Tag: afghanistan

In policy shift, State Department ends some bounties on Taliban’s Haqqani network leaders

The State Department is defending its decision to end its bounties against Taliban leader Sirajuddin Haqqani and other Haqqani Network commanders amidst indications that the United States may be adjusting its stance toward the terrorist group ruling Afghanistan.

The State Department’s Reward for Justice website had previously said that the U.S. “is offering a reward of up to $10 million for information” on Sirajuddin, a top leader in the Taliban government and a close ally of al-Qaeda. The bounty on Sirajuddin, now the head of the Taliban’s interior ministry, was first announced in 2009, and it was still in force until sometime in March.

But the bounty was dropped shortly after the Taliban agreed to free George Glezmann — an American citizen held hostage since 2022. No mention of any linkage to U.S. military or foreign policy was made.

Taliban’s “blitzkreig” follows U.S. retreat

The Taliban conducted a lightning-fast takeover of Afghanistan in 2021 and swept into the Afghan capital of Kabul on August 15. The chaotic and deadly non-combatant evacuation operation by the U.S. was conducted through Hamid Karzai International Airport while the U.S. military relied upon a hostile Taliban — including the Haqqani Network — to provide security outside the airport. According to one tally conducted by the Associated Press, the Taliban, the Haqqani Network, and al-Qaeda fighters are responsible for the deaths of most of the more than 2,400 U.S. troops and the more than 1,100 NATO and other U.S. allied troops who were killed during the war.

“It is the policy of the United States to consistently review and refine Rewards for Justice reward offers,” a spokesperson for the State Department told Just the News. “While there is no current reward offer for information on these individuals, the three persons named remain designated as Specially Designated Global Terrorists (SDGTs), and the Haqqani Network remains designated as a Foreign Terrorist Organization and a SDGT.”

Late last month, the State Department also removed its $5 million bounty on Sirajuddin’s younger brother, Abdul Aziz Haqqani, and removed its $5 million bounty on Sirajuddin’s brother-in-law, Yahya Haqqani. The U.S. government is still offering a $5 million bounty for Sirajuddin’s uncle Khalil Haqqani.

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Afghan National Accused of Stabbing Murder, Brought in Under Biden’s “Operation Allies Welcome” Program

Crooked Joe Biden is out of office, but his destructive policies are still wreaking havoc on the United States. Under the previous administration the DHS had a program called “Operation Allies Welcome” which helped settle Afghan refugees into the US.

37-year-old Masiulla Sahil is accused in the stabbing murder of Abdul Niazi, 34 years old. Both the victim and suspect were from Afghanistan.

Niazi was in a wheelchair and had lost both of his legs working for the United States Military while in Afghanistan. Niazi had a business where he helped Afghan refugees with issues including job applications, and paperwork to assist with immigration.

Sahil sought assistance from Niazi for his status as a refugee, but became increasingly frustrated at how long the approval for his refugee status was taking. After a brief argument, Sahil went to his vehicle, got a knife and came back to the office. After threatening Niazi, he stabbed him approximately 20 times.

Niazi had died on scene at his office. Sahil was eventually apprehended and was arrested. According to investigators, video shows the suspect entering and leaving the building. There appeared to be blood on his clothes while he was leaving the place of business.

Investigators also said that in court it was said that Sahil called a family member of Niazi’s to apologize after the attack.

Niazi is survived by his wife and five children. All his children are under 10 years old.

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More Of The Same? Germany Resumes Inbound Afghan Flights After Legacy Parties Survive Election Scare

The German government has resumed flights for Afghan refugees from Pakistan after a temporary suspension during the election campaign. On Tuesday, 155 Afghans arrived in Berlin, marking the first group to be transported since the election results secured power for the legacy parties CDU and SPD, who are expected to form a coalition government.

Flights for Afghan refugees were paused ahead of the election due to concerns over immigration and political optics. The decision followed a series of high-profile crimes committed by Afghan nationals, which fueled fears that further arrivals could strengthen the anti-immigration Alternative for Germany (AfD) party.

The Federal Ministry of the Interior (BMI) had officially cited logistical issues as the reason for canceling two charter flights in the weeks leading up to the election.

Now, with the election concluded, approximately 3,000 Afghans currently waiting at reception centers in Islamabad are expected to be transported to Germany in the coming weeks.

According to Die Welt, Germany has accepted more than 48,000 Afghans since August 2021, with almost 36,000 classified as “particularly endangered” by the federal government. Reports indicate that the cost of these relocations has amounted to several hundred million euros.

