Taliban FM goes viral riding motorcycle through Kabul
Taliban FM goes viral riding motorcycle through Kabul/node/2577554/world
Taliban FM goes viral riding motorcycle through Kabul
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The combination of photos shows Afghanistan's acting foreign minister, Amir Khan Muttaqi riding a motorcycle in Kabul in October 2024. (Social media/Screengrab)
Kabul: A video of Afghanistan’s acting foreign minister riding a motorcycle through Kabul has gone viral on social media, with people saying it showed improving security under Taliban rule.
Officials at the Ministry of Foreign Affairs confirmed to Arab News that the video shot this week shows Amir Khan Muttaqi riding after sunset in the Wazir Akbar Khan area of the Afghan capital.
The street where Muttaqi was driving is less than 1 km away from the Arg — the presidential palace, which since the Taliban takeover of Afghanistan three years ago has served as the meeting place of the country’s interim government.
The surrounding neighborhood was known as the diplomatic zone of Kabul before most representatives of the international community left the country after its Western-backed government collapsed and US-led troops withdrew in August 2021.
The sighting of a minister riding on the street was for some residents a reflection of the country being safer now than during the two-decade period of foreign military presence following the US invasion of Afghanistan in 2001.
“The security is very good now. The security forces are trying day and night to make sure people live in peace without any fear,” Hamza Kawsar, a resident of Kabul, told Arab News on Thursday.
“Unlike the leaders in previous regimes, our current leaders are not hiding from the people. They live a simple life. The foreign minister’s move to come out alone is proof of this.”
While people generally acknowledged that security had improved, many other pending issues were left unaddressed or aggravated.
“It’s been two weeks, and I can’t get my national ID. I go from one office to the other and my work is delayed,” said Rahmanullah, 22, who came from Logar province to Kabul to have his documents issued.
“It’s good that the ministers and other people are able to go around in the city without any worries. But in some offices it’s very difficult to see director-level officials, let alone a minister.”
For Javed Rahimi, a shopkeeper, the motorcycle video was a PR stunt and many new problems emerged with Taliban rule, including huge unemployment, poverty and bans on women’s education and work.
He admitted, however, that cases of theft, robbery, and deadly blasts, which were common before, had decreased.
“The good thing is that there’s no war and conflict anymore,” he said. “Our countrymen are not dying in explosions and attacks every day.”
American Jews who fled Syria ask White House to lift sanctions so they can rebuild in Damascus
They say the sanctions are blocking them from restoring some of the world’s oldest synagogues and rebuilding Syria’s decimated Jewish community
Members of the Hamra family, who fled Damascus in the 1990s, returned to Syria last month for the first time
Updated 6 sec ago
AP
WASHINGTON: American Jews who fled their Syrian homeland decades ago went to the White House this week to appeal to the Trump administration to lift sanctions on Syria that they say are blocking them from restoring some of the world’s oldest synagogues and rebuilding the country’s decimated Jewish community. For Henry Hamra, who fled Damascus as a teenager with his family in the 1990s, the 30 years since have been shadowed by worry for what they left behind. “I was just on the lookout the whole time. The old synagogues, the old cemetery, what’s going on, who’s taking care of it?’ said Hamra, whose family has settled in New York. His family fled the Syrian capital to escape the repressive government of Hafez Assad. With the toppling of his son, Bashar Assad, in December and the end of Assad family rule, Hamra, his 77-year-old father, Rabbi Yusuf Hamra, and a small group of other Jews and non-Jews returned to Syria last month for the first time. They briefed State Department officials for the region last week and officials at the White House on Wednesday. The White House did not immediately respond to a request for comment. They were accompanied by Mouaz Moustafa, executive director of a group called the Syrian American Task Force, who was influential in the past in moving US officials to sanction the Assad government over its institutionalized torture and killings. With Assad gone and the country trying to move out of poverty, Moustafa has been urging US policymakers to lift sweeping sanctions that block most investment and business dealings in Syria. “If you want a stable and safe Syria ... even if it’s as simple as rebuilding the oldest synagogue in the world, the only person that’s able to make that a reality today is, frankly, Donald Trump,” Moustafa said. Syria’s Jewish community is one of the world’s oldest, dating its history back to the prophet Elijah’s time in Damascus nearly 3,000 years ago. It once had been one of the world’s largest, and was still estimated at 100,000 at the start of the 20th century. Increased restrictions, surveillance and tensions after the creation of Israel and under the authoritarian Assad family sent tens of thousands fleeing in the 1990s. Today, only seven Jews are known to remain in Damascus, most of them elderly. What began as a largely peaceful uprising against the Assad family in 2011 grew into a vicious civil war, with a half-million dying as Russia and Iranian-backed militias fought to keep the Assads in power, and the Daesh group imposing its rule on a wide swath of the country. A US-led military coalition routed the Islamic State by 2019. Successive US administrations piled sanctions on Syria over