Chinese authorities have ordered Muslim shopkeepers and restaurant owners in a village in its troubled Xinjiang region to sell alcohol and cigarettes, and promote them in “eye-catching displays,” in an attempt to undermine Islam’s hold on local residents, Radio Free Asia (RFA) reported. Establishments that failed to comply were threatened with closure and their owners with prosecution.

Facing widespread discontent over its repressive rule in the mainly Muslim province of Xinjiang, and mounting violence in the past two years, China has launched a series of “strike hard” campaigns to weaken the hold of Islam in the western region. Government employees and children have been barred from attending mosques or observing the Muslim fasting month of Ramadan. In many places, women have been barred from wearing face-covering veils, and men discouraged from growing long beards.

In the village of Aktash in southern Xinjiang, Communist Party official Adil Sulayman, told RFA that many local shopkeepers had stopped selling alcohol and cigarettes from 2012 “because they fear public scorn,” while many locals had decided to abstain from drinking and smoking.

The Koran calls the use of “intoxicants” sinful, while some Muslim religious leaders have also forbidden smoking.

Sulayman said authorities in Xinjiang viewed ethnic Uighurs who did not smoke as adhering to “a form of religious extremism.” They issued the order to counter growing religious sentiment that was “affecting stability,” he said.

“We have a campaign to weaken religion here, and this is part of that campaign,” he told the Washington-based news service.

The notice, obtained by RFA and posted on Twitter, ordered all restaurants and supermarkets in Aktash to sell five different brands of alcohol and cigarettes and display them prominently. “Anybody who neglects this notice and fails to act will see their shops sealed off, their businesses suspended, and legal action pursued against them,” the notice said.

Radio Free Asia, which provides some of the only coverage of events in Xinjiang to escape strict Chinese government controls, said Hotan prefecture, where Aktash is located, had become “a hotbed of violent stabbing and shooting incidents between ethnic Uighurs and Chinese security forces.”

Critics say China’s long repression of Uighur rights and nationalist sentiment has pushed people toward Islam as the only permitted assertion of their community’s identity, and pushed a minority toward a violent form of Islam. Clumsy attempts to promote alcohol or forbid beards and veils may prove counterproductive, they warn.

Sulayman said around 60 shops and restaurants in the area had complied with the government order, and there were no reports of protests. But in an unrelated incident in neighboring Qinghai province on Friday, an angry crowd of Muslims smashed windows of a supposedly halal store in Xining city, after pork sausages and ham were found in a delivery van.

National Directorate for Security (NDS) personnel in a special operation arrested five organizers of terrorist attacks on Nangarhar Kabul Bank the other day.
The arrested people are as, Farmanullah S/o Humayoun, resident of Gandomak village, Shirzad district, Qari Enamullah S/o Naqibullah, resident of Parsha Khail, Kot district, Shahabullah S/o Mohammad Younus, resident of Hendrani village, Kot district, Abdul Ghafour S/o Mir Hassan, resident of Pira Khail village, Khogiani district.
The arrested people had not only involved in the Kabul Bank terrorist attacks but also in other terrorist activities in the province.
Likewise, this terrorist network was planned to organize a terrorist attack on a mosque on May 8, 2015, but fortunately their plan successfully foiled by NDS personnel.

A video purportedly from Al-Qaeda’s South Asia arm named India’s Prime Minister Narendra Modi as a foe for the first time.

“The battle we are waging is the same — be it against drones, Charlie Hebdo’s writings, the policies of IMF and World Bank, oppression of Muslims or Narendra Modi’s blood-spitting tongue,” said a voice allegedly belonging to Asim Umar, head of Al-Qaeda in the Indian Subcontinent.

Indian authorities are trying to authenticate the video posted online on May 2, said a government official who asked not to be identified amid the investigation. Jagdish Thakkar, a spokesman in Modi’s office, didn’t answer two calls to his mobile on Monday, a public holiday in India.

Modi, whose Hindu-dominated party swept to power last May on a campaign pledging jobs and development, has faced criticism for his handling of attacks against Muslims and Christians. His administration last week dismissed a US Congressional report that said minorities have been subjected to “violent attacks” and “forced conversions” over the past year.

Just months after Modi took charge, Al-Qaeda announced operations in the nation that’s home to the third-largest Muslim population. Fringe Hindu groups have also since called for mass conversions of minorities, which caused an uproar in parliament with lawmakers refusing to debate key economic bills.

