Tribal&nbsp;elders&nbsp;in eastern&nbsp;<a href="https://www.wionews.com/afghanistan">Afghanistan</a> have achieved something that has long eluded world leaders - a&nbsp;ceasefire&nbsp;between the&nbsp;Taliban&nbsp;and the&nbsp;Afghan&nbsp;government.

The month-long stoppage in hostilities in the Alingar district of Laghman province, one of the hardest hit by violence, was called to allow&nbsp;local&nbsp;farmers to harvest their wheat crop and students to sit annual examinations.

"A&nbsp;ceasefire&nbsp;has been something the world's most powerful countries were trying to establish in&nbsp;Afghanistan, but unfortunately, couldn't," Jaber Alkozai, resident of Alingar, told Reuters on Wednesday.

Also read |&nbsp;<a href="https://www.wionews.com/south-asia/afghanistan-taliban-resumes-shooting-as-ceasefire-ends-385400" hreflang="en">Afghanistan: Taliban resumes shooting as ceasefire ends</a>

Tribal&nbsp;elders&nbsp;drafted a demand letter, known&nbsp;locally as an "Ariza", which was then signed by two&nbsp;local&nbsp;officials of each the&nbsp;Taliban&nbsp;and the&nbsp;government.

Reuters has reviewed a copy of the letter. There have been no reports of fighting in Alinger since the&nbsp;ceasefire&nbsp;began on Tuesday, despite heavy clashes elsewhere in Laghman.

The&nbsp;ceasefire, which will last until June 21, is not the first such agreement during the war, but it comes at a critical time. Fighting has intensified across the country in the wake of Washington's announcement that it would unconditionally pull out all US&nbsp;troops by September.

Also read |&nbsp;<a href="https://www.wionews.com/south-asia/afghan-air-raids-kill-12-taliban-terrorists-in-eastern-logar-province-385800">Afghan air raids kill 12 Taliban terrorists in eastern Logar province</a>

Washington-led Western capitals and other influential regional countries have so far been unable to convince the&nbsp;Taliban&nbsp;to halt fighting against&nbsp;Afghan&nbsp;forces for an extended period, despite protracted attempts and talks.

Qari Nabi Sarwar, a&nbsp;tribal&nbsp;elder of Alingar, said farmers had been facing another year of the loss of ready-to-harvest wheat due to fighting. Dozens of stacks of wheat were burned to ashes in previous years after being hit in the crossfire by ammunition, including rocket launchers.

"Farmers were preparing to get the result of their toil, and the&nbsp;Taliban&nbsp;and&nbsp;Afghan&nbsp;forces were fingers-on-triggers, looking for a small excuse to fire at each other," Sarwar told Reuters by phone.

Also read |&nbsp;<a href="https://www.wionews.com/south-asia/warring-afghan-sides-discuss-peace-talks-as-deadly-blast-hits-mosque-385282" hreflang="en">Warring Afghan sides discuss peace talks as deadly blast hits mosque</a>

Farmers in the region plan to begin their wheat harvest on May 22, which marks the first day of the third&nbsp;Afghan&nbsp;solar month of Jawza, traditionally the start of harvest across the country.

Haji Abdul Waris, a member of the delegation that approached both sides, told Reuters the&nbsp;ceasefire&nbsp;would also prevent thousands of students from missing their exams "as their schools are turned into trenches".

Locals are happy with the development because they believe it serves as an important example that a&nbsp;ceasefire&nbsp;across&nbsp;Afghanistan can be achieved by "true and honest"&nbsp;tribal&nbsp;elders, Alkozai said.

Asadullah Dawlatzai, a spokesman for the Laghman provincial governor, said the&nbsp;government&nbsp;was working with&nbsp;local&nbsp;tribal&nbsp;elders&nbsp;and religious scholars to expand the&nbsp;ceasefire&nbsp;into other areas.

Also read |&nbsp;<a href="https://www.wionews.com/south-asia/china-offers-to-host-afghan-peace-talks-backs-leading-role-for-ghani-led-govt-386029">China offers to host Afghan peace talks, backs leading role for Ghani-led govt</a>

"Through this, the&nbsp;local&nbsp;government&nbsp;is trying to reach a permanent&nbsp;ceasefire&nbsp;even if it is on a village, district or provincial level," he said, adding that it was also in force in Laghman's provincial capital, Mehtarlam.

