VOI - Voice of Indonesia | RRI - Radio Republik Indonesia

Vietnam has pushed back a plan to re-open the resort island of Phu Quoc to foreign tourists until November, after failing to meet targets for inoculating residents due to insufficient vaccine supplies, state media reported.

The Southeast Asian nation, which is currently shut to all visitors apart from returning citizens and investors, has been struggling to speed up inoculations to help contain a spike in COVID-19 cases driven by the Delta variant in recent months.

Authorities had initially planned to allow vaccinated foreign tourists to start returning to Phu Quoc in October to revive the tourism sector and prop up the economy. read more

"We have to inoculate residents here for herd immunity but vaccine supplies are falling short," the state-run VTC newspaper quoted Huynh Quang Hung, the chairman of Phu Quoc City's People's Committee, as saying.

Last week, the island's authorities said an additional 250,000-300,000 doses were needed to achieve herd immunity.

So far only 2.9% of residents in Kien Giang, the province that hosts Phu Quoc, had received two doses, official data showed.

Overall, 7.3% of Vietnam's 98 million people are fully vaccinated - one of the lowest rates in the region.

Phu Quoc on Monday detected a new COVID-19 cluster after months with no local cases, though provincial authorities said it was under control and would not affect the reopening plan.

Authorities said Phu Quoc would have a phased reopening over six months starting on Nov. 20, with up to three chartered flights touching down per week.

Under the plan, the island expects to welcome 3,000-5,000 visitors over the trial period, with compulsory COVID-19 tests conducted by authorities, VTC said in Thursday's report.

It remained unclear if visitors will have to undergo a seven-day quarantine period as requested by Vietnam's health ministry.

Foreign arrivals to Vietnam slumped from 18 million in 2019, when tourism revenue was $31 billion, or nearly 12% of gross domestic product, to 3.8 million last year.

The plans to welcome back tourists come as Malaysia last week reopened its Langkawi island to domestic visitors, while Thailand has opened Phuket and Samui islands to vaccinated foreign tourists. (Reuters)

The Taliban's new defence minister has issued a rebuke over misconduct by some commanders and fighters following the movement's victory over the Western-backed government in Afghanistan last month, saying abuses would not be tolerated.

Mullah Mohammad Yaqoob said in an audio message that some "miscreants and notorious former soldiers" had been allowed to join Taliban units where they had committed a range of sometimes violent abuses.

"We direct you keep them out of your ranks, otherwise strict action will be taken against you," he stated. "We don't want such people in our ranks."

The message from one of the Taliban's most senior ministers underlines the problems Afghanistan's new rulers have sometimes had in controlling fighting forces as they transition from an insurgency to a peacetime administration.

Some Kabul residents have complained of abusive treatment at the hands of Taliban fighters who have appeared on the streets of the capital, often from other regions and unused to big cities. read more

There have also been reports of reprisals against members of the former government and military or civil society activists, despite promises of an amnesty by the Taliban.

Yaqoob said there had been isolated reports of unauthorized executions, and he repeated that such actions would not be tolerated.

"As you all are aware, under the general amnesty announced in Afghanistan, no mujahid has the right to take revenge on anyone," he said.

It was not clear precisely which incidents he was referring to, nor what prompted the message, which was published on Taliban Twitter accounts and widely shared on social media.

There have been reports of tensions within the movement between hardline battlefield commanders and political leaders more willing to seek compromise with governments outside Afghanistan. (Reuters)

South Korea has set a record for daily COVID-19 cases at 2,434, breaking the previous record set last month, as the country grapples with a wave of infections that began in early July, the Korea Disease Control and Prevention Agency (KDCA) said Friday.

The mortality rate and severe cases remain relatively low and steady at 0.82% and 309, respectively, helped largely by vaccinations that prioritised older people at high risk of severe COVID-19, KDCA said when reporting figures for Thursday.

Prime Minister Kim Boo-kyum stressed the need for virus-prevention rules to be stricter as adherence could have been lax during this week's three-day holiday.

"If prevention measures are not managed stably, the gradual recovery to normal life will inevitably be delayed," Kim told Friday's COVID-19 response meeting.

Authorities have advised people returning from holiday to be tested even for the mildest COVID-19-type symptoms, especially before going to work. read more

The daily caseloads may continue to surge and peak by next week as more people get tested after the break, Lee Ki-il, deputy minister of health care policy, told a briefing.

The government is drawing up a plan on how to live more normally with COVID-19, expecting 80% of adults to be fully vaccinated by late October. The strategy will be implemented in phases to gradually ease restrictions, while masks will still be required at least in the initial stage.