the Assad government’s torture, imprisonment and killing of perceived opponents. Bashar Assad was ousted in December by a coalition of rebel groups led by an Islamist insurgent, Ahmad Al-Sharaa, who today leads what he says is a transition government. He and his supporters have taken pains to safeguard members of Syria’s many minority religious groups and pledged peaceful coexistence as they ask a skeptical international community to lift the crippling sanctions. Although incidents of revenge and collective punishment have been far less widespread than expected, many in Syria’s minority communities — including Kurds, Christians, Druze and members of Assad’s Alawite sect — are concerned and not convinced by promises of inclusive government. After the decades away, Yusuf Hamra’s former Christian neighbors in the old city of Damascus recognized him on his trip back last month and stopped to embrace him, and share gossip on old acquaintances. The Hamras prayed in the long-neglected Al-Franj synagogue, where he used to serve as a rabbi. His son, Henry Hamra, said he was shocked to see tiny children begging in the streets — a result, he said, of the sanctions. Visiting the site of what had been Syria’s oldest synagogue of all, in the Jobar area of Damascus, Hamra found it in ruins from the war, with an ordnance shell still among the rubble. Hamra had become acquainted with Moustafa, then a US-based opposition activist, when he reached out to him during the war to see if he could do anything to rescue precious artifacts inside the Jobar synagogue as fighting raged around it. A member of Moustafa’s group suffered a shrapnel wound trying, and a member of a Jobar neighborhood council was killed. Both men were Muslim. Despite their effort, fighting later destroyed most of the structure. Hamra said Jews abroad want to be allowed to help restore their synagogues, their family homes and their schools in the capital’s old city. Someday, he says, Syria’s Jewish community could be like Morocco’s, thriving in a Muslim country again. “My main goal is not to see my Jewish quarter, and my school, and my synagogue and everything fall apart,” Hamra said.
Judge orders Trump administration to speed payment of USAID and State Dept. debts
Thursday’s decision thaws the administration’s six-week funding freeze on all foreign assistance
Ali issued his order a day after a divided Supreme Court rejected the Trump administration’s bid to freeze funding that flowed through USAID
Updated 4 min 29 sec ago
AP
WASHINGTON: A federal judge on Thursday ordered the Trump administration to speed up its payment on some of nearly $2 billion in debts to partners of the US Agency for International Development and the State Department, giving it a Monday deadline to repay the nonprofit groups and businesses in a lawsuit over the administration’s abrupt shutdown of foreign assistance funding.
US District Judge Amir Ali described the partial payment as a “concrete” first step he wanted to see from the administration, which is fighting multiple lawsuits seeking to roll back the administration’s dismantling of USAID and a six-week freeze on USAID funding, which has forced US-funded organizations to halt aid and development work around the world and lay off workers.
Ali’s line of questioning in a four-hour hearing Thursday suggested skepticism of the Trump administration’s argument that presidents have wide authority to override congressional decisions on spending when it comes to foreign policy.
It would be an “earth-shaking, country-shaking proposition to say that appropriations are optional,” Ali said.
“The question I have for you is, where are you getting this from in the constitutional document?” he asked a government lawyer, Indraneel Sur.
Thursday’s order is in an ongoing case with more decisions coming on the administration’s termination of more than 90 percent of USAID contracts worldwide this month.
Ali’s ruling came a day after a divided Supreme Court rejected the Trump administration’s bid to freeze funding that flowed through USAID. The high court instructed Ali to clarify what the government must do to comply with his earlier order requiring the quick release of funds for work that had already been done.
The funding freeze stemmed from an executive order signed by President Donald Trump on Jan. 20. The administration appealed after Ali issued a temporary restraining order and set a deadline to release payment for work already done.
The administration said it has replaced a blanket spending freeze with individualized determinations, which led to the cancelation of 5,800 USAID contracts — more than 90 percent of the agency’s contracts for projects — and 4,100 State Department grants totaling nearly $60 billion in aid.
“The funding freeze, it’s not continuing. It’s over,” Sur told the judge Thursday.
With thousands of the form-letter contract terminations going out within days earlier this month, nonprofits and businesses charge that no actual individual contract reviews were possible, and that the contract cancelations only made permanent most of the across-the-board program shutdowns from the funding freeze.
The AIDS Vaccine Advocacy Coalition, the Global Health Council and other plaintiffs in the lawsuit are seeking back payment for their share of the nearly $2 billion they and other USAID partners were already owed at the time of the Jan. 20 funding freeze.
Lawyers for the organizations told the court Thursday they also wanted to see all of the contract terminations reversed, and future terminations follow regulations.
The Trump administration said it recently resumed payment for USAID debts after the funding freeze. But it told the court that its processing of payments was being slowed because it had pulled most USAID workers off their jobs, through forced leaves and firing, as part of the agency shutdown.