A spokesman for the&nbsp;Taliban&nbsp;did not respond to requests for comment. A source in the insurgent group confirmed the&nbsp;Taliban&nbsp;had agreed to the arrangement, which they described as an agreement with&nbsp;locals, not the&nbsp;government.

The one-page demand letter, signed by&nbsp;local&nbsp;government&nbsp;officials, the military and the&nbsp;Taliban, stipulates both sides will remain limited to areas already held and will undertake no movement or operations during the&nbsp;ceasefire.

"Both sides must take tribes' problems into consideration and help them in solving them; whichever side violates the abovementioned items will be guilty before the tribe," the letter said.

Tribal elders in eastern Afghanistan have achieved something that has long eluded world leaders - a ceasefire between the Taliban and the Afghan government. The month-long stoppage in hostilities in the Alingar district of Laghman province, one of the hardest hit by violence, was called to allow local farmers to harvest their wheat crop and students to sit annual examinations.

Tribal elders in eastern Afghanistan have achieved something that has long eluded world leaders - a ceasefire between the Taliban and the Afghan government. The month-long stoppage in hostilities in the Alingar district of Laghman province, one of the hardest hit by violence, was called to allow local farmers to harvest their wheat crop and students to sit annual examinations. "A ceasefire has been something the world's most powerful countries were trying to establish in Afghanistan, but unfortunately, couldn't," Jaber Alkozai, resident of Alingar, told Reuters on Wednesday. Also read | Afghanistan: Taliban resumes shooting as ceasefire ends Tribal elders drafted a demand letter, known locally as an "Ariza", which was then signed by two local officials of each the Taliban and the government. Reuters has reviewed a copy of the letter. There have been no reports of fighting in Alinger since the ceasefire began on Tuesday, despite heavy clashes elsewhere in Laghman. The ceasefire, which will last until June 21, is not the first such agreement during the war, but it comes at a critical time. Fighting has intensified across the country in the wake of Washington's announcement that it would unconditionally pull out all US troops by September. Also read | Afghan air raids kill 12 Taliban terrorists in eastern Logar province Washington-led Western capitals and other influential regional countries have so far been unable to convince the Taliban to halt fighting against Afghan forces for an extended period, despite protracted attempts and talks. Qari Nabi Sarwar, a tribal elder of Alingar, said farmers had been facing another year of the loss of ready-to-harvest wheat due to fighting. Dozens of stacks of wheat were burned to ashes in previous years after being hit in the crossfire by ammunition, including rocket launchers. "Farmers were preparing to get the result of their toil, and the Taliban and Afghan forces were fingers-on-triggers, looking for a small excuse to fire at each other," Sarwar told Reuters by phone. Also read | Warring Afghan sides discuss peace talks as deadly blast hits mosque Farmers in the region plan to begin their wheat harvest on May 22, which marks the first day of the third Afghan solar month of Jawza, traditionally the start of harvest across the country. Haji Abdul Waris, a member of the delegation that approached both sides, told Reuters the ceasefire would also prevent thousands of students from missing their exams "as their schools are turned into trenches". Locals are happy with the development because they believe it serves as an important example that a ceasefire across Afghanistan can be achieved by "true and honest" tribal elders, Alkozai said. Asadullah Dawlatzai, a spokesman for the Laghman provincial governor, said the government was working with local tribal elders and religious scholars to expand the ceasefire into other areas. Also read | China offers to host Afghan peace talks, backs leading role for Ghani-led govt "Through this, the local government is trying to reach a permanent ceasefire even if it is on a village, district or provincial level," he said, adding that it was also in force in Laghman's provincial capital, Mehtarlam. A spokesman for the Taliban did not respond to requests for comment. A source in the insurgent group confirmed the Taliban had agreed to the arrangement, which they described as an agreement with locals, not the government. The one-page demand letter, signed by local government officials, the military and the Taliban, stipulates both sides will remain limited to areas already held and will undertake no movement or operations during the ceasefire. "Both sides must take tribes' problems into consideration and help them in solving them; whichever side violates the abovementioned items will be guilty before the tribe," the letter said.

Tribal elders broker local Taliban, Afghan government ceasefire

The virus took Grandma Delores first, silencing an 86-year-old voice that rang with Lakota songs and stories. Then it came for Uncle Ralph, a stoic Vietnam veteran. And just after Christmas, two more elders of the Taken Alive family were buried on the frozen North Dakota prairie: Jesse and Cheryl, husband and wife, who died a month apart.

