Here are the top updates from Friday:

  1. Shortly before India evacuated about 200 people from Afghanistan, the Taliban had requested the Indian government to retain its diplomatic presence in the country, the Hindustan Times reported. A senior leader of the militant group, Sher Mohammed Abbas Stanekzai, reportedly sought to assure Indian officials that they should not worry about the safety of India’s mission and diplomats in Kabul. However, India concluded that it could not take the request at face value and went ahead with the evacuation, the report said.
  2. Women who have been working for the government and private offices in Afghanistan held a protest to express their concerns about their future under the Taliban regime, Tolo News reported. The protestors said that the militant group cannot ignore the progress that women have made in the past 20 years.
  3. A Nato official pledged to speed up evacuations from Afghanistan and said that over 18,000 persons have been flown out of Kabul since the Taliban took over the country on August 15, Reuters reported. The official, however, said that thousands of people are still gathering at the Kabul airport. The Taliban has exhorted people who do not have travel documents to go back home.
  4. Taliban militants are going door-to-door to find people who worked for Nato or the Ashraf Ghani-led government, the BBC reported. The Taliban have been threatening them and their family members, the document prepared by the RHIPTO Norwegian Center for Global Analyses said.
  5. The Taliban killed nine men from the Hazara ethnic minority in July, AP quoted Amnesty International as saying on Friday. The killings were “a reminder of the Taliban’s past record, and a horrifying indicator of what Taliban rule may bring”, Amnesty International’s chief Agnes Callamard said.
  6. A German civilian was shot at while he was on his way to the Kabul airport, Reuters quoted a government spokesperson as saying on Friday. The man has not sustained life-threatening injuries and will soon be flown out of Afghanistan, the spokesperson said.
  7. The Vatican has urged the global community to welcome refugees from Afghanistan, Al Jazeera reported. An article in the Vatican’s official newspaper reportedly expressed surprise “that before deciding to abandon the country no one thought through such a foreseeable scenario or did anything to avoid it”.
  8. Union Minister for External Affairs S Jaishankar told the United Nations Security Council on Thursday that the recent developments in Afghanistan have enhanced global concerns about their implications for regional and international security. He also warned that the financial resource mobilisation of terrorist groups like the Islamic State has become more robust.
  9. United States President Joe Biden said on Thursday that even though the Taliban is in power in Afghanistan, he believes that outposts of al-Qaeda and its affiliated groups in other countries constitute a greater threat for the country, AP reported. “We should be focusing on where the threat is the greatest,” Biden added.
  10. Pakistan International Airlines, the country’s state-run airline, has resumed operations in Kabul, Pakistan’s Information and Broadcasting Minister Chaudhry Fawad Hussain said. Pakistan is at the forefront of helping journalists and others caught up in the Afghan conflict, he claimed.