Taliban

In a madrassa in the Afghan capital, rows of teenage girls rock back and forth reciting verses of the Koran under the watchful eye of a religious scholar.

The number of Islamic schools has grown across Afghanistan since the Taliban returned to power in August 2021, with teenage girls increasingly attending classes after they were banned from secondary schools.

A suicide bomber struck Monday inside a mosque within a police compound in the northwestern Pakistani city of Peshawar, killing at least 28 people and wounding as many as 150 worshippers, most of them policemen, officials said.

Current and former British military commanders have accused the Duke of Sussex of "making arguments" for Iran's propaganda machine and using his military career for financial gain.

As the recent dialogue between Türkiye, Russia and Syria yields results, the number of Syrian refugees returning to their homeland will increase, President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan said on Jan. 11.

"As the security environment in northern Syria improves, the return of Syrians to their homes is accelerating," Erdoğan said at the International Ombudsman Conference.

 A top U.N. envoy met with the Taliban-led Afghan government's higher education minister Saturday to discuss the ban on women attending universities. Markus Potzel is the first international official to meet with him since the ban was introduced last month.

Prince Harry faced a backlash Friday over his memoir "Spare", with criticism from the media, commentators, army veterans and even the Taliban, while Buckingham Palace kept silent on its widely leaked contents.

Prince Harry says his brother William physically attacked him during a ferocious argument — one of many startling allegations in a new memoir that includes revelations about the estranged royal's drug-taking, first sexual encounter and role in killing people during his military service in Afghanistan.

Foreign Minister Mevlüt Çavuşoğlu held a phone conversation with the minister of Foreign Affairs and International Cooperation of the United Arab Emirates, Sheikh Abdullah bin Zayed Al Nahyan, on Jan. 3 and discussed the latest developments in Afghanistan and the raid on Al-Aqsa Mosque.

The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation says it will commit $1.2 billion to the effort to end polio worldwide. The money will be used to help implement the Global Polio Eradication Initiative's strategy through 2026. 

Two employees of the Russian embassy in Kabul were killed today in a bomb explosion that occurred in the area of the diplomatic mission, world agencies reported, citing the Russian Ministry of Foreign Affairs.