Ali noted Thursday that USAID had said it routinely made thousands of payments before the agency shutdown, and that it said it had recently called 100 staffers off leave to process payments.
The administration could continue bringing idled workers off leave to make Monday’s deadline, he said.
SpaceX’s latest Starship test flight ends with another explosion
Updated 07 March 2025
AP
Nearly two months after an explosion sent flaming debris raining down on the Turks and Caicos, SpaceX launched another mammoth Starship rocket on Thursday, but lost contact minutes into the test flight as the spacecraft came tumbling down and broke apart.
This time, wreckage from the latest explosion was seen streaming from the skies over Florida. It was not immediately known whether the spacecraft's self-destruct system had kicked in to blow it up.
The 403-foot (123-meter) rocket blasted off from Texas. SpaceX caught the first-stage booster back at the pad with giant mechanical arms, but engines on the spacecraft on top started shutting down as it streaked eastward for what was supposed to be a controlled entry over the Indian Ocean, half a world away. Contact was lost as the spacecraft went into an out-of-control spin.
Starship reached nearly 90 miles (150 kilometers) in altitude before trouble struck and before four mock satellites could be deployed. It was not immediately clear where it came down, but images of flaming debris were captured from Florida, including near Cape Canaveral, and posted online.
The space-skimming flight was supposed to last an hour.
“Unfortunately this happened last time too, so we have some practice at this now,” SpaceX flight commentator Dan Huot said from the launch site.
SpaceX later confirmed that the spacecraft experienced “a rapid unscheduled disassembly" during the ascent engine firing. "Our team immediately began coordination with safety officials to implement pre-planned contingency responses,” the company said in a statement posted online.
Starship didn't make it quite as high or as far as last time.
NASA has booked Starship to land its astronauts on the moon later this decade. SpaceX’s Elon Musk is aiming for Mars with Starship, the world’s biggest and most powerful rocket.
Like last time, Starship had mock satellites to release once the craft reached space on this eighth test flight as a practice for future missions. They resembled SpaceX’s Starlink internet satellites, thousands of which currently orbit Earth, and were meant to fall back down following their brief taste of space.
Starship’s flaps, computers and fuel system were redesigned in preparation for the next big step: returning the spacecraft to the launch site just like the booster.
During the last demo, SpaceX captured the booster at the launch pad, but the spacecraft blew up several minutes later over the Atlantic. No injuries or major damage were reported.
According to an investigation that remains ongoing, leaking fuel triggered a series of fires that shut down the spacecraft’s engines. The on-board self-destruct system kicked in as planned.
SpaceX said it made several improvements to the spacecraft following the accident, and the Federal Aviation Administration recently cleared Starship once more for launch.
Starships soar out of the southernmost tip of Texas near the Mexican border. SpaceX is building another Starship complex at Cape Canaveral, home to the company’s smaller Falcon rockets that ferry astronauts and satellites to orbit.
Trump casts doubt on NATO solidarity, despite it aiding the US after Sept. 11
Trump also suggested that the US might abandon its commitments to the alliance if member countries don’t meet defense spending targets
Last year, NATO’s Secretary-General Jens Stoltenberg said a record 23 of NATO’s 32 member nations had hit the military alliance’s defense spending target
Updated 07 March 2025
AP
WASHINGTON: President Donald Trump on Thursday expressed uncertainty that NATO would come to the US’s defense if the country were attacked, though the alliance did just that after Sept. 11 — the only time in its history that the defense guarantee has been invoked.
Trump also suggested that the US might abandon its commitments to the alliance if member countries don’t meet defense spending targets, a day after his pick for NATO ambassador assured senators that the administration’s commitment to the military alliance was “ironclad.”
Trump’s comments denigrating NATO, which was formed to counter Soviet aggression during the Cold War, are largely in line with his yearslong criticism of the alliance, which he has accused of not paying its fair share toward the cost of defense. But they come at a time of heightened concern in the Western world over Trump’s cozy relationship with Russian President Vladimir Putin, who has long seen NATO as a threat, and as the US president seeks to pressure Ukraine into agreeing to a peace deal with the country that invaded it three years ago.
US President Donald Trump reacts at the Oval Office at the White House in Washington on March 6, 2025. (REUTERS)
Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth sent the alliance into upheaval last month when he said in a speech that the US would not participate in any peacekeeping force in Ukraine, which is not a NATO member, and would not defend any country that participated in it if attacked by Russia.
Trump said Thursday in the Oval Office that other countries would not come to the defense of the US — though they have done exactly that, in the only instance that the Article 5 defense guarantee was invoked.
