The Washington Post - 06.09.2019

A10 EZ M2 THE WASHINGTON POST.FRIDAY, SEPTEMBER 6 , 2019

The World

KASHMIR

Landline service fully restored, India says

Officials said Thursday that they have restored landline telephone service in Indian- administered Kashmir after suspending most communications on Aug. 5, when India’s Hindu nationalist-led government downgraded the Muslim-majority region’s autonomy and imposed a strict security lockdown. The government says it suspended communications across the Kashmir Valley, including the main city of Srinagar, to prevent rumors from spreading after the downgrading. The communications suspension by the government of Prime Minister Narendra Modi almost completely isolated people in Indian-controlled Kashmir. On Thursday, people lined up at offices or homes with landline telephones to try to contact family and friends after being unable to do so for a month. But many were unable to get through. Many Kashmiris living outside the valley also said they were having trouble getting in touch with their families in Kashmir. The Press Trust of India reported that there are no longer any restrictions on daytime movements in the Kashmir Valley. However, checkpoints remain. Kashmir has been divided between India and Pakistan since

The nations have fought two
wars over the Himalayan region.
— Associated Press

UKRAINE

Key MH17 witness is released from prison

A Ukrainian court on Thursday unexpectedly released a key witness in the case of the 2014 downing of Malaysia Airlines Flight 17, just minutes before Russian President Vladimir Putin said he was optimistic about an impending prisoner swap with Ukraine. Russia and Ukraine, which remain deadlocked over Russia’s 2014 annexation of the Crimean Peninsula and fighting in Ukraine’s separatist-controlled east, have been discussing a major prisoner exchange that could lead to the release of dozens of Russians and Ukrainians. On Thursday, the appeals court in Kiev, Ukraine’s capital, ordered the release of Volodymyr Tsemakh on recognizance, pending further investigation. Tsemakh, who was the commander of the separatists’ air defense in the area where MH was shot down five years ago, was abducted by Ukrainian security services earlier this year. Shortly after Tsemakh’s release, Putin said at a conference in Russia’s Far East that the talks on the broader prisoner exchange are in their final stages. All 298 passengers and crew members on the flight from Amsterdam to Kuala Lumpur were killed July 17, 2014, when a missile shattered the jet in midair over the rebel-controlled area. Overwhelming evidence has pointed to Russia supplying both funds and weapons to the rebels. International investigators are convinced that the missile used to shoot down MH17 came from a Russian army brigade. — Associated Press

SUDAN

First cabinet named since Bashir’s ouster

Sudan’s prime minister announced on Thursday the formation of the first government since the overthrow of longtime president Omar Hassan al-Bashir in April. The government was formed as part of a three-year power-sharing deal signed last month between the military and civilian parties and protest groups. Abdalla Hamdok announced the names of 18 ministers in the new cabinet and said he would name two more later. “Today, we start a new phase in our history,” he said in Khartoum. The new government is a key step in transitioning from nearly 30 years under Bashir, when Sudan was afflicted by internal conflicts, international isolation and deep economic problems. Most of the 18 ministers named Thursday were approved earlier in the week. They include Asmaa Abdallah, who becomes the country’s first female foreign minister, and Ibrahim Elbadawi, a former World Bank economist who will serve as finance minister. — Reuters

