An explosion rocked Afghanistan’s capital Tuesday apparently targeting civilians in front of a military hospital, a Taliban spokesman said.

Taliban supreme leader Haibatullah Akhundzada addressed supporters in the southern city of Kandahar, officials announced

A hardline Pakistani Islamist group called off a protest march to the capital Islamabad yesterday after reaching a deal with the government, ending two weeks of clashes that left at least seven policemen dead and scores injured on both sides.

Taliban fighters shot dead two wedding guests who were listening to music, local officials and a witness said yesterday, forcing Afghanistan’s new government to insist such attacks are not authorised.

A Pakistani held at the US military prison in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba told a sentencing jury how he was raped, beaten and

Myanmar troops on Friday shelled a restive western town, with an ensuing fire destroying dozens of houses, as well as the office of charity Save the Children, witnesses and local media reported.

The proscribed Islamist group Tehreek-i-Labbaik Pakistan (TLP) resumed its march from Gujranwala yesterday, with thousands of activists travelling in cars, buses and on foot continuing their journey towards Islamabad.

Thousands of demonstrators from a banned Pakistani Islamist group clashed with police yesterday, killing and wounding several people from both sides, police and the group said.

Women activists in Kabul yesterday held up signs that read “why is the world watching us die in silence?” protesting the

Fahima has wept many times since her husband sold their two young daughters into marriage to survive the drought gripping western Afghanistan.

Southeast Asian leaders sharply criticised Myanmar’s junta as a regional summit opened yesterday without a representative from the country, following its top general’s exclusion for ignoring a peace roadmap agreed six months ago.

"This winter, millions of Afghans will be forced to choose between migration and starvation unless we can step up our life-saving assistance," said David Beasley, executive director of the World Food Programme.

Afghanistan will shortly collapse into chaos unless the international community acts rapidly, Swedish and Pakistani ministers have warned. 

Myanmar’s military rulers yesterday pledged to cooperate “as much as possible” with a peace plan agreed with Asean, despite a stern rebuke of the regional bloc for excluding the country’s top commander from a summit this week. 

A radical Islamist party yesterday said seven of its supporters have died in clashes with authorities in Pakistan’s eastern city of Lahore after two police officers were killed in the unrest. 

The Islamic State militant group’s Afghan branch said it was behind an explosion that brought down electricity lines and plunged Kabul into darkness.

A group of Afghan women urged the United Nations to block the Taliban from gaining a seat at the world body, calling for better representation for their country during a visit to the organisation’s New York headquarters on Thursday.

Myanmar has spiralled into civil war following a military coup, the outgoing UN special envoy on Myanmar said on Thursday, warning that the chance to return to democracy is disappearing and signalling that further targeted sanctions could be helpful.

Since Taliban came to power in Afghanistan, Nargis Nayeel Sadat, 22, a business entrepreneur and women activist based in Kabul, is on the run along with her mother to save their lives after a Taliban court found her guilty. 

The Taliban struck several journalists to prevent media coverage of a women’s rights protest in Kabul yesterday.