Afghan Celebrity Gossip

SARA Rahmani’s best-selling fashion design last year was a shirt made from a burqa remodelled into a peasant blouse with just a hint of cleavage.

This year the 38-year-old Afghan designer shows off her new season’s success, a jacket made from the black turbans worn by the Taliban and Pashtun men from the south and east of the country.

Ms Rahmani’s company, Sara Afghan, is one of three Kabul fashion labels that operate in an environment far removed from the baby doll fashions sweeping European catwalks.

The majority of women who buy from them locally want tailored clothes that are in keeping with local cultural sensitivities.

“This jacket is very popular,” Ms Rahmani says. “I used to make shirts made from burqa, but I think it is important to change with the season.”

Unsurprisingly, most of her customers are foreign women working in Kabul. The prices are too high for Afghans, with a burqa costing $A16 but Ms Rahmani’s shirt selling for $A46.

“Some Afghan women who have lived abroad buy my clothes too,” she says.

Ms Rahmani lists the obstacles that businesses in Kabul have to work around: unreliable power supply, hassles with generators and difficulty in sourcing local material and finding trained staff.

Since she set up in August 2004, the business has expanded to employ 12 full-time machinists and up to 60 part-time embroiderers. But the Sara Afghan label is far from being able to find buyers outside Afghanistan.

After almost 25 years of war, Afghanistan’s infrastructure has been bombed back into the Stone Age, and most of the country’s skilled workers fled the fighting, never to return.

Operating a fashion business in Afghanistan takes grit and persistence. For the three foreign women who have moved to Kabul to train seamstresses and built their own labels, perhaps it also requires a dash of insanity.

“We are eccentrics. I don’t think anyone really thinks about what it involves when they set up here,” says Sarah Takesh, the creative and managing director of Tarsian and Blinkley, the only Kabul fashion label that has managed to vault out onto the international stage.

An Iranian-American, Ms Takesh, 32, imports silk and linen for her jackets and dresses from India and other countries in the region.

She provides work for about 300 people. The results are exquisite clothes with hand-stitched embroidery and beadwork, sequins or crochet.

Afghan women traditionally embroider clothes and linen as part of their dowry, so the clothes provide a livelihood to women who would otherwise struggle to make a living, as well as being beautiful.

Ms Takesh is not the only woman trying to use Kabul as a springboard to the international women’s wear market. Zarif and Royah is Kabul’s third fashion brand, and the only one sourcing all its materials locally.

Italian Gabriella Ghidoni and Afghan-American Zolaykha Sherzad have designed a line of clothes that reworks the traditional chapan jackets worn by President Hamid Karzai into tailored suits and coats.

Finding reliable sources of handmade fabric has taken two years.

“The material is beautiful. It’s made from silk, wool and cotton depending on the season, and the embroidery here is of unbelievably high quality,” Ms Ghidoni says.

CONGRATULATIONS Rohullah Nikpai FOR AFGHANISTAN’S FIRST OLYMPIC MEDAL !!!

TABREEK TABREEK TABREEK

Noor Ahmad Gayezabi said a silent prayer while watching the small family TV with his 13-year-old son. ”Help Nikpai. Help Nikpai. Help Afghanistan.”

Then he watched his country win its first-ever Olympic medal.

Rohullah Nikpai defeated world champion Juan Antonio Ramos of Spain on Wednesday to earn the bronze medal in the men’s under 58-kilogram taekwondo competition, sparking applause, wide smiles and laughter in homes, restaurants and ice cream parlors around the country.

”When I saw that he won, I jumped up and hugged and kissed my son,” Gayezabi said. ”I was crying.”

President Hamid Karzai immediately called to congratulate Nikpai. He also awarded him a house at the government’s expense, said Humayun Hamidzada, the president’s spokesman.

”I hope this will send a message of peace to my country after 30 years of war,” Nikpai said.

The victory led all of Afghanistan’s evening newscasts.

”I am so happy. I cannot express my feelings in words,” said Mohammad Akbar, 33, who watched on a TV at his Kabul pharmacy. ”While I was watching the match I was clapping I was so happy.”

Nikpai, who is 21, started learning the Korean martial art when he was 10 because his brother had found a club in Kabul to train. Not only was it an escape from the daily rigours of life in a country that not been at peace since the 1970s, he turned out to be good at it.

Exceptionally good.