DIGEST

BY PAMELA CONSTABLE

kabul — The 29-year-old was a
gung-ho Afghan army captain
with a university degree, fighting
a war with bullets and Facebook
posts against an enemy with a
medieval vision of Islam. Often,
he posted photos of himself, heft-
ing a weapon or praying in a field,
between bouts of fighting in
northern Afghanistan.
A few weeks before he died,
Lemar Safi posted an image that
posed a defiant question to the
Taliban. In it, he is sitting on a low
mud wall, with his rifle resting
beside him, holding up a hand-
lettered sign. “I am Muslim,” it
reads in large English letters.
Above, in Dari script, it adds: “Do
you really want to kill me?”
That was in the spring of 2017,
in Kunduz province, where Safi
had spent more than a year on
combat duty with the Afghan
National Army and fought in a
battle for control of the province’s
strategic capital and main high-
way. Dozens of his comrades per-
ished. Safi was shot by a Taliban
sniper in a predawn ambush and
died instantly, according to his
commanding officer.
On Saturday, the Taliban
launched a fierce assault on Kun-
duz city, attacking from several
sides as residents fled intense
fighting. At least 10 people were
killed in an insurgent suicide
bombing. A government spokes-
man said the attack, which came
as U.S. and Taliban officials were
finalizing a possible peace agree-
ment in Qatar, showed that the
insurgents “do not accept the
opportunity for peace” being of-
fered.
Nevertheless, Safi’s parents in
Kabul have been praying that the
peace process will bring a perma-
nent end to decades of conflict,
destruction and personal loss.
Their first son, Khalid, died in
Afghanistan’s civil war during the
early 1990s. Another son, Hamun,
44, a high school principal, lost
his left leg in a land mine explo-
sion during military training in
2005.
Safi’s message to the Taliban
was a pointed challenge to the
insurgents’ assertions that they
are a pure Islamist movement
fighting an “infidel” foreign army
and its Afghan minions. The vast
majority of those killed by the
Taliban have been fellow Afghan
Muslims, including civilian gov-
ernment workers, bombing vic-
tims and security forces.
“Lemar’s death has been a
heavy burden for our family to
bear, but we don’t believe that his
sacrifice was for nothing,” said
Khybar, 38, another brother who
works in the Afghan judicial sys-
tem. “Thousands of soldiers like
him have died for the same cause.
He wanted to fight to defend his
country and its future as a democ-
racy. He lost his life, but he did it
for the sake of peace.”
The Afghan government does
not release casualty numbers for
security forces, but President
Ashraf Ghani said in January
that 45,000 soldiers and police
officers had been killed since he
took office in 2014. In recent
months, Taliban and Afghan forc-
es have been fighting aggressively
to gain an advantage in peace
negotiations. The high rates of
casualties among civilians and
armed forces, including those
from U.S. airstrikes, have intensi-
fied public demand for peace.
Both sides in the talks in Qatar
say they are close to an agreement
that would allow about 5,000 U.S.
troops to leave in return for the
Taliban promising not to let al-
Qaeda operate from areas it con-

trols. It is not clear whether nego- tiators have resolved disagree- ments over a permanent cease- fire, a timetable for remaining troops to leave or whether the Taliban is willing to meet with Afghan officials. By all accounts, Safi was an enthusiastic soldier with an un- usual profile. He had a college degree in child psychology and a talent for poetry. He was not married, and he had spent time as an interpreter for the U.S. military. To his family’s initial dismay, he decided to enlist in the army when he was 26. He enrolled in its officer academy and graduated as a captain one year later. “We wanted him to stay home, to become a teacher, but he had strong feelings about the war, about wanting to stop the Taliban and the terrorists,” said his father, Mohammed Akram, a retired security officer in his 70s. In 2016, Safi was assigned to a combat unit in Kunduz, a province near the border with Tajiki- stan where the Taliban had brief- ly seized the capital in weeks of

heavy fighting the year before. The surrounding region and link roads remained under siege for months. Safi soon became known as a driven fighter who took risks and inspired others to do the same. “He hated to hang around the base and always wanted to be out looking for the enemy,” Lt. Col. Hamid Saifi, his former commanding officer, said in a phone interview from another province. “He volunteered for everything. His morale was very high. We rarely see such soldiers in the army.” Saifi described intense skir- mishes with the Taliban during that period. At one point, the army’s forces were trapped for five days under fire in the Khana- bad area. At another, he said they were cut off by Taliban fighters and unable to reach the provin- cial capital. Safi’s unit, he said, “established a strong line and fought hard,” opening up the way. “I lost a lot of men in that war,” the commanding officer said. “Then I lost him.”

Safi also had an affinity for social media with an exhibitionis- tic flair. He frequently posed for war-zone photos and posted them with comments. He spoke to his family by cellphone almost daily, reassuring them that everything was fine. He recorded and sent out dramatic videos, including one of a village patrol, punctu- ated by bursts of gunfire, that shows soldiers scrambling and shouting. Akram said his son had dreamed of joining the army’s special operations forces but died while waiting for his application to be reviewed. Hours after the family got the news from Kunduz, an army official in Kabul called to say they needed his final paper- work for the transfer. “We told the man we were waiting for his body,” Akram said. There was no posthumous military award, but Safi’s family received a $2,000 payment that the Afghan Defense Ministry pro- vides in all war deaths. Help for Afghan Heroes, a nonprofit group in Kabul that assists families of