Although the strategy will not immediately lift all prevention measures, South Korea - which struggled to get vaccine supplies initially - was now in a more comfortable position for the transition, President Moon Jae-in told reporters aboard South Korea's presidential jet on Friday.

"There is no problem at all with the amount of vaccines secured for this year," Moon said. "The vaccine shipment got off to a slower start than other countries, which delayed the vaccination programme, but I believe by next month, we will catch up and be a leading country by inoculation rate."

South Korea this week said it would donate more than 1 million doses of COVID-19 vaccine to Vietnam next month in what would be the country's first direct cross-border sharing of its vaccine stockpile. read more

South Korea will remain under tough social-distancing curbs through Oct. 3, which includes limited operating hours for cafes and restaurants and limiting the number of people allowed at social gatherings at up to two people after 6 p.m. in Seoul.

Thursday's new cases brings total infections to 295,132, with 2,434 deaths.

South Korea has given 72.3% of its 52 million population at least one dose of COVID-19 vaccine through Thursday, and has fully inoculated nearly 44%. (Reuters)

A little more than a month after toppling the Western-backed government in Kabul, Afghanistan's new Taliban rulers are facing internal enemies who have adopted many of the tactics of urban warfare that marked their own successful guerrilla campaign.

A deadly attack on Kabul airport last month and a series of bomb blasts in the eastern city of Jalalabad, all claimed by the local affiliate of Islamic State, have underlined the threat to stability from violent militant groups who remain unreconciled to the Taliban.

While the movement's spokesman Zabihullah Mujahid has downplayed the threat, saying this week that Islamic State had no effective presence in Afghanistan, commanders on the ground do not dismiss the threat so lightly.

Two members of the movement's intelligence services who investigated some of the recent attacks in Jalalabad said the tactics showed the group remained a danger, even if it did not have enough fighters and resources to seize territory.

Using sticky bombs - magnetic bombs usually stuck to the underside of cars - the attacks targeted Taliban members in exactly the same way the Taliban itself used to hit officials and civil society figures to destabilize the former government.

"We are worried about these sticky bombs that once we used to apply to target our enemies in Kabul. We are concerned about our leadership as they could target them if not controlled them successfully," said one of the Taliban intelligence officials.

Islamic State in Khorasan, the name taken from the ancient name for the region that includes modern Afghanistan, first emerged in late 2014 but has declined from its peak around 2018 following a series of heavy losses inflicted by both the Taliban and U.S. forces.

Taliban security forces in Nangarhar said they had killed three members of the movement on Wednesday night and the intelligence officials said the movement still retains the ability to cause trouble through small-scale attacks.

"Their main structure is broken and they are now divided in small groups to carry out attacks," one of them said.

FUNDING DRIED UP

The Taliban have said repeatedly that they will not allow Afghanistan to be used as a base for attacks on other countries. But some Western analysts believe the return of the Islamist group to power has invigorated groups like ISIS-K and al Qaeda, which had made Afghanistan their base when the Taliban last ruled the country.

"In Afghanistan, the return of Taliban is a huge victory for the Islamists," said Rohan Gunaratna, professor of security studies at Singapore's Nanyang Technological University. "They have celebrated the return of the Taliban, so I think that Afghanistan is the new theatre."

ISIS-K is believed to draw many of its fighters from the ranks of the Taliban or the Pakistani version of the Taliban, known as the TTP, but much of the way it operates remains little understood.

It has fought the Taliban over smuggling routes and other economic interests but it also supports a global Caliphate under Islamic law, in contrast with the Taliban which insists it has no interest in anywhere outside Afghanistan.

Most analysts, as well as the United Nations, peg ISIS-K's strength at under 2,000 fighters, compared to as many as 100,000 at the Taliban's disposal. The ranks of ISIS-K were swollen with prisoners released when Afghanistan's jails were opened by the Taliban as they swept through the country.

According to a June report by the UN security council, ISIS-K's financial and logistic ties to its parent organisation in Syria have weakened, though it does retain some channels of communication.

"Funding support to the Khorasan branch from the core is believed to have effectively dried up," the report said.

However, the report said signs of divisions within the Taliban, which have already started to emerge, could encourage more fighters to defect as the wartime insurgency tries to reshape itself into a peacetime administration.

"It remains active and dangerous, particularly if it is able, by positioning itself as the sole pure rejectionist group in Afghanistan, to recruit disaffected Taliban and other militants to swell its ranks," the UN said. (Reuters)