German police arrested seven Afghan asylum seekers in raids on refugee shelters today on suspicion the men repeatedly raped an Iranian teenager and filmed the sexual assault. More than 30 police joined the raids on 10 rooms in several accommodation facilities in the towns of Nagold and Wildberg in the southwestern state of Baden-Wurttemberg, said police. “The Afghan asylum seekers are suspected of having raped a 17-year-old Iranian asylum seeker several times and of having filmed the acts,” police and prosecutors said in a brief joint statement.

American officials ignored repeated warnings about Afghanistan’s corrupt government. By R. Jeffrey Smith.

At least 15 civilians were killed and 13 wounded in a U.S. unmanned aircraft strike in eastern Afghanistan, the United Nations said, calling for an independent investigation into the incident. The airstrike early on Wednesday morning hit what U.S. officials said was an Islamic State target in the Achin district of Nangarhar province.

US air strikes have killed eight Afghan policemen in the embattled southern province of Afghanistan, officials confirmed, as security forces, supported by US strikes, battle Taliban fighters. Rahimullah Khan, a provincial operational commander, said the first of two air strikes on Sunday afternoon killed one policeman at a checkpoint outside the provincial capital of Tarin Kot, while the second, killed seven others.

Germany expects up to 300,000 asylum seekers to arrive this year, less than one-third of the total during 2015's record influx, the Federal Office for Migrants and Refugees (BAMF) said Sunday. BAMF chief Frank-Juergen Weise told the Bild am Sonntag newspaper that Germany's healthy economy and improvements to refugee services meant that the country was well-placed to absorb new arrivals, particularly as their numbers have dropped off.

Pakistan has told all three million Afghan refugees within its borders to leave - causing chaos on its borders, the BBC's M Ilyas Khan reports.

An Afghan cleric has defended his marriage to a six-year-old girl, saying she was a “religious offering” to him. Mohammad Karim, who is believed to be in his sixties, was arrested after marrying the girl. He has told officials that he had been given the girl as a “religious offering” by her parents, Agence France-Presse reports. However, her parents reportedly claim she was abducted without their consent from the Herat province.

Islamic State claimed responsibility for a suicide attack in the Afghan capital Kabul on Saturday that killed at least 61 people and wounded more than 200 when it tore through a demonstration by members of the mainly Shia Hazara minority.

War doesn’t only destroy human lives, but also land and ecologies - and therefore livelihoods. Afghanistan is a case in point. Enter a woman with a community spirit and a strong sense of what needs to get done. By Jenny Peng and Tamsin Walker.

Once upon a time, President Obama said he wanted to pull almost all troops out of Afghanistan. That has proved way harder than he thought.

The Taliban are using child sex slaves to mount crippling insider attacks on police in southern Afghanistan, exploiting the pervasive practice of "bacha bazi" -- paedophilic boy play -- to infiltrate security ranks, multiple officials and survivors of such assaults told AFP.

David Gilkey, an NPR photojournalist who chronicled pain and beauty in war and conflict, was killed in Afghanistan on Sunday along with NPR's Afghan interpreter Zabihullah Tamanna. David and Zabihullah were on assignment for the network traveling with an Afghan army unit, which came under attack killing David and Zabihullah.

The war rug tradition of Afghanistan has its origins in the decade of Soviet occupation of Afghanistan from 1979, and has continued through subsequent military, political and social conflicts. Afghan rug-makers began incorporating the apparatus of war into their designs almost immediately after the Soviet Union invaded their country. They continue to do so today in the wake of the United States' 2001 invasion of Afghanistan which ousted the Taliban government of Mullah Omar but has failed to bring an end to violence in the country. These days, with the ongoing drone war, these have started creeping up.

Afghanistan's government has offered the new Taliban leader a choice: make peace or face the same fate as his predecessor, killed in a U.S. drone strike last week. But Mullah Haibatullah Akhundzada is a hard-liner who has used his religious credentials to justify the Taliban insurgency that has killed or wounded tens of thousands of Afghan civilians as a "holy war" and his succession has inspired little hope for an end to the bloodshed.

The Afghan government has executed six Taliban prisoners, solidifying a change in policy that further threatens the likelihood of peace talks. Sunday’s executions followed a promise from the president, Ashraf Ghani, to take a harder line against the Taliban after a massive truck bomb on 19 April in Kabul killed at least 64 people.

At least 28 people have been killed and more than 300 injured in a large suicide attack in the Afghan capital Kabul, say officials.

The first time Noor ul-Haq died, his Afghan Army outpost was completely cut off by the Taliban on a bleak southern battleground. Hundreds of insurgent fighters swept in, and all that was left for the government to do was ship the corpses home. His wife and their 10 children buried the body, piling rocks into a mound over the grave in a cemetery rapidly filling with other war dead here in Behsud District, in eastern Afghanistan.

Bitter Lake explores how the realpolitik of the West has converged on a mirror image of itself throughout the Middle-East over the past decades, and how the story of this has become so obfuscating and simplified that we, the public, have been left in a bewildered and confused state. The narrative traverses the United States, Britain, Russia and Saudi Arabia—but the country at the centre of reflection is Afghanistan. By Adam Curtis. (2015)

The United States has "significantly" increased its air strikes against Islamic State in Afghanistan since President Barack Obama granted commanders broader authority last month to target the group there, a U.S. military spokesman said on Thursday. Islamic State is a relatively new force in Afghanistan and the militant group has violently challenged the much larger Afghan Taliban movement in pockets of the country.