When Gayezabi met Nikpai, they were both living at a refugee camp in Iran during the years of war that embroiled Afghanistan in the 1980s and 1990s. The two competed together on a refugee taekwondo team.

Nikpai came to Kabul four years ago, Gayezabi said. In the mornings he lifted weights and in the evenings he practiced martial arts. In between he earned money cutting hair as a barber.

With success came better training conditions. After being selected for the national team six months ago, he was able to use a special gymnasium.

But in a country where sports take a distant place behind the realities of war, few resources are dedicated to training athletes.

”My training situation is a lot like the situation in my country,” Nikpai said. ”It’s not good.”

Gayezabi had a lucky few hours of electricity that allowed him to watch his former teammate’s victory. He feared he would only be able to listen on the radio since Kabul averages about four hours of municipal electricity a day.

”I was crying because I was remembering back when we were both on the Afghan refugee taekwondo team in Iran,” Gayezabi said.

Only four Afghan athletes came to Beijing, representing a country that had never won an Olympic medal and is sinking ever deeper into war as the Taliban insurgency escalates.

Sprinter Robina Muqimyar - who in 2004 broke the gender barrier on the Afghan Olympic team - was last in a field of 85 women in the 100 metres, with a time of 14.80. She ran with a scarf covering her head.

Teammate Massoud Azizi finished 76th in the men’s 100. He trains in Kabul’s National Stadium, where the Taliban once staged regular public executions, wearing jogging shoes because his spikes won’t dig into the track’s cracked, concrete surface.

But Nikpai, who is 21, has claimed a spot among his sport’s elite.

Afghanistan will get another chance at a medal in taekwondo. Nesar Ahmad Bahave is competing in a heavier weight class.

Hussein Rachmati, a taekwondo teacher who works in the gym where Nikpai trains, said Nikpai prepared for the Olympics with a Korean teacher. He placed second in the World Taekwondo Federation’s qualifying event in Vietnam last year.

Afghans gathered around an ice cream shop TV in Kabul broke out in wide smiles and passed around congratulations to one another after watching Nikpai’s win, said Abdul Wafi, a 28-year-old university student.

”It is wonderful that an Afghan athlete can win a medal in the world Olympics,” said Wafi. ”It is a great achievement for Afghanistan.”

The top U.N. official in Afghanistan, Kai Eide, said the Olympic win shows that the country can compete on the global stage against the world’s best athletes.

”Young people should draw hope and inspiration from this Olympic win,” Eide said in a statement. ”Today, Afghanistan has demonstrated that it can and will succeed in the face of adversity with the determination, commitment and hard work of its most precious resource - the young people of Afghanistan.”

Along with the president’s offer of a house, Nikpai’s bronze medal comes with a cash prize.

Ehsanullah Bayat, chairman of the Afghan Wireless Communication Company, earlier announced that he would award any Afghan athlete who won an Olympic bronze $10,000, along with $50,000 for a gold medal and $25,000 for a silver, said Khalid Andisha, a spokesman for AWCC.

”It is a great victory for Afghanistan,” said Mohammad Sukran, an 18-year-old student. ”In a country like Afghanistan, the only thing we hear about all the time is violence and fighting. This is finally good news for Afghanistan.”

Zolaykha Sherzad was born in Kabul, Afghanistan where she lived until the age of ten. During the Soviet occupation, Zolaykha and her family were forced to flee and settled as political refugees in Switzerland. Trained as an architect, Zolaykha received her Masters in Architecture from the School of Architecture at the Federal Institute of Technology. Zolaykha now resides in New York City, where she and her partner Frederic Levrat founded the architecture practice, ARX New York. ARX has received numerous design awards including: the New York Foundation of the Arts Architecture Fellowship in 2000, the Young Architects Forum in 1997 as one of the seven Best Young American Architecture Firms of the Year, and the winning entry for the European 5 Zurich site in 1998. Zolaykha has been a Professor of Architecture at the Pratt Institute from 1998 to 2003.

In 2000, she founded School of Hope, a non-profit organization that has successfully rebuilt and supported primary and secondary schools in rural Afghanistan and developed programs in the US and Europe to raise cross-cultural understanding.

The past two years, Zolaykha and her family were living in Kabul, Afghanistan, where she was involved with the work for School of Hope and the design of clinics, housing and school development projects.