Modi has maintained that his government is working toward “development for all,” irrespective of religion or caste. He has also repeatedly denied any wrongdoing in allegations that he failed to stop anti-Muslim riots in 2002 as chief minister of the western state of Gujarat.

In its video, titled “From France to Bangladesh: The Dust will Never Settle Down,” Al-Qaeda claimed responsibility for the murder of four Bangladeshi bloggers, including Avijit Roy, the American writer hacked to death in Dhaka in February for blogging about atheism and religious freedom.

At least 17 Taliban insurgents, including their commander, were killed in a U.S drone attack in eastern Nangarhar province late Monday, local officials said to ToloNews.

The strike took place in Mohmand Dara district of the province where a group of insurgents had gathered, head of the Media Office of the Police in Nangarhar, Hazrat Hussian Mashriqiwal said.

“A Taliban commander named Mullah Daoud is among the dead,” he said.

This comes a day after another U.S drone attack targeted two Taliban vehicles – 12 Taliban insurgents were killed.

The Taliban has not yet commented on the attacks.

Mohmand Dara is considered an insecure area – where insurgents frequently target security forces.

In recent weeks, police in Tajikistan have been issuing warnings to women wearing Islamic hijab and shaving off men’s beards.

The campaign seems to have been sparked by a speech that President Imomali Rahmon made last month. Since then, police have been stopping people deemed to have the “wrong appearance” in streets and marketplaces across Tajikistan. Experts say that while official fears of radical Islam are legitimate, this is a ludicrous way of addressing them.

Although Tajikistan’s population is overwhelmingly Muslim, official suspicion of the hijab and other outward expressions of the faith are nothing new. In recent years, clerics loyal to the government have denounced them from the pulpit as “un-Tajik”, and women have been told not to come to work, school or university in hijab. (See Islamic Dress as Bar to Female Education in Tajikistan .)

The authorities frequently jail people for joining well-established groups like Hizb ut-Tahrir and the Islamic Movement of Uzbekistan, and video footage of Tajiks fighting alongside Islamic State in Syria have sparked fears that this new movement might try to establish a presence locally. (See Countering Extremism in Tajikistan on the issues.)

In a televised speech on March 6 ahead of International Women’s Day, President Rahmon said hijab was alien to Tajik tradition, and he encouraged women to wear national dress instead. Traditional long dresses and headscarves are still a common sight in Tajikistan, and are usually brightly multicoloured instead of the black associated with the hijab.

Immediately after his speech, TV channels ran programmes which alleged that the hijab was often used as cover by young women involved in prostitution.

This was followed by instructions from local government offices to shut down shops that sold Islamic styles of clothing for women. The mayor of the northern city of Khujand, Rajjabboy Ahmadzod, was first to issue the order to police, and was soon followed by others around the country.

Mahmadsaid Ubaydulloev, mayor of the capital Dushanbe, instructed the local trading standards office to take action to remove “alien” clothing from all shops in the city, and prevent more coming in.

Police then started stopping women and threatening them with fines or dismissal from their jobs unless they discarded the hijab.

In Dushanbe, officers roamed markets and shopping centres seeking out offenders. One shop owner told IWPR he watched as police “pushed women wearing hijabs into a bus”.

He continued, “When the women said they should have been given a first warning and only then taken to a police station, an officer replied, ‘Your first [warning] was on TV. Don’t you watch TV?’”

Police officers also stopped bearded men and in some cases forcibly shaved them.

Rustam Gulov, a well-known blogger and human rights activist from the city, described being taken to a police station where three officers took a razor to his beard despite his protestations.

He saw a large pile of beard shavings on the floor.

“It looked as though around 200 men had had their beards shaved off,” he said.

Gulov, who is a member of the Public Council for Police Reform, filed a complaint to Interior Minister Ramazon Rahimzoda and also reported the case to international human rights organisations.

On April 19, video footage appeared on YouTube showing a policeman detaining a bearded man, saying, “How old are you? If you don’t shave your beard yourself, I’ll do myself – dry. I don’t want to see this again. You mustn’t grow a beard.” The officer then turns to the man’s hijab-clad female companions and says, “This is Tajikistan, not Turkey or Saudi Arabia.” Finally he grabs the man and takes him away.

