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The Taliban administration will encourage self-sufficiency and wants international trade and investment, the acting commerce minister said, as Afghanistan faces isolation and suspension of some humanitarian operations over restrictions on women.

"We will start a national self-sufficiency programme, we will encourage all government administrations to use domestic products, we will also try to encourage people through mosques to support our domestic products" Haji Nooruddin Azizi told Reuters. "We will support any item which can help us for self-sufficiency."

Another part of their strategy was to boost trade and foreign investment, he said.

"Those who were importing items to Afghanistan from abroad, they are asking us to provide opportunities for investing in Afghanistan and they want to invest here instead of importing from abroad," he said.

He said that countries including Iran, Russia and China were interested in trade and investment. He said some of the projects under discussion were Chinese industrial parks and thermal power plants, with involvement from Russia and Iran.

Already facing a lack of formal recognition and sanctions hampering the country's banking sector, investors are faced with growing security concerns after attacks on foreign targets in Kabul, claimed by the Islamic State.

An attack on a hotel catering to Chinese businessmen this month, which badly hurt several foreigners, could prompt some to re-think investing, a leading member of the Chinese business community has said. 

Azizi said authorities were working to ensure security.

"We do our best for our businessmen to not come to harm. The attack hasn't had any bad impact, (but) if it happened constantly, yes it might have bad impact," he said, referring to the investment environment.

Azizi laid out a plan to develop industry by creating special economic zones on land previously used for U.S. military bases. He said his ministry was presenting the plan to the administration's cabinet and economic commission.

He added that foreign investors were showing interest in Afghanistan's mining sector, which has been valued at more than $1 trillion. He said that an iron mine in western Herat and a lead mine in central Ghor province had seen 40 companies take part in an auction and that the results would be announced soon.

He said that a major contract signed with Russia in September for the supply of gas, oil and wheat would see the delivery of the items to Afghanistan in coming days.

The Taliban-led administration is facing increased isolation over policies in recent days restricting women from access to public life, including attending university.

An order barring female NGO workers has thrown the humanitarian sector, which is providing urgent aid to millions of people, into disarray, with some organisations suspending operations in the middle of the harsh winter.

Azizi did not comment on the new restrictions but said his ministry had allocated 5 acres of land for a permanent exhibition centre and hub for women-led businesses.

"We always support women investors," he said. (Reuters)

South Korea and the United States are discussing possible joint exercises using U.S. nuclear assets, South Korean President Yoon Suk-yeol said, as North Korean leader Kim Jong Un labelled the South its "undoubted enemy" in flaring cross-border tensions.

Yoon's comments, in a newspaper interview published on Monday, come after he called for "war preparation" with an "overwhelming" capability, following a year marked by the North's record number of missile tests, and the intrusion of North Korean drones into the South last week.

"The nuclear weapons belong to the United States, but planning, information sharing, exercises and training should be jointly conducted by South Korea and the United States," Yoon said in the interview with the Chosun Ilbo newspaper.

The newspaper quoted Yoon as saying the joint planning and exercises would be aimed at a more effective implementation of the U.S. "extended deterrence," and that Washington was also "quite positive" about the idea.

The term "extended deterrence" means the ability of the U.S. military, particularly its nuclear forces, to deter attacks on U.S. allies.

A Pentagon spokesperson said: "We have nothing to announce today," when asked about Yoon's comments, adding that the alliance remains "rock-solid."

Yoon's remarks were published a day after North Korean state media reported that its leader Kim called for developing new intercontinental ballistic missiles (ICBMs) and an "exponential increase" of the country's nuclear arsenal.

At a meeting of the ruling Workers' Party meeting last week, Kim said South Korea has now become the North's "undoubted enemy" and rolled out new military goals, hinting at another year of intensive weapons tests and tension.

Inter-Korean ties have long been testy but have been even more frayed since Yoon took office in May, promising a tougher stance on the North.

On Sunday, North Korea fired a short-range ballistic missile off its east coast, in a rare late-night, New Year's Day weapons test, following three ballistic missiles launched on Saturday.

The North's official KCNA news agency said the projectiles were fired from its super-large multiple rocket launcher system, which Kim said "has South Korea as a whole within the range of strike and is capable of carrying tactical nuclear warheads."

The North's race to advance its nuclear and missile programmes has renewed debate over South Korea's own nuclear armaments, but Yoon said in the Chosun Ilbo interview that maintaining the Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons remained important.

To better cope with the North's growing threats, South Korea's military said on Monday it had established a new directorate under the Joint Chiefs of Staff to counter the North's nuclear and weapons of mass destruction capabilities.

North Korea, meanwhile, conducted a reshuffle of its military leadership at the year-end party gathering, sacking Pak Jong Chon, the second-ranked military official after Kim, and replacing its defence minister and the chief of the army's General Staff, according to state media.

The reason for Pak's replacement was not immediately known, although Pyongyang regularly revamps its leadership and uses the party event to announce major personnel reshuffles.

Hong Min, a senior researcher at the Korea Institute for National Unification, said this year could be a "year of crisis" with military tension on the Korean peninsula going beyond 2017, when Pyongyang first test-fired an ICBM and also conducted its sixth nuclear test.

