As a new push threatens to engulf a key town in Helmand province, the Taliban looks set to turn the tide.
The coffins of people murdered by Islamic State are carried through the streets of Kabul in a demonstration against violence and terrorism.
EPA/Jawad Jalali
Afghanistan has seen mass protests before, but Wednesday’s was different. In a show of national unity and support for the political system, protesters called for continued international help.
As President Barack Obama extends America’s military presence in Afghanistan, Australia is determining what’s next for its military role.
Dan Peled/AAP
After 14 years of continued military presence and a decision by President Obama to keep US forces in Afghanistan, what is the next step for Australia’s role in the Afghanistan war?
Candles outside the Medecins sans Frontieres HQ in Geneva
Denis Balibouse/Reuters
Bombing a hospital and killing doctors and wounded or sick persons may seem to be an obvious war crime. But the reality of both the law and the facts is significantly more complicated.
Afghan refugee children returning from Pakistan learn about the dangers of mines and explosives at a UNHCR registration centre in Kabul.
Reuters/Ahmad Masood
As the US slows down its troop withdrawal and China increases its involvement in Afghanistan, a warning that if the country is to see peace again, foreign meddling needs to stop.
President Barack Obama and his inner circle follow the assassination of Osama bin Laden, which made headlines worldwide but is seemingly unimportant four years on.
EPA/Pete Souza/White House handout
Memories of the killing of Osama bin Laden are fading, but the legacies of al-Qaeda and the war on terror’s many ‘own goals’ haunt us in the form of multiplying threats and lost civil liberties.
Families cross the Euphrates River seeking the relative safety of Baghdad as Islamic State fighters advance with the goal of creating such violence that people turn from the government to any force capable of restoring peace.
EPA/Ahmed Jalil
Islamic State is a project built on solid foundations by jihadist theorists with decades of experience. The savagery of terrorism precedes the next stage of a caliphate that delivers longed-for order.
Afghan women’s rights activists mourn during the burial ceremony of Farkhunda, an Afghan woman who was beaten to death in Kabul on March 22.
REUTERS/Mohammad Ismail
The brutal mob attack on a young woman in the streets of Kabul reveals the instability of the Afghan government even after 12 years of US and NATO military support and aid.
In this January 2015 photograph, a man walks through the ruins of Old Aleppo, a designated World Heritage site.
Hosam Katan/Reuters
Recently in Aleppo, Syria, the Jabha Shamiya militia has started carrying out a new urban warfare strategy: tunnel bombing. Aside from the human damage wrought by this tactic, it is also extremely damaging…
In response to deeply unpopular drone strikes, a public rally in Karachi demands the blocking of NATO supplies from Pakistan to neighbouring Afghanistan. The banner reads, in Urdu ‘Rulers! Come out of the US war’.
EPA/Rehan Khan
I learned a number of lessons about Islam in Peshawar, Pakistan. As a senior United Nations official, I arrived in the country within 24 hours of the massive earthquake that struck in October 2005. Pakistan…
Ever since Taliban militants murdered 153 people, many of them school children, in cold blood on December 16 2014, the country has been grappling with the question of how to kickstart its justice system…
Nabila Rehman, 9, shows her drawing of a drone attack on her Pakistani village that killed her grandmother.
Jason Reed/Reuters
Jeff Bachman, American University School of International Service
On November 24, two weeks before the Senate Intelligence Committee released its “torture report,” Reprieve, a UK-based human rights NGO, published the results of its latest investigation into President…
A scene of devastation after the Taliban attack in Peshawar.
EPA/Bilawal Arbab
The Pakistani Taliban claimed responsibility for the attack on a school in Peshawar that killed more than 130 children. The militants planned the massacre to take revenge on the Pakistan army. They murdered…
Protest in Faisalabad against the school attack.
EPA/Ilyas Sheikh
It is a little more than two years since the education campaigner – and now Nobel laureate – Malala Yousafzai was almost killed. In Peshawar many more potential Malalas have now died. The people of Pakistan…
Protestors gather in the wake of the attack.
EPA/T Mughal
The shock waves from a brutal terror attack that claimed the lives of more than 130 children in the northern Pakistani city of Peshawar are being felt around the world. The Taliban assault, which began…
Shock and outrage in Pakistan at the Taliban’s school attack.
EPA/Arshad Arbab
The horrendous attack on the army school in Peshawar has once again brought to public attention the pervasiveness of violence in Pakistan. Terrorism in the country is an almost everyday occurrence, but…
Refugees from the Pakistan government’s assault on the Khyber region of Waziristan.
EPA
Shahzeb, a university student in Islamabad, who comes from the mountainous region of Waziristan in Pakistan, designated as a “tribal” area since colonial times, summed up the burden of harassment his fellow…
The start of a beautiful friendship? The US’s John Kerry and Iran’s Javad Zarif.
EPA/Carolyn Kaster/Pool
It’s a desperately sad historical irony: in 2003, the United States invaded Iraq because its secular dictator was allegedly about to supply Islamist terrorists with weapons of mass destruction. About three…