Farishta, a 21-year-old saleswoman at the Saodat shopping centre, lost her job for wearing a headscarf deemed too Islamic. She says police began raiding shops in March, but she always hid before they arrived.

One day she was spotted by three policemen, two of them from the local precinct and one seconded from the interior ministry.

“They began asking me personal questions. I asked them who they were and why they were asking such questions. They replied, ‘A law has been passed and you are disobeying it and still wearing hijab’. Since I had watched the president’s speech, I told them that he never mentioned anything like that; he was annoyed with black robes. I was wearing a national dress with a headscarf.

“The policemen just said the president’s word was the law.”

Farishta said the police threatened to impose fines on her.

“They approached me and my bearded male colleagues. They told us that if the women didn’t remove their headscarves and the men didn’t shave off their beards by the following day, each of us would be fined 500 somoni [about 80 US dollars],” she said. “They said this was an initial penalty, and if they saw us like that again, it would be 750 somoni, 1,200 the third time, and the fourth time they would detain us and take us to the police station.”

These would be large fines as Farishta was earning 550 somonis a month.

In early April, her employers said they had been threatened with a fine of 3,000 somoni, so she would have to remove the headscarf or leave.

Farishta left.

“There was no other way, even though my family depends on my job. I couldn’t remove my hijab because it is ‘fard’ [religious obligation]. That’s the only thing that consoles me,” she said.

In mid-April, the government committee for religious affairs announced that only people aged 35 or over would be allowed to go on the Hajj, the pilgrimage to the holy places of Islam. The committee said it was imposing the age limit because Saudi Arabia was restricting the quota of pilgrims allowed from each country.

On April 21, the interior ministry appeared to backtrack on the policy of coercion. Spokesman Jaloliddin Sadriddinov said no orders had been issued to forcibly remove headscarves or shave off beards. Instead, police had been asked to “raise awareness” about the issues among members of the public, especially young people.

Six days later, Deputy Interior Minister Ikrom Umarzoda said police who shaved off beards would face “disciplinary measures”, although he told the Asia Plus news agency that his office had only received three complaints about this.

Experts say the sledgehammer manner in which the policy is being implemented in practice is not an effective way of countering extremism, and is likely to breed resentment.

“Any unlawful action or coercion will yield the opposite effect,” lawyer Faizinisso Vohidova told IWPR. “It seems like officials are actually trying to destabilise society.”

The only reason why hardly anyone had complained, she added, was that “judges in Tajikistan aren’t independent… other state agencies don’t protect civil rights, either, so people are disillusioned and believe going to court is a waste of time”.

Political scientist Parviz Mullojanov pointed out that it was impossible to spot extremists by their appearance, anyway.

“There are many moderate believers who dress strictly according to Islamic standards, yet they have a negative view of radicals,” he said. “On the other hand, members of clandestine extremist organisations have learnt to disguise themselves really well. These days, most of them, especially the leaders, don’t have an Islamic appearance as they don’t want to catch the law enforcement agencies’ eye.”

Khursand Khurramov, another political analyst in Dushanbe, warns that some moderate-but-bearded men will turn against the authorities.

“This government policy decision, designed to counter radicalism, is itself a clear catalyst for radicalism,” he said. “History shows that coercive prohibition never produces the desired outcome. It confers power as a temporary result, but it inevitably leads to social conflict with all the consequences that entails.”

Andrei Serenko, a member of the League of Experts of the Post-Soviet Space, said Tajikistan seemed to be repeating the mistakes of the Soviet Union, which similarly tried and failed to counter expressions of faith. The policy reflected confusion in government, he said.

“When they don’t know what to do or how to react to what they see as a threat, they resort to the simplest course of action – intimidation as a response,” Serenko said. “Officials in Tajikistan seem to believe that if there are no bearded men in this country, then radical Islam will disappear, too. However, logic suggests quite the contrary. The war on beards shows that the authorities aren’t coping, and that has to be a sad thing.”

At least 18 Taliban insurgents were killed and four others injured in a military operation in northern Kunduz province, local officials said on Monday to ToloNews.

Provincial Police Chief, Gen. Abdul Basir Nasrati has said that the operation still continues in the province and to date 10 villages – in the Imam Sahib and Chardara districts – have been cleared of insurgents.

“Clashes still continue in Chardara and Imam Shaib districts in which 14 Taliban insurgents – including their commander Mullah Sherzai Gojar – were killed in Imam Sahib. Four others were killed in Chardara,” he said.

