Russia paid Taliban $200K per coalition soldier killed
A joint report from Russian-founded investigative outlet The Insider and German news magazine Der Speigel found that Moscow had been offering bounties of $200,000 for every American and coalition soldier killed in Afghanistan.
The report, which came out on Jan. 8, claimed that Russia’s military intelligence agency, the GRU, had paid around $30 million in total to Taliban-linked soldiers between 2016 and 2019.
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The Insider learned from four former Afghan officials who worked in the country’s intelligence agency (NDS) before the Taliban took power in 2021 that the NDS had uncovered the Russian scheme in mid-2019 while interrogating captured Taliban-linked soldiers. This led to the arrest of at least ten people in the Kabul, Kunduz, and Logar provinces who were accused of carrying messages from the GRU.
Rahmatullah Azizi, a smuggler who officially ran a gemstone trading business in Afghanistan, allegedly oversaw the cash-for-kill operation on behalf of the Kremlin. At the same time, significant sums were also paid to other groups who opposed the American-supported government in Kabul.
State funeral of former US President Jimmy Carter remembers a “man of character”
Dignitaries foreign and domestic gathered in the National Cathedral in Washington, D.C., on Thursday to remember the 39th President of the United States, James Earl Carter Jr., who went by the name of Jimmy. Jimmy died at 100 years old.
President Joe Biden, former Carter staff members, and the former president’s grandsons remembered a world leader who grew up on a Georgia peanut farm and went on to earn the Nobel Prize for Peace for brokering a deal between Egypt’s Anwar Sadat and Israel’s Menachem Begin in 1978. Those Camp David Accords resulted in the Arab world’s recognition of Israel’s right to exist and Israel’s withdrawal from occupied Palestinian territories that it had gained in the Six-Day War.
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Jimmy’s grandson, Jason Carter, delivered a eulogy that reminded the Washington elite that, aside from Jimmy’s four years in the White House and four years in the Georgia governor’s mansion in Atlanta, Jimmy had spent his other 92 years in an unassuming brick ranch house in his hometown of Plains, Georgia, a home that the former president (an accomplished carpenter who was active in the volunteer organization Habitat for Humanity) “might have built himself.”
The grandson went on to remember the former president opening the door for him, wearing “1970s short-shorts and Crocs,” leading him to a kitchen where he and his wife Rosalyn, who had both grown up during the Great Depression, had a wooden rack next to the sink where they would wash and dry used plastic bags.
The grandson’s eulogy was followed by that of Steven Ford, the son of the 38th president Gerald Ford, who read a prepared eulogy of his Republican father, who had died 18 years before Carter. He remembered the relationship between the two political adversaries and then the two Commanders-in-Chief’s great friendship, contrasting that to today’s politically polarized atmosphere in the US.
A bit later, US President Joe Biden took the podium and remembered Carter as the first presidential candidate that he personally had endorsed as a junior US Senator in 1976. Seemingly fixing his gaze to his right, where US President-elect Donald Trump was seated, next to his third wife, Melania, Biden repeated many times that Jimmy Carter was “a man of character.”
In the rows to Biden’s right as he spoke, were seated, (front to back, first to second row): Biden’s wife, Jill, Vice President Kamala Harris and her husband, Douglas Emhoff. Behind them were the 42nd US president Bill Clinton (also a governor from the South), his wife Hillary Rodham Clinton (who lost to Trump in 2016), the next president, George W. Bush and his wife Laura, and then the 44th US president, Barack Obama. Next to Obama were Trump and his wife.
Obama and Trump shared smiles and a laugh during the funeral, however forced.
Obama’s wife, Michelle, who was slated to be seated next to Trump, was not in attendance at Carter’s funeral.
By all accounts, this was to be a celebration of a president who, according to the eulogies and history in general, was a champion of civil rights and fought fiercely for a woman’s position in society, but the former first lady had “scheduling conflicts” in Hawaii for the dates of the funeral, her camp said.
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