"North Korea's hardline stance...and aggressive weapons development when met with South Korea-U.S. joint exercises and proportional response could raise the tension in a flash, and we cannot rule out what's similar to a regional conflict when the two sides have a misunderstanding of the situation," Hong said. (Reuters)

Islamic State on Monday claimed responsibility for an attack on Taliban forces in Kabul.

The militant group said on Telegram that the attack on Sunday had killed 20 people and wounded 30.

A spokesman for Afghanistan's Taliban-run interior ministry said an explosion outside the military airport in the capital Kabul had caused multiple casualties.

The interior ministry denied the casualty figures claimed by Islamic State and said it would release the official death toll.

Islamic State has claimed several high-profile attacks in Kabul, including the storming of a hotel that caters to Chinese businessmen and a shooting at Pakistan's embassy that Islamabad called an assassination attempt against its ambassador, who escaped unharmed. (Reuters)

Russia acknowledged on Monday that scores of its troops were killed in one of the Ukraine war's deadliest strikes, drawing demands from nationalist bloggers for commanders to be punished for housing soldiers alongside an ammunition dump.

Russia's defence ministry said 63 soldiers had died in the fiery blast which destroyed a temporary barracks in a former vocational college in Makiivka, twin city of the Russian-occupied regional capital of Donetsk.

It said the accommodation had been hit by four rockets fired from U.S.-made HIMARS launchers, claiming two rockets had been shot down. Kyiv said the Russian death toll was in the hundreds, though pro-Russian officials called this an exaggeration.

Russian military bloggers, many with hundreds of thousands of followers, said the huge destruction was a result of storing ammunition in the same building as a barracks, despite commanders knowing it was within range of Ukrainian rockets.

Separately, Ukraine said on Monday it had shot down all 39 drones Russia had launched in an unprecedented third straight night of air strikes against civilian targets in Kyiv and other cities.

Ukrainian officials said their success proved that Russia's tactic in recent months of raining down air strikes to knock out Ukraine's energy infrastructure was increasingly a failure as Kyiv beefs up its air defences.

'EACH MISTAKE HAS A NAME'

Unverified footage posted online of the aftermath of the Makiivka strike on the Russian barracks showed a huge building reduced to smoking rubble.

Igor Girkin, a former commander of pro-Russian troops in east Ukraine who has emerged as one of the highest profile Russian nationalist military bloggers, said the death toll was in the hundreds, later editing his post to include wounded in that figure. Ammunition had been stored at the site and Russian military equipment there was uncamouflaged, he said.

Another nationalist blogger, Rybar, said around 70 soldiers were confirmed dead and more than 100 wounded.

"What happened in Makiivka is horrible," wrote Archangel Spetznaz Z, another Russian military blogger with more than 700,000 followers on Telegram.

"Who came up with the idea to place personnel in large numbers in one building, where even a fool understands that even if they hit with artillery, there will be many wounded or dead?" he wrote. Commanders "couldn't care less" about ammunition stored in disarray on the battlefield, he said.

"Each mistake has a name."

Russia's acknowledgement of scores of deaths in one incident was almost without precedent. Moscow rarely releases figures for its casualties, and when it does the figures are typically low - it acknowledged just one death from among a crew of hundreds when Ukraine sank its flagship cruiser Moskva in April.

Russia has seen in the new year with nightly attacks on Ukrainian cities, including Kyiv, hundreds of kilometres from the front lines. The nightly attacks mark a change in tactics, after months in which Moscow usually spaced such strikes around a week apart.

After firing dozens of missiles on Dec. 31, Russia launched dozens of Iranian-made Shahed drones on Jan. 1 and Jan. 2. But Kyiv said on Monday it had shot down all 39 drones in the latest wave, including 22 shot down over the capital.

Kyiv said the new tactic was a sign of Russia's desperation as Ukraine's ability to defend its air space had improved.

"Now they are looking for routes and attempts to hit us somehow, but their terror tactics will not work. Our sky will turn into a shield," presidential chief of staff Andriy Yermak said on Telegram.

In his latest nightly speech, President Volodymyr Zelenskiy praised Ukrainians for showing gratitude to the troops and one another and said Russia's efforts would prove useless.

"Drones, missiles, everything else will not help them," he said of the Russians. "Because we stand united. They are united only by fear."

Ukraine's air defence systems worked through the night to bring down incoming drones and to warn communities of the approaching danger.

"It is loud in the region and in the capital: night drone attacks," Kyiv Governor Oleksiy Kuleba said.

Russia has turned to mass air strikes against Ukrainian cities since suffering humiliating defeats on the battlefield in the second half of 2022.

It says its attacks, which have knocked out heat and power to millions in winter, aim to reduce Kyiv's ability to fight. Ukraine says the attacks have no military purpose and are intended to hurt civilians, a war crime.

Russia has flattened Ukrainian cities, killed thousands of civilians and annexed swathes of Ukraine since Putin ordered his invasion in February, calling Ukraine an artificial state whose pro-Western outlook threatened Russia's security.

Ukraine has fought back with Western military support, driving Russian forces from more than half the territory they seized. In recent weeks, the front lines have been largely static, with thousands of soldiers dying in intense warfare.

In a stern New Year's Eve message filmed in front of a group of people dressed in military uniform, Putin vowed no let-up in his war.

"The main thing is the fate of Russia," Putin said. "Defence of the fatherland is our sacred duty to our ancestors and descendants. Moral, historical righteousness is on our side." (Reuters)