News stories by Ashfaq Yusufzai, page 17

'In the last few years, I have sung more than a dozen songs against the Taliban,' award-wining singer Khyal Muhammad tells IPS. 'I got threatening messages on the mobile phone. But I will continue to sing because it gives me strength.'

Assurances by visiting U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton here late last week that Pakistan has a major role to play in future peace talks in Afghanistan have helped ease growing tensions between Islamabad and Washington.

'Today is the best day of my life,' Gul Hamid, 40, told IPS. 'Finally my family members are convinced that HIV/AIDS can’t be transmitted through handshakes or shared meals and utensils.'

'Gun city' lies just a 40-minute drive from Peshawar, capital of the troubled Khyber Pakhtunkhwa province of Pakistan. The city, Darra Adamkhel, lives off a thriving trade in making and selling guns.

Guns available in new abundance in the troubled north of Pakistan are increasingly being used on women in ‘honour’ killings and domestic disputes, according to local reports.

With Pakistan’s Khyber Pakhtunkhwa province turning into the ‘polio capital of the world’, authorities are warning parents that heeding Taliban propaganda against oral polio vaccination (OPV) could earn them a prison sentence.

The United States-led war-on terror, unleashed on Afghanistan in the wake of the 9/11 attacks, has utterly destabilised the neighbouring Pashtun-dominated tribal areas of Pakistan and reduced them to a state of utter lawlessness.

Having to contend with U.S. army drones and the crossfire between the Taliban and the Pakistani army, the residents of Pakistan’s tribal areas find access to treatment for HIV/AIDS harder than in most other parts of the world.

Journalists covering the United States-led ‘war-on-terror’ in Pakistan’s turbulent northwest are not sure who wants them out of the way more — the Taliban or the Pakistan army.

Along with the devastating drone strikes the United States-led ‘war on terror’ in Afghanistan is bringing changes to punitive laws imposed by British colonialism on Pakistan’s Pashtun areas more than a century ago.