“You know the biggest problem I have with NATO? I really, I mean, I know the guys very well. They’re friends of mine. But if the United States was in trouble, and we called them, we said, ‘We got a problem, France. We got a problem, couple of others I won’t mention. Do you think they’re going to come and protect us?’ They’re supposed to. I’m not so sure.”
Article 5 was invoked after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks, leading to NATO’s largest operation in Afghanistan. France’s military participated in the operation.
“We are loyal and faithful allies,” French President Emmanuel Macron responded Thursday, expressing “respect and friendship” toward US leaders.
“I think we’re entitled to expect the same,” he said.
Macron invoked “centuries-old history,” namechecking the Marquis de Lafayette, a 19-year-old French nobleman, who was a major-general in the American Continental Army during the Revolutionary War, and Gen. John Pershing, commander of the American army in France during World War I. Macron added that a few days ago, he met American World War II veterans who landed on Omaha Beach as part of the D-Day invasion of Nazi-occupied France.
France and the US “have always been there for each other,” Macron said.
France's President Emmanuel Macron gestures as he addresses the media during a press conference in Brussels on March 6, 2025, to discuss continued support for Ukraine and European defense. (AFP)
When asked Thursday if it he was making it US policy that the US would not defend NATO countries that don’t meet military spending targets, Trump said, “well, I think it’s common sense, right? If they don’t pay, I’m not going to defend them. No, I’m not going to defend them.”
Trump has suggested since his 2016 presidential campaign that the US under his leadership might not comply with the alliance’s mutual defense guarantees and would only defend countries that met targets to commit 2 percent of their gross domestic products on military spending.
The US is the most powerful nation of the seven-decade alliance, has the largest economy among members and spends more on defense than any other member.
The US was one of 12 nations that formed NATO following World War II to counter the threat posed by the Soviet Union to Western European during the Cold War. Its membership has since grown to 32 countries, and its bedrock mutual defense guarantee, known as Article 5, states that an attack on one member is considered an attack on all.
Trump on Thursday also seemed to suggest the US commitment to NATO might be leveraged in his trade war as he seeks to target what he says are unfair trade policies with other nations, including the European Union.
“I view NATO as potentially good, but you’ve got to get, you’ve got to get some good thinking in NATO. It’s very unfair, what’s been happening,” Trump said. “Until I came along, we were paying close to 100 percent of NATO. So think of it, we’re paying 100 percent of their military, and they’re screwing us on trade.”
On Wednesday, Trump’s choice for NATO ambassador, Matt Whitaker, said at his confirmation hearing that in regards to the US commitment to the NATO alliance and specifically Article 5, “It will be ironclad.”
Last year, NATO’s Secretary-General Jens Stoltenberg said a record 23 of NATO’s 32 member nations had hit the military alliance’s defense spending target.
Trump has taken credit for countries meeting those targets because of his threats, and Stoltenberg himself has said Trump was responsible for getting other nations to increase their spending.
Hegseth dismisses as “garbage” critique of US stance on Russia
Updated 07 March 2025
Reuters
WASHINGTON: US Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth on Thursday dismissed as “garbage” accusations that Washington had taken a pro-Russia stance, saying President Donald Trump was pursuing a peaceful end to Russia’s three-year-old invasion of Ukraine.
Trump has piled pressure on Ukraine, pausing all US military and intelligence assistance to Kyiv, as his administration pushes for a negotiated solution to the biggest conflict in Europe since World War Two.
Trump and his advisers, including Hegseth, have also declined to brand Russia as the aggressor.
“The press is interested in narratives. Our president is interested in peace. So we will get characterized one way or another: ‘Oh, your stance is pro-Russia or pro-’ ... it’s all garbage,” Hegseth told reporters.
“The President got elected to bring peace in this conflict, and he is working with both sides in a way that only President Trump can ... to bring them to the table to end the killing.”
Hegseth spoke alongside British Defense Secretary John Healey, who aimed to discuss a peace plan for Ukraine during a meeting at the Pentagon on Thursday.
“It’s the detail of those discussions which are rightly behind the scenes that the defense secretary and I will now pursue this afternoon,” Healey said.
Over the weekend, Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov praised Trump’s “common sense” aim to end the war, while accusing European powers which have rallied around Kyiv of seeking to prolong the conflict.
Trump and Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky had acrimonious talks at the White House on February 28 but since then the two sides have resumed work on a revenue-sharing minerals deal.
At his speech to a joint session of Congress on Tuesday, Trump said he had received a letter from Zelensky in which the Ukrainian leader said he was “ready to come to the negotiating table as soon as possible.”
Trump’s special envoy, Steve Witkoff, said on Thursday he is in discussions with Ukraine for a peace agreement framework to end hostilities with Russia and that a meeting is planned next week with the Ukrainians in Saudi Arabia.
“We’re now in discussions to coordinate a meeting with the Ukrainians,” Witkoff told reporters at the White House. He said it would likely be in Riyadh or Jeddah.
