Cambodia’s Ream Naval Base — a facility in the Gulf of Thailand — has in recent years been the subject of interest from major powers competing for influence in Southeast Asia. China’s efforts to access the base first surfaced in July 2019 after the Wall Street Journal reported an alleged agreement allowing the Chinese military to use the base. The […]

An explosion tore through a crowded mosque in western Afghanistan on Friday, killing a prominent cleric close to the country’s Taliban regime, officials said. At least 18 people were killed and 23 more wounded in the blast, according to a statement sent to CBS News’ Ahmad Mukhtar and other Afghan journalists by Mawlawi Hamidullah Mutawakil, a spokesman for the Herat […]

In the year since the fall of Kabul, the situation in Afghanistan has deteriorated exponentially from an economic, humanitarian and human rights perspective. Millions of Afghans are facing severe food insecurity due to lost income and rising food costs, while advances made post-2001 towards women’s rights and media freedom have been rolled back. The Taliban of today are recreating their […]

The ISIS group claimed responsibility for a suicide bombing near the Russian embassy in Afghanistan’s capital on Monday that killed two embassy staff and four others. An ISIS fighter “blew up his suicide vest in a gathering attended by Russian employees” near the embassy, the extremist group said in a statement via Telegram channels.

A suicide bomber blew himself up outside the consular section of Russia’s embassy in Kabul on Monday, killing a top diplomat, a Russian security guard and four Afghans, according to Russian and Afghan officials. Afghan police reported that Taliban guards at the embassy shot dead the attacker, but his device still detonated. The blast happened as the embassy’s second secretary […]

Pakistani security forces raided a militant hideout in a former Taliban stronghold near the border with Afghanistan Monday, triggering a shootout that killed five soldiers and four insurgents. Acting on intelligence, security forces launched the raid in North Waziristan, a district of Khyber Pakhtunkhwa province, according to a military statement. North Waziristan and other former tribal regions in northwestern Pakistan […]

A radical decentralisation of politics and decision-making in Iran is needed to allow Kurdish communities to benefit from natural resources, experts have argued. Kurdish regions in Iran have rich minerals, dense forests and massive surface and underground water deposits. But deforestation, exploitation of the environment and the irregular and unconsidered extraction of gold and aluminium has resulted in environmental and […]

The Iranian Navy’s Jamaran destroyer seized two American maritime drones and then released them in a safe area in the Red Sea as means of preventing naval accidents. The destroyer encountered the “data collecting” vessels during a routine operation aimed at securing shipping routes and confronting piracy and maritime terrorism, the Navy said in a statement on Thursday. The Iranian […]

In 2015, President Barack Obama worked with three European powers, the European Union, Iran, China, and Russia to conclude the Iran nuclear deal, officially known as the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA). In 2018, President Donald Trump formally withdrew the United States from the deal. Instituting his policy of “maximum pressure,” Trump imposed crippling economic sanctions that punished Iran […]

When the school year began in Afghanistan in March 2022, journalists were poised to cover the return of girls to secondary education. Taliban leaders in Kabul had committed to allowing separate education for girls so long as they followed the Taliban-mandated dress code. Instead, the cameras recorded disappointed girls being sent back home. The Taliban’s decision-making process is opaque to […]