“It takes your breath away,” said Ira Taken Alive, the couple’s oldest son. “The amount of knowledge they held, and connection to our past.”

One by one, those connections are being severed as the coronavirus tears through ranks of Native American elders, inflicting an incalculable toll on bonds of language and tradition that flow from older generations to the young.

“It’s like we’re having a cultural book-burning,” said Jason Salsman, a spokesperson for the Muscogee (Creek) Nation in eastern Oklahoma, whose grandparents contracted the virus but survived. “We’re losing a historical record, encyclopedias. One day soon, there won’t be anybody to pass this knowledge down.”

The loss of tribal elders has swelled into a cultural crisis as the pandemic has killed American Indians and Alaska Natives at nearly twice the rate of white people, deepening what critics call the deadly toll of a tattered health system and generations of harm and broken promises by the U.S. government.

The deaths of Muscogee elders strained the tribe’s burial program. They were grandparents and&nbsp;mikos,&nbsp;traditional leaders who knew how to prepare for annual green-corn ceremonies and how to stoke sacred fires their ancestors had carried to Oklahoma on the Trail of Tears. One tiny Methodist church on the reservation recently lost three cherished great-aunts who would sneak candy and smiles to restless children during Sunday services.

“We’ll never be able to get that back,” Salsman said.

Tribal nations and volunteer groups are now trying to protect their elders as a mission of cultural survival.

Navajo women started a campaign to deliver meals and sanitizer to high-desert trailers and remote homes without running water, where elders have been left stranded by quarantines and lockdowns of community centers. Some now post colored cardboard in their windows: green for “OK,” red for “Help.”

In western Montana, volunteers led by a grocery-store worker put together turkey dinners and hygiene packets to deliver to Blackfeet Nation elders. In Arizona, the White Mountain Apache sent out thermometers and pulse oximeters and taught young people to monitor their grandparents’ vital signs.

Across the country, tribes are now putting elders and fluent Indigenous language speakers at the head of the line for vaccinations. But the effort faces huge obstacles. Elders who live in remote locations often have no means to get to the clinics and hospitals where vaccinations are administered. And there is deep mistrust of the government in a generation that was subjected without consent to medical testing, shipped off to boarding schools and punished for speaking their own language in a decadeslong campaign of forced assimilation.

About a year into the pandemic, activists say there is still is no reliable death toll of Native elders. They say their deaths are overlooked or miscounted, especially off reservations and in urban areas, where some 70% of Indigenous people live.

Adding to the problem, tribal health officials say their sickest members can essentially vanish once they are transferred out of small reservation health systems to larger hospitals with intensive-care units.

“We don’t know what happens to them until we see a funeral announcement,” said Abigail Echo-Hawk, director of the Urban Indian Health Institute.

The virus claimed fluent Choctaw speakers and dressmakers from the Mississippi Band of Choctaw Indians. It took a Tulalip family matriarch in Washington state, then her sister and brother-in-law. It killed a former chair of the Yocha Dehe Wintun Nation in California who spent decades fighting to preserve Native arts and culture. It has killed members of the American Indian Movement, a group founded in 1968 that became the country’s most radical and prominent civil rights organization for American Indian rights.

On the Navajo Nation, where 565 of the reservation’s 869 deaths are among people 60 and older, the pandemic has devastated the ranks of hataałii,&nbsp;traditional medicine men and women.

When the virus exploded across the Navajo Nation, traditional healers who use prayer, songs and herbs as treatments tried to protect themselves with masks and gloves. They wrapped ceremonial objects in plastic. They set hand sanitizer outside traditional hogan dwellings.

But people came, seeking help with their grief or prayers for ailing relatives. And the healers got sick.

Now, remote meetings of the Diné Hataałii Association, a group of Navajo medicine men and women, include updates on who has died, members said. The roster of loss now includes Avery Denny’s 75-year-old grandfather and 78-year-old aunt, who both died of the virus.

“When they pass on, all that knowledge is gone forever, never to be retained,” said Denny, a member of the association and professor at Diné College. “It’s just lost.”

Cemeteries are filling up on the rolling plains of the Standing Rock Sioux in western North Dakota, where families like the Taken Alives have buried multiple grandparents, matriarchs and patriarchs. Standing Rock has recorded 24 deaths during the pandemic.

