During their rule in the 1990s, Afghanistan’s hard-line Taliban banned photography, television, and the Internet by declaring that taking pictures of living things was forbidden in Islam. But two ...

For nearly 18 years, Afghanistan’s hard-line Islamist Taliban movement largely refrained from attacking the country’s predominately Shi’ite Hazara minority. But the Taliban recently began targeting ...

BAGHLAN, Afghanistan -- A female warlord who built a distinguished reputation by fighting against the Soviet occupation, the Taliban regime, and its insurgency in recent years has formally joined the ...

Traces of bullets and Negar's blood are still visible on the walls and doors of her family home, a daily reminder of the night gunmen came for the expecting mother, wife -- and former Afghan ...

The Hazara, a minority group that is targeted by Islamic extremists in Pakistan’s Balochistan Province, often live inside sealed-off communities for their own safety. 1 An entrance to Pakistan’s ...

A university student in Pakistan aspired to join the country’s elite civil service after undergoing a competitive process that requires participants to prepare for years. Instead, Shahdad Baloch, in ...

Nearly half a century ago, a bloodless palace coup in Afghanistan ended more than two centuries of Durrani monarchy in Afghanistan. But the power grab of the July 17, 1973, coup that saw Sardar ...

A 20th-century poetic genius wrote about his people's struggles with modernity, ignorance, freedom and discrimination. Some of his popular poems were turned into songs and introduced generations of ...

A series of recent high-profile rape and child sexual abuse cases in Pakistan has spurred a debate over how to curb the incidence of violent crimes that mostly target women and children. As part of a ...

I recently attended a celebration at a banquet hall in Toronto. A beautiful young woman wearing a colorful ethnic dress was standing on the brightly-lit stage. Next to her was a table, on which sat a ...

RFE/RL's Radio Free Afghanistan has obtained video footage from an eyewitness that appears to show the brutal stoning last week of a 19-year-old Afghan woman in the central province of Ghor. The ...

Afghanistan and Pakistan are at the bottom of the global gender gap index for 2022, dragged down by the lack of opportunities for women in the conservative, male-dominated societies. The World ...