In 2004, she started Zarif Design (fine, precious in Farsi) aiming at reviving the Afghan Artistic Culture. She started with a first assessment of the current existing designs and productions within NGOs, private businesses and implemented a pilot project with the NGO, Afghanistan Libre. The pilot project consisted in training women in design, including pattern making, cutting, sewing, stitching etc. In May 2005, Zarif Design presented its first collection in Kabul, which was highly acclaimed and started selling its colourful line of “women chapans” in its exhibition   Gallery in Kabul.

Mahvish Rukhsana Khan is an American lawyer, born to immigrant Afghan parents in Michigan. While persuing a law degree at the University of Miami, she became enraged by the illegal detainment of prisoners at Guantanamo Bay. Having grown up listening to her mother tell her “Now is not the time to be complacent,” Khan felt compelled to help any way she could. With her fluency in Pashto and a familiarity with Afghan cultures and customs that no other “habeas” lawyer with security clearance had, she was quickly taken on as an interpreter for Afghan detainees. Six months later, in January 2006, Khan was on her way to Guantanamo Bay. Her role with the detainees quickly developed. She began providing supervised legal counsel and traveled to Afghanistan to find exonerating evidence for prisoners.

During more than thirty trips to Guantanamo, Khan unexpectedly connected with the very men that Donald Rumsfeld called “the worst of the worst.” She brought them starbucks chai, the closest available drink to the kind of tea they would drink at home. And they quickly befriended her, offering fatherly advice as well as a uniquely personal insight into their plight, and that of their families thousands of miles away. As time went by Khan began to question whether Guantanamo truly held America’s most dangerous enemies. But regardless of each prisoner’s innocence or guilt, she was determined to preserve their most fundamental right, the right to a fair trial.

For Mahvish Rukhsana Khan, the experience was a validation of her Afghan heritage—as well as her American Freedoms, which allowed her to intervene at Guantanamo purely out of her sense that it was the right thing to do. Her story is challenging, brave, and essential test of who she is—and who we are.

Mahvish Rukhsana Khan is a recent law school graduate and journalist. She has been published in the Wall Street Journal, New York Times, the Washington Post, and other media. She lives in San Diego.

Born in the UK to Afghani parents, Osman Yousefzada went into banking after graduating from Cambridge in 1997. Two years ago, he left the City to study fashion design at Central Saint Martins. His clothes, which he’ll be showing at London Fashion Week (11 to 16 February) are now worn by Kate Moss and Thandie Newton. He lives in a house in Earls Court, west London.

Osman Yousefzada, ” I grew up in Birmingham and moved to London when I was 18. I never imagined that my career in fashion would take off and expand so far and so quickly as it did. I always thought that maybe I would just have a small shop in Brick Lane selling a few dresses.”

Osman Yousefzada is one London designer who has shown a knack for building his business without an active investor on board. Not only is he consulting for a high profile British luxury chain, he is collaborating with Mango to release a capsule collection of little black dresses which will hit Mango stores worldwide in March, after an exclusive selling period at Selfridges in London. These projects help Osman by injecting cash to finance production and operating costs for the business.

DOWNLOAD YAAHOO MUSIC ALBUM

Farhad Darya’s new album has been released in Afghanistan on August first. Darya recorded his latest album in Munich, Germany and named it “Yaahoo”. This album is recorded for the purpose of solidarity among Afghans inside and abroad Afghanistan.

The album contains eleven songs of which six are brand new, two are Darya’s previous hit songs but re-recorded in a different style, and three are repeated titles. The album also contains a twelfth track in the form of a demo. You can listen to the album on the main page flash player.

Armed Criminals have once again struck the heart of Afghan ‘ghairat’ by gang rapping yet another teen in Afghanistan. Following is a footage of the family who has ‘dared’ to come forward and make a plea of their case to Hamid Karzai.

Another reason that impedes families from coming forward when a member is rapped is the current Islamic Shariah Law which states “In order for a rape to be validated, victims must have four male witnesses to the crime — if not, the victims can be charged with fornication or adultery.” — This is just Bizzare!

Teenager Raped in Afghanistan: (Video by RAWA)

Siddiq Barmak (Born September 7, 1962 in Panjshir, Afghanistan) is an Afghan film director and producer. He received an M.A degree in cinema direction from Moscow Film Institute (VGIK) in 1987.

