Afghanistan

Sept 21 (Reuters) - Afghanistan's Taliban rulers announced several senior appointments on Tuesday, naming two veteran battlefield commanders from the movement's southern heartlands as deputies in important ministries.

Main Taliban spokesman Zabihullah Mujahid said Mullah Abdul Qayyum Zakir will be deputy defence minister, while Sadr Ibrahim was named deputy minister for the interior. Both men had been expected to take major positions in the new government but neither was named in the main list of ministers announced this month.

Sept 21 (Reuters) - Afghanistan's Taliban government bolstered its economic team on Tuesday, naming a commerce minister and two deputies as the group tries to revive a financial system in shock from the abrupt end to billions of dollars in foreign aid.

Nooruddin Azizi, a businessman from Panjshir province north of Kabul, was named as acting minister of commerce and industry and would start work immediately, Taliban spokesman Zabihullah Mujahid told a news conference.

20 Sep 2021; MEMO: The terrorist group Daesh has taken credit for Sunday's back-to-back bombings in eastern Afghanistan that claimed at least three lives, Anadolu Agency reported.

The group's Amaaq propaganda news agency posted a statement on Monday about the incident in Jalalabad, the capital of Afghanistan's eastern Nangarhar province bordering Pakistan, claiming that "more than 35 Taliban militia members were killed or wounded" in the attack on a Taliban patrol vehicle.

Kabul, Sep 21 (AP-PTI) The Taliban announced a list of deputy ministers on Tuesday, failing to name any women, despite an international outcry when they presented their all-male Cabinet ministers earlier this month.

The list was presented by government spokesman Zabihullah Mujahid at a new conference in the Afghan capital, Kabul.

KABUL, Sept. 20 (Xinhua) -- Efforts are underway to solve all technical difficulties before international commercial flights resume in Kabul International Airport, airport director Abdul Hadi Hamadani said on Monday.

Domestic flights as well as cargo flights carrying aid items are operating and authorities are working to solve a number of technical problems for the resumption of all commercial international flights, Hamadani told Xinhua.

He made the remarks after local media reported earlier in the day that the airport has launched international flights.

19 Sep 2021; AA: At least two people were killed and 21 others injured in a series of blasts in Afghanistan on Saturday, the first since US forces left the war-torn country on Aug. 31 and the Taliban assumed interim rule.

According to sources, three explosions occurred one after the other in the eastern city of Jalalabad and another in the capital Kabul.

Two people were killed in the explosions, according to a public hospital in Jalalabad, while 19 others, including members of the Taliban, were injured.

KABUL, Afghanistan (AP) — Female employees in the Kabul city government have been told to stay home, with work only allowed for those who cannot be replaced by men, the interim mayor of Afghanistan’s capital said Sunday, detailing the latest restrictions on women by the new Taliban rulers.

Witnesses, meanwhile, said an explosion targeted a Taliban vehicle in the eastern provincial city of Jalalabad, and hospital officials said five people were killed in the second such deadly blast in as many days in the Islamic State stronghold.

(AP) --- Every night in yet another house in Afghanistan’s capital, a U.S. green card-holding couple from California take turns sleeping, with one always awake to watch over their three young children so they can flee if they hear the footsteps of the Taliban.

Sept 17 (Reuters) - Workers in the Afghan capital Kabul replaced signs for the country's women's ministry with those for the Taliban's moral police on Friday, as female former employees of the department said they had been locked out of the building.

A sign for the building was covered by a replacement in a mixture of Dari and Arabic, reading "Ministries of Prayer and Guidance and the Promotion of Virtue and Prevention of Vice" on Friday, according to photographs and Reuters witnesses.

Sept 16 (Reuters) - The Taliban's abrupt return to power has left hundreds of Afghan diplomats overseas in limbo: running out of money to keep missions operating, fearful for families back home and desperate to secure refuge abroad.

The Islamist militant movement, which swiftly ousted Afghanistan's Western-backed government on Aug. 15, said on Tuesday that it had sent messages to all of its embassies telling diplomats to continue their work.