The decision to suspend flights during the campaign followed a string of violent crimes involving Afghan nationals across Germany. 

Two weeks before the election, an Afghan migrant drove a vehicle into a left-wing Ver.di demonstration in Munich, injuring at least 28 people, including a toddler. Police confirmed that the attacker, 24-year-old Farhad Noori, was a rejected asylum seeker with a history of theft and other offenses. His asylum claim had been denied in 2020 after authorities deemed his account of persecution in Afghanistan to be fabricated.

The January 2024 fatal stabbing of a toddler and a 41-year-old man in Schöntal Park, Aschaffenburg, by a 28-year-old Afghan national who targeted a group from daycare, sparked national outrage and reignited calls for a suspension of new arrivals and expedited deportations back to the country now governed by the Taliban.

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Osama bin Laden’s Secret Weapon: Economic Literacy

While acknowledging his great evils, future strategists and historians will one day likely recognize Osama bin Laden’s strategic acumen. With minimal resources or technology, Osama bin Laden managed to create immense socioeconomic damage and nearly destroy both of his main enemies—the “godless” Communist Soviet Union and the Zionism-supporting United States. Bin Laden achieved this using only one simple weapon, a basic understanding of economics, and thus, the immense harm that military spending does.

A simple economic concept is all we need to understand why most military spending is so detrimental. Every living order—whether it’d be a single cell, or a collection of them like a human being, or a collection of humans like a community or a company—is in a constant cycle of the production and consumption of wealth. A surgeon produces wealth in terms of surgeries, which he exchanges for money, which he then exchanges for the wealth he consumes in terms of housing, energy, food, and so on.

Production increases the world’s economic pie of wealth and order, while consumption reduces it. If the government taxes people and uses the money to hire 100 laborers to work on digging holes, only to then refill them, the laborers have not produced or increased the economic pie in terms of useful wealth, yet they trade their wages for—and then consume—goods and services (civilian goods that lead to life, enjoyment, etc.). This leads to an overall net shrinking of the economic pie to the detriment of the taxpayers who were deprived of the wealth which they sacrificed a part of their lives to create. In order to realize overall economic growth, action and social cooperation must be coordinated to facilitate more production than consumption.

With the above in mind, let us now look at military spending. Every year, about $1.5 trillion—an amount similar to the entire yearly productive output of Spain, which has the world’s 15th-largest economy at $1.58 trillion GDP—is consumed by the millions of people employed by the national defense bureaucracy and its associated contractors as they produce push-ups, military drills, jets, nukes, and other weapons. There is a massive consumption of real wealth taxpayers were deprived of and production of goods which do not improve the lives of Americans. Should the US be invaded, the production of the aforementioned would have been well worth the $1.5 trillion dollars of wealth consumed. But, since there is no chance of anyone attempting this, and they themselves—not being completely bankrupted by the attempt—the materials created would all be virtually worthless.

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Biden Admin Quietly Spent $15 Mil To Distribute ‘Contraceptives and Condoms’ in Afghanistan—and Said Doing So Would Take ‘Some Coordination’ With Taliban

The Biden administration quietly awarded $15 million in taxpayer funds to Taliban-controlled Afghanistan to help distribute “oral contraceptives and condoms,” a non-public congressional funding notice reviewed by the Washington Free Beacon shows. In doing so, the administration acknowledged that “some coordination” with the Taliban would be “necessary for programmatic purposes.”

The United States Agency for International Development (USAID) earmarked the cash infusion, which has not been previously reported, last July. It transmitted the funds to Afghanistan in August, according to the funding notice and congressional sources familiar with the matter.

The $15 million USAID and its partner groups spent to “procure contraceptives,” including “oral contraceptives and condoms” in the Middle Eastern nation was part of a $100 million package meant to support “basic rights and freedoms” and empower “women and girls” living under Taliban rule. The terrorist organization, the USAID funding notice states, does not allow “young women and girls” to go to school or work in most professional fields.

It was the Biden administration’s chaotic withdrawal from Afghanistan three years prior that led to those restrictions. The Taliban took over Kabul even before the final U.S. military planes left the city, and they quickly banned girls from school beyond sixth grade, making Afghanistan the only country in the world with such restrictions.

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Marco Rubio Exposes Biden Regime’s Cover-Up: Taliban Holds More American Hostages Than Reported — Calls for Massive Bounties on Their Leadership

Newly confirmed U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio raised alarms about the actual number of American hostages held by the Taliban—figures far greater than previously reported.

This disclosure, coming just days after the Secretary’s appointment, points to a disturbing possibility: Biden’s administration knew about the higher hostage counts but chose to hide this critical information from the public.