He has written a few screenplays and has made a few short films. His first feature film Osama won Golden Globe for Best Foreign Language Film in 2004.

There is a stylistic echo in Osama of the “Afghan” films by the Iranian Makhmalbaf dynasty - father Mohsen’s Kandahar and daughter Samira Makhmalbaf’s At Five in the Afternoon, the latter also shot in post-Taliban Kabul. Barmak directed Osama with significant funding and assistance from Mohsen Makhmalbaf; the Iranian director invested thousands of dollars in the film, lent Barmak his Arriflex camera and encouraged him to send the movie to international festivals, which eventually generated further funding from Japanese and Irish producers.[1] Barmak received “UNESCO’s Fellini Silver Medal” for his drama, Osama, in 2003.

Barmak is also director of the Afghan Children Education Movement (ACEM), an association that promotes literacy, culture and the arts, founded by Iranian film director Mohsen Makhmalbaf. The school trains actors and directors for the newly emerging Afghan cinema. Barmak is one of the celebrated figures in Persian cinema as well as emerging cinema of Afghanistan.

Early history and education:

Zalmay Khalilzad was born in the city of Mazari Sharif in northern Afghanistan. He is an ethnic Pashtun, from the Kakar tribe. Khalilzad began his education at the private Ghazi Lycée school in Kabul. He immigrated to the United States as a high school exchange student, but attained his Bachelor’s and Master’s Degrees from the American University of Beirut in Lebanon. Khalilzad received his PhD at the University of Chicago, where he studied closely with strategic thinker Albert Wohlstetter, a prominent nuclear deterrence thinker and an opponent to the disarmament treaties, who provided Zalmay with contacts in the government and with RAND Corporation. From 1979 to 1985, Zalmay Khalilzad was an Assistant Professor of Political Science at Columbia University’s School of International and Public Affairs. During that time he worked closely with Zbigniew Brzezinski, the Carter Administration’s architect of the policy supporting the Afghan Mujahadeen resistance to the Soviet Union’s invasion of Afghanistan.

Personal life:

Zalmay Khalilzad is married to Cheryl Benard, who is a political analyst with the RAND Corporation. She is also the author of several books, including: Civil Democratic Islam, a controversial study of political attitudes in the Middle East, and the science-fiction feminist novel, Turning on the Girls. Khalilzad and Benard have two sons, Alexander, who is 24, and Maximilian, who is 16. Alexander Benard is a student at Stanford Law School.[1]

Career history:

Zalmay Khalilzad with George W. Bush in the Oval Office of the White House. Zalmay Khalilzad with George W. Bush in the Oval Office of the White House. In 1984 Khalilzad accepted a one-year Council on Foreign Relations fellowship to join the State Department, where he worked for Paul Wolfowitz, then the Director of Policy Planning. From 1985 to 1989, Khalilzad served in President Ronald Reagan’s Administration as a senior State Department official advising on the Soviet war in Afghanistan and the Iran-Iraq war. During this time he was the State Department’s Special Advisor on Afghanistan to Undersecretary of State Michael H. Armacost. In this role he developed and guided the international program to promote the merits of a Mujahideen-led Afghanistan to oust the Soviet occupation. From 1990-1992, Khalilzad later served under President George H. W. Bush in the Defense Department as Deputy Undersecretary for Policy Planning. Between 1993 and 2000, Khalilzad was the Director of the Strategy, Doctrine, and Force Structure at the RAND Corporation. During this time, he helped found RAND’s Center for Middle Eastern Studies as well as “Strategic Appraisal,” a periodic RAND publication. He also authored several influential monographs, including “The United States and a Rising China” and “From Containment to Global Leadership? America and the World After the Cold War.” While at RAND, Khalilzad also had a brief stint consulting for Cambridge Energy Research Associates, which at the time was conducting a risk analysis for Unocal, now part of ConocoPhillips, for a proposed 1,400 km (890 mile), $2-billion, 622 m³/s (22,000 ft³/s) Trans-Afghanistan gas pipeline project which would have extended from Turkmenistan through Afghanistan to Pakistan. He is one of the original members of Project for the New American Century (PNAC) and was a signatory of the letter to President Bill Clinton sent on January 26, 1998, which called for him to accept the aim of “removing Saddam Hussein and his regime from power” using “a full complement of diplomatic, political and military efforts.”[2] In 2001, President George W. Bush asked Khalilzad to head the Bush-Cheney transition team for the Department of Defense and Khalilzad briefly served as Counselor to Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld. In May 2001, National Security Advisor Condoleezza Rice announced the Khalilzad’s appointment as Special Assistant to the President and Senior Director for Southwest Asia, Near East, and North African Affairs at the National Security Council. In December 2002 the President appointed Khalilzad to the position of Ambassador at Large for Free Iraqis with the task of coordinating “preparations for a post-Saddam Hussein Iraq.”[3] After the terrorist attacks of 9/11, President Bush came to rely on Khalilzad’s Afghanistan expertise. Khalilzad was involved in the early stages of planning to overthrow the Taliban and on December 31st 2001 was selected as Bush’s Special Presidential Envoy for Afghanistan. He served in that position until November of 2003, when he was appointed to serve as U.S. Ambassador to Afghanistan. Khalilzad held the position of U.S. Ambassador to Afghanistan from November 2003 until June 2005. During this time, he oversaw the drafting of Afghanistan’s constitution, was involved with the country’s first elections, and helped to organize the first meeting of Afghanistan’s parliament (the Loya Jirga). It was rumored by some that Hamid Karzai, Afghanistan’s President, was very reliant on Khalilzad’s guidance, including rumors that Khalilzad pressured other candidates in the election to drop out, leaving Karzai unopposed. However, Khalilzad denied this.[4] Should a Republican win the 2008 Presidential Election, Khalilzad is widely speculated to be a leading candidate to become Secretary of State.

