AFGHANISTAN: Authorities in Kabul have banned Indian films from state television and women singing from the radio, Afghan officials said yesterday, in a continuing struggle for influence between Islamists and moderates.
"A letter has been issued to officials to drop Indian movies as well as foreign TV series from the TV and also women's songs from the radio," one television official said.
Engineer Mr Mohammad Ishaq, the head of Kabul TV and Radio, made the decision without any prior warning, the official added.
Mr Ishaq is a senior member of the Northern Alliance, which dominates President Hamid Karzai's government and helped the United States oust the fundamentalist Taliban regime last year. Mr Ishaq was not immediately available for comment.
After five years of Taliban rule, when strict Islamic sharia law was imposed and public music and television banned, Afghans have enjoyed new freedoms this year. Fresh restrictions are a sensitive issue for Karzai and his Information Minister, Mr Sayed Raheen Makhdoom, who have generally followed a more liberal course.
Indian films, with their mix of melodrama, romance, songs and theatrical fighting, have become hugely popular, and restaurants throughout Afghanistan compete for customers by showing them.
Ironically, Indian films - and images of women singing - are regularly shown on state television in Kandahar, the deeply conservative former stronghold of the Taliban. Both also appear on television in the northern city of Mazar-i-Sharif. But Kabul TV has remained under the influence of more conservative elements of the Northern Alliance, and images of women singing have not been allowed.
Mr Ishaq's predecessor, Mr Abdul Hafiz Mansoor - another Northern Alliance official - was dismissed several weeks ago by Mr Makhdoom. Mr Mansoor said he was criticised for airing too many statements of the Northern Alliance's slain leader, Ahmad Shah Masood, and for refusing to show women singing on television. - (Reuters)
Guardian Service adds: Two of Osama bin Laden's senior lieutenants are planning operations from a safe haven in north-east Iran, according to Arab intelligence sources quoted by the Washington Post yesterday. The newspaper reported that Mr Saif al-Adel and Mr Mahfouz Ould Walid had risen in al-Qaeda since the Afghan war to take control of its military and ideological committees.
Mr Adel is on the FBI's most wanted list, and Mr Walid was thought by US intelligence to have been killed in Afghanistan in January. The two are said to be sheltering with dozens of other al-Qaeda fighters in Mashhad and Zabol. But Mr Hamid Reza Asefi, an Iranian foreign ministry spokesman, said: "It has become a bad habit of some American circles to issue repetitious and baseless charges against Iran. Those al-Qaeda members are not in Iran."