Marco Rubio, voicing his concerns on X, highlighted the dire situation: “Just hearing the Taliban is holding more American hostages than has been reported. If this is true, we need to immediately place a VERY BIG bounty on their top leaders, maybe even bigger than the one we had on Bin Laden.”

Rubio’s did not specify the exact number of Americans still captive.

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Taliban Defies Trump: Will Keep $7 Billion in Military Gear Left in Afghanistan by Joe Biden During Bungled Withdrawal

As The Gateway Pundit previously reported – Joe Biden supplied the Taliban terrorist organization and their Islamist accomplices with billions of dollars worth of US weapons, armed vehicles, helicopters, ammunition, and piles of cash after Biden bungled his withdrawal from the country.

Rather than destroying the equipment before leaving the country, Joe Biden surrendered billions of dollars worth of US military equipment to the Taliban.

In fact, Joe Biden left 300 times more guns than those passed to the Mexican cartels in Obama’s Fast and Furious program.

The Taliban later released video of the weapons Joe Biden left behind and a room full of stacks of $100 bills Joe left for good measure.

The Taliban posted videos of pallets of weapons and stacks of $100 bills they had seized.

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Donald Trump Cancels Flights for 1,600 Refugees: Report

President Donald Trump has cancelled flights for 1,660 refugees from Afghanistan who were previously cleared by the government to come to the U.S., according to Reuters.

The 1,660 Afghan refugees who have been taken off flights include family members of active-duty U.S. military personnel, unaccompanied minors flying to the U.S. to reunite with family, and those who fought for the former U.S.-backed Afghan government.

Trump’s suspension of U.S. refugee programs and subsequent cancelling of flights is detailed in a report from Shawn VanDiver, the head of the #AfghanEvac, a coalition of U.S. veterans and advocacy groups, and an anonymous U.S. official.

Newsweek reached out to the Trump transition team for comment via email outside of business hours. Newsweek also reached out to the U.S. Department of State for comment via a form on their website outside of working hours.

Trump’s suspension of U.S. refugee programs is significant because he is following through with the immigration crackdowns he mentioned during his presidential campaign.

Further, by cancelling the flights of Afghan refugees, the president is mirroring actions from his first term, as he signed an executive order barring people from Iran, Iraq, Libya, Somalia, Sudan, Syria and Yemen from entering the U.S. for 90 days in 2017.

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Here are the 25 Shocking Photos That Expose the True Disaster of Joe Biden’s Presidency

In less than 24 hours, Donald Trump will be sworn in as the 47th president of the United States.

Since seizing office in 2021 following a presidential election that was tainted by widespread voter fraud, Joe Biden has overseen rampant inflation, disastrous foreign policy, a rise in poverty, the invasion of over ten million illegal aliens, the persecution and torture of political opponents and an obsession with identity politics, among many other failings.

In addition to his political failings, Biden has also been in a state of constant mental and physical decline that eventually culminated with him being forced to drop out the presidential race and make way for his vice-president Kamala Harris.

Thankfully, the American people recognized Harris’s role in Biden’s disastrous leadership and delivered a landslide election victory to Donald Trump that was too big to rig.

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Joe Biden’s Bizarro World of Foreign Policy “Achievements”

Biden’s farewell boasts ring hollow as his foreign policy missteps—from emboldening Iran and Hamas to the chaotic Afghanistan withdrawal—undermine his claims of global achievement.

 Departing President Joe Biden offered a farewell brag this week to his State Department about how his tenure had improved America’s stature abroad. In his now accustomed weird mix of whispering and fiery shouting, Biden apparently felt he had to lie or mislead about almost every one of his “achievements.”

Yet to the extent that anything improved abroad on his watch—the weakening of Iran or the near destruction of Hamas and Hezbollah—it was due despite, not because of, Biden.

Biden, bowing to election year political pressure, did all he could to restrain and block Israeli retaliations to the October 7 massacres. Only after he was repeatedly proven wrong does he now shamelessly take credit for what Israel ironically achieved by ignoring his own threats directed at Israel. Additionally, the Afghanistan withdrawal remains a significant marker of his presidency.

Biden is correct only that Iran is “weaker than it’s been in decades.” But Tehran was aided, not hurt, by Biden’s nonstop efforts to lift sanctions, to allow Iran to make billions in oil revenues, to pay the theocracy billions of dollars in hostage ransom, and to beg the mullahs to reenter the ill-starred Iran deal. Everything Biden did makes it much harder for Israel to survive.

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