In 2016, the tribe’s fight to block an oil pipeline propelled Standing Rock to international fame, drawing thousands of activists to protest camps that sprawled along the Missouri River. This winter, Standing Rock’s families are waging a lonelier battle as the virus rages through crowded multigenerational homes where elders raise children and pass along their language — a crucial role that has made them incredibly vulnerable.

Diane Gates, 75, one of Standing Rock’s first elders to die of the virus, lived with multiple family members, relatives said. Her 75-year-old sister-in-law, Reva, who recently had open-heart surgery, also lives with several grandchildren in an isolated corner of the reservation. They see few visitors and have a lock on their gate, and they try to protect themselves with herbs and steam treatments. But there is always the risk of what a granddaughter could bring home from work.

Tribal health workers say they are also tired and overwhelmed, the strains of fighting COVID compounded by isolation, distance and a lack of resources.

The Standing Rock Sioux had to create their own contact-tracing team after tribal officials said governments in North Dakota and South Dakota failed to track the virus. Over the summer, bureaucratic conflicts scuttled an effort to set up a testing site on the southern end of the reservation, forcing people without cars to hitchhike or walk for miles to get swabbed. Those who do recover from the virus often find themselves stranded at hospitals hundreds of miles from the reservation, and have to call a tiny team of drivers to shuttle them home.

In October, as an outbreak of coronavirus swarmed across North Dakota, Rita Hunte, 66, woke one morning gasping for breath in her riverside community of Cannon Ball. She called her daughter and said: My girl, I don’t know what to do.

She spent two days in the 12-bed Indian Health Service hospital on the reservation, begging to be transferred out, her daughter, Marlo, said. She was taken to a hospital in Fargo where she lingered for weeks, mostly unconscious and on a breathing machine, as her daughter washed her hair and tried to move her arms and legs to reduce the swelling. She died Nov. 29.

Hunte was one of just 290 people who still spoke fluent Dakota, and in her work with a tribal cancer program, she would often pray with patients before they traveled to Bismarck or the Mayo Clinic for treatment.

Since her death, her widower, Marlon, has been trying to stay busy with church services where he plays acoustic guitar and lays hands on people as they testify to the goodness of the Lord. But his daughter said that Marlon Hunte’s role as a respected elder has paradoxically isolated him even further. Some neighbors now keep their distance because they are uneasy about asking whether he is doing OK, Marlo Hunte said.

“I feel a little lost there every now and then,” Marlon Hunte said.

Many of the elders now perishing are dying after months of monastic precautions. When the pandemic first erupted, Jesse Taken Alive helped record public-service messages in Lakota urging fellow elders to protect themselves. He set up a computer in the tepee beside his home where he taught remote language classes.

But as the pandemic grew worse, requests from his community piled up: Help with funeral prayers. Help with a ceremony. He had been a tribal chairman, and he and his wife, Cheryl, had spent their lives trying to help people on Standing Rock, whether it was fighting for tribal land and sovereignty or addressing a rash of suicides.

“We tried our best to keep everyone away,” their daughter Nola Taken Alive said. “But my dad had a hard time saying no when people needed him.”

The couple ended up on separate floors of the same hospital in Fargo. When Cheryl died in November, the fight began to fade in Jesse, said his son, Ira, who is also vice chairman of the Standing Rock Sioux Tribe. Jesse Taken Alive died Dec. 14. The family has been reflecting on the loss — Delores, the walking dictionary of Lakota linguistics. Ralph’s quiet dignity. Jesse and Cheryl’s deep faith and love for each other and their people.

“We’ll still be here,” Nola Taken Alive said. “But it’s going to be a struggle. How do I fill their shoes?”

The virus took Grandma Delores first, silencing an 86-year-old voice that rang with Lakota songs and stories. Then it came for Uncle Ralph, a stoic Vietnam veteran.

