcoming Beijing Olympics. He expressed support to the Chinese government in its efforts to ensure social stability and the rule of law in Tibet and to defend the fundamental interests of the Tibetan people. A spokesman of Mongolia's...

Former Ambassador to Jordan to Face US Arms Deal Charges April 20, 2007 The Northern Echo/ thenorthernecho.co.uk A judge has ruled that a former Iranian diplomat living in the North-East should be extradited to the US to face charges of trying to buy military equipment for his homeland. Nosratollah Tajik, 53, of Coxhoe, County Durham, who was an honorary fellow at Durham University, has been accused of being the British link in a £1.5m international arms-smuggling ring spanning the US, Holland and Turkey. Mr Tajik, who was Iran's ambassador to Jordan between 1999 and 2003, was arrested last autumn after...

Undercover American agents are staging secret 'sting' operations in Britain against criminal and terrorist suspects they want to extradite to the US. [• Comment: Beware: George Bush's secret agents can now arrrest us in our own country] In a recent operation, agents from America's Department of Homeland Security set up a suspect by posing as dealers wanting to illegally sell night-vision goggles for export to Iran. The spies arranged a series of clandestine meetings in London hotels, which they secretly filmed as evidence. It is thought to be the first time American agents have been caught using such sting tactics...

Two men attacked and stabbed a nine-year-old girl of mixed Russian and African heritage in St. Petersburg, seriously injuring her in an apparent xenophobic attack, officials said Sunday. The Saturday evening attack took place in an apartment building hallway and was the latest incident targeting foreigners or minorities in Russia's second-largest city. Aliu Tunkara, who heads a civic group for Africans in St. Petersburg, said the girl was returning home after a walk and had just entered the building when two men stabbed her. Alexander Klaus, an investigator with the city prosecutor's office, said in televised comments that during the...

AMIAN, Afghanistan — Hussein Jan, a 51-year-old farmer, tossed a stone into a shallow pit dug on a slope above this town. "They shot us here, 76 people, they killed everyone, and only I survived," he said. "With me there were 11 people from my village, most of them relatives, and I alone survived," he said. He laughed, tipping his head back, but his face suddenly twisted into a grimace of terrible pain. In tales like this, the people of the Bamian region have been counting their dead since they returned to this fabled valley seven months ago, after the...