The operation comes after hundreds of Taliban insurgents carried out an attack on security forces in Ali Abad, Imam Sahib, Qal-e-Zal, Dasht-e-Archi districts and Gor Tepa in Kunduz City over the past 10 days.

Officials said Saturday that over 200 militants have so far been killed in the past week and at least 125 insurgents injured. This is in addition to 20 security force members and four civilians killed in the clashes over the same time period. An additional 36 security force members have also been injured, officials said.

The clashes have resulted in more than 2,000 families being displaced from their homes in the past week due to fighting.

Earlier concerns were raised that Kunduz would possibly fall into the hands of the Taliban after scores of insurgents attacked the province in their annual spring offensive about 10 days ago.

But officials from the Defense Ministry (MoD) eased fears and assured the nation that neither Kunduz nor any other province in the country was on the verge of collapse.

Reinforcement troops were however deployed to the province to support the local security force members, said officials.

Six ISIS militants, including two Air Force personnel, were charged in Malaysia, police said.

They face up to 30 years imprisonment if convicted of promoting acts of terrorism.

The suspects, who appeared before the Sessions Court of Alor Setar in the northern state of Kedah, were among 17 arrested this month in several raids throughout Malaysia.

They allegedly plotted bomb attacks on key government installations in Kuala Lumpur and in nearby states to punish Malaysia for being a secular non-Islamic state.

Prosecutors allege they advocated the ideology of the ISIS fundamentalist group that has declared a caliphate across a swathe of northern Syria and Iraq.

Last week police arrested another 12 suspected militants also allegedly plotting bomb attacks in the outskirts of Kuala Lumpur.

Police said at least 63 Malaysian citizens have gone to Syria and Iraq to fight alongside ISIS militants.

Months after President Obama formally declared that the United States’ long war against the Taliban was over in Afghanistan, the US military is regularly conducting airstrikes against low-level insurgent forces and sending Special Operations troops directly into harm’s way for what it calls “training and advising.”

In justifying the continued presence of the US forces in Afghanistan, administration officials have insisted that the troops’ role is relegated to counterterrorism, defined as tracking down the remnants of Al Qaeda and other global terrorist groups, and training and advising the Afghan security forces who have assumed the bulk of the fight.

In public, officials have emphasized that the Taliban is not being targeted except for “force protection” — where the insurgents were immediately threatening US forces.

But interviews with US and Western officials in Kabul and Washington offer a picture of a more aggressive range of military operations against the Taliban in recent months, as the insurgents have continued to make gains against struggling government forces.

Rather than ending the US war in Afghanistan, the military is using its wide latitude to instead transform it into a continuing campaign of airstrikes — mostly drone missions — and Special Operations raids that have in practice stretched or broken the parameters publicly described by the White House.

Western and military officials said that US and NATO forces conducted 52 airstrikes in March, months after the official end of the combat mission. Many of these assaults, which totaled 128 in the first three months of 2015, targeted low- to mid-level Taliban commanders in Afghanistan.

As early as January, when officials in Washington were hailing the end of the combat mission, about 40 US Special Operations troops were deployed to Kunar province to advise Afghan forces that are fighting the Taliban over a few villages along the border with Pakistan.

With the troops on the ground, the command for the US-led coalition called in airstrikes under the authority of force protection, according to two Western military officials, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because the details of the operation are not public.

“They are putting guys on the ground in places to justify the airstrikes,” one of the officials said. “It’s not force protection when they are going on the offensive.”

The top US commander in Afghanistan, General John F. Campbell, vehemently denied that he was putting troops into harm’s way just to enable more airstrikes.

He has insisted that it is within his purview to target Taliban insurgents who pose a threat to not just US or NATO troops, but to any Afghan security forces. And his options on the ground were clear, he said in an interview, even if Washington’s public description of them was not.

“Washington is going to have to say what they say politically for many different audiences, and I have no issue with that,” Campbell said. “I understand my authorities and what I have to do with Afghanistan’s forces and my forces. And if that doesn’t sell good for a media piece then, again, I can’t worry about it.”

He added: “Combat and war and transition, as you know, it’s a very complex thing. For me, it’s not black and white.”

The operations are continuing during a troubling stretch for the Afghan security forces, as the Taliban continues to make gains. Members of the nation’s military and police forces are being killed at an accelerating pace in the first three months of 2015. The casualty rate rose 54 percent over the same period last year, according to one Western and one Afghan official, who spoke on the condition of anonymity.

