Taliban offensive

The Taliban warned the United States not to "destabilize" the regime on Oct. 9 during their first face-to-face talks since the U.S. withdrawal, as a deadly sectarian bombing raised further questions about their grip on power.

The Taliban killed a child. The reason - suspicion that his father was involved in the resistance against the new regime.

The news was spread by Afghan media, which published a video with the bloody body of the little boy. According to Panjshir Observer, the murder took place in Takhar province.

The top U.S. military officers from United States and Russia held six hours of talks in Helsinki on Wednesday, in the first face-to-face meeting between them since 2019 as both nations adjust to the U.S. pullout and Taliban takeover in Afghanistan.

The European Union will focus on humanitarian aid as it figures out how to deal with the Taliban, aiming on an informal arrangement with Afghanistan's new rulers to ensure safe aid corridors, four diplomats and two officials said.

"We will not allow any individual or group to use our territory against any other country," said Foreign Minister Muttaqi of Afghanistan's new Taliban government, the first comment by a Taliban government member on an agreement reached last year with the United States.

President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan is set to pay a four-day visit to the U.S. to attend the 76th session of the U.N. General Assembly, state-run Anadolu Agency has reported.

At the U.N. headquarters in New York, the president will address the General Assembly, which begins Sept. 14. Erdoğan is also set to inaugurate the 36-story Turkevi Center in Manhattan.

U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken warned on Sept. 8 that the Taliban would have to earn legitimacy from the world, after talks with allies on how to present a united front to the hardline new government in Afghanistan.

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Some women in Afghanistan are determined to resist the Taliban's strict rules as they anticipate that their rights and freedoms will be further confined.

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Afghan journalists sheltering in Albania are grateful to have escaped the Taliban take-over but fear for the possible persecution of their families back home.

The Taliban are covering the images of women depicted on the walls of Afghanistan's capital Kabul with paint and writing pro-Taliban slogans over them.

The group, which captured large swathes of the country within days in a sweeping military offensive, is now dictating its rules even though it has not yet made those rules official.