Time as Ambassador to Iraq:

Khalilzad began his job as Ambassador to Iraq on June 21, 2005. He was credited for helping negotiate compromises which allowed the ratification of Iraq’s Constitution in October 2005, which allows for the partitioning of Iraq into different regions along ethnic lines. Khalilzad also worked to ensure that the December 2005 elections ran smoothly and played a substantial role in forming the current government. Khalilzad was one of the first high-level Administration officials to warn that sectarian violence was overtaking the insurgency as the number one threat to Iraq’s stability. After the Al Askari shrine bombing, in February 2006, he warned that spreading sectarian violence might lead to civil war — and possibly even a broader conflict involving neighboring countries. Khalilzad’s term as Ambassador to Iraq ended on March 26, 2007. His replacement is Ryan Crocker, a career diplomat, who was immediately previously the Ambassador to Pakistan.

Ambassador to the U.N.

On February 12, 2007, the White House submitted Khalilzad’s nomination to the Senate to become U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations.[5] He was confirmed by the Democratic-Controlled U.S. Senate on March 29, 2007 by a unanimous voice vote.[6] This marked a strong contrast to Khalilzad’s predecessor, John Bolton, whose extreme rhetoric and ethical lapses caused him to fail to be confirmed by the Senate resulting in a recess appointment that compromised the credibility of the U.S. delegation. Colleagues at the UN noted that Khalilzad has a different, more reconciling style than Bolton’s.[7]

Writing on U.S. leadership

Khalilzad wrote several articles on the subject of the value of U.S. global leadership in the mid-90’s. The specific scenarios for conflict he envisioned in the case of a decline in American power have made his writings extremely popular in the world of competitive high school and college policy debate. * Khalilzad, Zalmay (1995). “Losing the moment? The United States and the world after the Cold War”. The Washington Quarterly 18:2: 03012.

Ehsan Bayat earned his Bachelor of Science Degree in Engineering Technology from New Jersey Institute of Technology (1986). His family in Afghanistan was prominent in business, which prepared him for his future when he established himself as a successful entrepreneur in New York. After the fall of the Taliban in 2001, Mr. Bayat decided to embark on business endeavors that would bring about positive change to the development of Afghanistan. Today, he is the name behind three of the largest organizations in Afghanistan: Afghan Wireless Communication Company (AWCC), Ariana Radio and Television Network (ATN), and the Bayat Foundation. Three different business entities, with one mission statement –
“A window for a better tomorrow.”

Mr. Bayat has received numerous awards recognizing his dedication to business and humanitarian efforts:  Businessman of The Year Award (Afghan American Chamber of Commerce 2007), Best Humanitarian Award (2007, Zeba Magazine), and the 2006 Human Rights National Award, awarded by the Afghanistan Human Rights Association through President Karzai.