Who is Mullah Hasan Akhund? What does the Taliban’s choice of interim prime minister mean for Afghanistan?
By: Ali A. Olomi, Penn State The Taliban announced on Sept. 7, 2021, that Mullah Hasan Akhund has been appointed interim prime minister of Afghanistan. The decision comes more than two weeks after the militant Islamist group seized control of much of the country, including…
New Zealand’s latest terror attack shows why ISIS is harder to defeat online than on the battlefield
By: Joe Burton, University of Waikato As Friday’s attack by an ISIS sympathiser in a New Zealand supermarket has shown, ISIS’s extreme ideology still holds strong appeal for some disaffected Muslims living in the west. ISIS ideology did not die in Syria and Iraq with…
How Joe Biden failed the people of Afghanistan — and tarnished US credibility around the world
William Maley, Australian National University In April 1961, just months after the young John F. Kennedy was inaugurated as the 35th president of the United States, his reputation for expertise in foreign policy took a battering as a result of the Bay of Pigs fiasco,…
‘Journalism is sacred work’: Afghanistan’s front line reporters
By Robyn Huang and Matt Reichel It was about 8am on a Monday morning in April 2018 when Bushra Seddique felt the multi-storey apartment building she was living in with her family in Kabul’s Shash Darak district shake. Smoke billowed from the street below. She barely had time to…