The danger was highlighted in recent days in the northern province of Kunduz, where the Afghan army has been forced to send thousands of reinforcements to beat back a major Taliban offensive. In addition to threatening to claim at least one district, the insurgents have come within a few miles of the provincial capital, officials in Kunduz said. Coalition forces deployed jets to the area in a show of force but no munitions were dropped, officials said.

In that environment, US military officials have been reluctant to let go of the war, arguing that their involvement remains necessary given the Taliban threat and changing regional factors.

But in March, when Obama and President Ashraf Ghani of Afghanistan publicly announced that they had agreed to slow the withdrawal of US troops, administration officials emphasized that counterterrorism and training were still the focus, not everyday combat missions against the Taliban. The idea of the extended timeline was to bolster the ability of Afghans to fight, officials said, not to directly fight on their behalf.

Now, though, the distance seems to be widening between the administration’s public statements and what the military appears to be doing, whether at the behest of the White House or on its own, officials here said.

“What I’m thankful for is that I have the authority and flexibility to make those very tough decisions,” Campbell said. “They could have said, ‘Every time you hit a target, you have to get approval.’ ”

Beyond any discrepancy over mission descriptions, US airstrikes in Afghanistan have a fraught history. A high number of civilian casualties in such strikes created increasing tensions with Afghan officials and the public, and in recent years those missions had been sharply restrained to cut the risk.

Even though US officials argue that drone strikes are controlled and precise, in truth they have been far from trouble free — a fact highlighted last week when a US drone strike accidentally killed American and Italian hostages of al-Qaida in Pakistan.

Still, Campbell has found strong support from Ghani, who became the president in September. Many officials characterize their relationship as a strikingly close partnership: Campbell visits the president nearly every day — more than any other Western official in the country — and the commander’s staff has been tasked with not only helping to write policy for the Afghan forces but also helping direct overall strategy, at a time when the war is meant to be entirely in the hands of the Afghans.

Ghani, who has yet to name a minister of defense, has in many ways outsourced much of the running of the war to Campbell.

Some Western officials have privately expressed discomfort with the US role and questioned how prolonging the US strategy in Afghanistan would be more effective this year than it had in the past 13.

“I’m not surprised they are continuing in this way,” said one Western diplomat living in Kabul. “What’s surprising is how much of it they’re doing.”

Many of the strikes described by officials had no discernible basis for force protection or terrorist hunting. One included an attack in Kunar province that wounded two miners; another in Ghazni killed several “common Taliban fighters,” and, at most, one Taliban commander, according to the head of the provincial peace council.

In February, a disaffected ex-Taliban leader was killed in a drone strike in remote Helmand province. Though the commander, Mullah Abdul Rauf Khadim, had pledged allegiance to the Islamic State, there was no evidence he had been staging or even planning significant operations.

When asked to justify the strike, the US military did not say it was for counterterrorism purposes but rather described it as force protection — despite there having been no US forces stationed in the area for years.

When asked about that decision, Campbell responded with a question of his own: “Do you know what was in his mind?” he said of Mullah Khadim.

The military has said that it is authorized to send out Special Forces trainers at the ground level, but that they are not to advance on the target with their Afghan counterparts. In hostile areas, however, those restrictions do not often mean very much.

This month, for example, a US Special Forces soldier was shot in the chest while advising Afghan commandos conducting an operation against the Taliban in restive Logar province, according to the two Western military officials. The bullet struck the soldier’s body armor and he survived, the officials said.

But when confronted with reports of a re-expanded US combat role in Afghanistan, Obama administration officials have vehemently rejected the claims.

One such case came in November when Josh Earnest, the White House press secretary, sought to discredit an article by The New York Times reporting that Obama had quietly approved an expanded combat authorization for US forces in Afghanistan in 2015.

“The US military will not be engaged in specific operations targeting members of the Taliban just because they’re members of the Taliban,” Earnest had said at the time. He laid out only two circumstances warranting continued combat operations: protection of US soldiers still stationed in Afghanistan and the counterterrorism mission against al-Qaida and similar groups.

On Sunday, however, a spokesman at the National Security Council issued a statement that appeared to broaden the circumstances, saying that US forces may provide combat support to Afghan troops “in limited circumstances to prevent detrimental strategic effects to these Afghan security forces.”