slain or disabled service members, arranged for his death cer- tificate to be sent from the war zone so the funds could be pro- cessed. Safi’s death received consider- able attention among Afghans on social media, where his photos and poems from the front lines had attracted thousands of follow- ers on Facebook. His relatives also organized activities to commemo- rate him, making posters and ban- ners to display on holidays. In the lobby of the high school where Safi’s brother Hamun is the principal, near the family’s apart- ment in a crowded suburb of east Kabul, a large wall-hanging de- picts several of Afghanistan’s his- toric heroes, including King Amanullah Khan, a reformist monarch from the 1920s, and the late anti-Taliban commander Ahmed Shah Massoud. There are also four photos of Capt. Lemar Safi in uniform, including one with his pointed message to the Taliban: “I am Mus- lim.” [email protected]

‘He lost his life, but he did it for the sake of peace’

Afghan army’s Lemar Safi was a focused soldier with a flair for social media. His family prays the war he fought is finally ending.

FAMILY PHOTOS TOP: Lemar Safi, a captain in the Afghan army, was killed in 2017 by a Taliban sniper. He and his unit fought the insurgents for months in Kunduz province. ABOVE: Safi, on the right, wearing a green beret, with officers and soldiers from his unit in 2017.

BY SIOBHÁN O’GRADY AND SAYED SALAHUDDIN

kabul — Two NATO service
members, including an American,
were among 10 people killed in
Kabul on Thursday, military and
Afghan officials said, just days af-
ter the top U.S. negotiator in peace
talks with the Taliban said he had
reached a deal “in principle.”
The U.S. and Romanian service
members died in a Taliban-
claimed car bombing in a heavily
fortified part of central Kabul just
after 10 a.m., a NATO official con-
firmed. The Afghan Interior Min-
istry said 10 people in all were
killed in the attack.
This brings the number of U.S.
troops killed in combat in Afghan-
istan to 16 this year. A U.S. Green
Beret from Idaho was killed in the

southeastern province of Zabul on Aug. 29. The identity of the U.S. service member killed Thursday is being withheld until the family has been notified. Over the past week, as U.S. en- voy Zalmay Khalilzad has met with top Afghan officials to brief them on the peace agreement, the Taliban has ramped up its attacks, killing dozens of civilians, Afghan security personnel and foreigners. In the past three days, more than 20 people have been killed in Tali- ban bombings in Kabul, including a Romanian diplomat. The group also has launched offensives in two northern cities, Kunduz and Pol-e Khomri. “Our attacks currently are in reaction to the long wave of offensives by foreign troops, which also involves local forces against civil-

ians,” Taliban spokesman Zabiul- lah Mujahid said in a phone call Thursday. The Afghan government has been excluded from nine rounds of U.S. peace talks with the Taliban in Qatar, and this week’s attacks have reinforced concerns among Afghan leaders that the proposed agreement does not offer strong enough guarantees that Afghan security forces and civilians will be protected as U.S. troops draw down. On Wednesday, presidential spokesman Sediq Sediqqi said that the Afghan government fears the deal would have dangerous consequences for Afghans and that officials need to “seek further clarifications about this docu- ment so that we can thoroughly assess potential threats and pre-

vent them.” Under the draft agreement, 5,400 U.S. troops would leave Af- ghanistan, and five U.S. bases would close within about five months, pending President Trump’s approval. At a campaign rally in Kabul after the explosion Thursday, President Ashraf Ghani’s running mate, Amrullah Saleh, said of the peace talks: “This is a conspiracy. It is not peace.” “This is aimed at the division of Afghanistan, and we do not accept it,” he added. Harun Mir, an Afghan political analyst, said Afghans are especial- ly concerned that the deal may not include a comprehensive cease- fire. If attacks against Afghan security forces continue, he said, it will undermine the U.S. mission in

Afghanistan, which is supporting the Afghan military. Talks between the Taliban and Afghan officials are expected to immediately follow any peace deal between Washington and the Tali- ban. But disputes have emerged over the makeup of the Afghan government delegation and which topics will be on the table. “There has to be at least an internal consensus among the Af- ghan political elite about what must be discussed with the Tali- ban, and so far we don’t have this consensus in Kabul,” Mir said. “We cannot engage in serious talks with this high degree of uncer- tainty.” [email protected]

Sharif Hassan contributed to this report.

Taliban blast in Kabul kills 10, including U.S. service member

The Washington Post - 06.09.2019

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