The virus took Grandma Delores first, silencing an 86-year-old voice that rang with Lakota songs and stories. Then it came for Uncle Ralph, a stoic Vietnam veteran. And just after Christmas, two more elders of the Taken Alive family were buried on the frozen North Dakota prairie: Jesse and Cheryl, husband and wife, who died a month apart. “It takes your breath away,” said Ira Taken Alive, the couple’s oldest son. “The amount of knowledge they held, and connection to our past.” One by one, those connections are being severed as the coronavirus tears through ranks of Native American elders, inflicting an incalculable toll on bonds of language and tradition that flow from older generations to the young. “It’s like we’re having a cultural book-burning,” said Jason Salsman, a spokesperson for the Muscogee (Creek) Nation in eastern Oklahoma, whose grandparents contracted the virus but survived. “We’re losing a historical record, encyclopedias. One day soon, there won’t be anybody to pass this knowledge down.” The loss of tribal elders has swelled into a cultural crisis as the pandemic has killed American Indians and Alaska Natives at nearly twice the rate of white people, deepening what critics call the deadly toll of a tattered health system and generations of harm and broken promises by the U.S. government. The deaths of Muscogee elders strained the tribe’s burial program. They were grandparents and mikos, traditional leaders who knew how to prepare for annual green-corn ceremonies and how to stoke sacred fires their ancestors had carried to Oklahoma on the Trail of Tears. One tiny Methodist church on the reservation recently lost three cherished great-aunts who would sneak candy and smiles to restless children during Sunday services. “We’ll never be able to get that back,” Salsman said. Tribal nations and volunteer groups are now trying to protect their elders as a mission of cultural survival. Navajo women started a campaign to deliver meals and sanitizer to high-desert trailers and remote homes without running water, where elders have been left stranded by quarantines and lockdowns of community centers. Some now post colored cardboard in their windows: green for “OK,” red for “Help.” In western Montana, volunteers led by a grocery-store worker put together turkey dinners and hygiene packets to deliver to Blackfeet Nation elders. In Arizona, the White Mountain Apache sent out thermometers and pulse oximeters and taught young people to monitor their grandparents’ vital signs. Across the country, tribes are now putting elders and fluent Indigenous language speakers at the head of the line for vaccinations. But the effort faces huge obstacles. Elders who live in remote locations often have no means to get to the clinics and hospitals where vaccinations are administered. And there is deep mistrust of the government in a generation that was subjected without consent to medical testing, shipped off to boarding schools and punished for speaking their own language in a decadeslong campaign of forced assimilation. About a year into the pandemic, activists say there is still is no reliable death toll of Native elders. They say their deaths are overlooked or miscounted, especially off reservations and in urban areas, where some 70% of Indigenous people live. Adding to the problem, tribal health officials say their sickest members can essentially vanish once they are transferred out of small reservation health systems to larger hospitals with intensive-care units. “We don’t know what happens to them until we see a funeral announcement,” said Abigail Echo-Hawk, director of the Urban Indian Health Institute. The virus claimed fluent Choctaw speakers and dressmakers from the Mississippi Band of Choctaw Indians. It took a Tulalip family matriarch in Washington state, then her sister and brother-in-law. It killed a former chair of the Yocha Dehe Wintun Nation in California who spent decades fighting to preserve Native arts and culture. It has killed members of the American Indian Movement, a group founded in 1968 that became the country’s most radical and prominent civil rights organization for American Indian rights. On the Navajo Nation, where 565 of the reservation’s 869 deaths are among people 60 and older, the pandemic has devastated the ranks of hataałii, traditional medicine men and women. When the virus exploded across the Navajo Nation, traditional healers who use prayer, songs and herbs as treatments tried to protect themselves with masks and gloves. They wrapped ceremonial objects in plastic. They set hand sanitizer outside traditional hogan dwellings. But people came, seeking help with their grief or prayers for ailing relatives. And the healers got sick. Now, remote meetings of the Diné Hataałii Association, a group of Navajo medicine men and women, include updates on who has died, members said. The roster of loss now includes Avery Denny’s 75-year-old grandfather and 78-year-old aunt, who both died of the virus. “When they pass on, all that knowledge is gone forever, never to be retained,” said Denny, a member of the association and professor at Diné College. “It’s just lost.” Cemeteries are filling up on the rolling plains of the Standing Rock Sioux in western North Dakota, where families like the Taken Alives have buried multiple grandparents, matriarchs and patriarchs. Standing Rock has recorded 24 deaths during the pandemic. In 2016, the tribe’s fight to block an oil pipeline propelled Standing Rock to international fame, drawing thousands of activists to protest camps that sprawled along the Missouri River. This winter, Standing Rock’s families are waging a lonelier battle as the virus rages through crowded multigenerational homes where elders raise children and pass along their language — a crucial role that has made them incredibly vulnerable. Diane Gates, 75, one of Standing Rock’s first elders to die of the virus, lived with multiple family members, relatives said. Her 75-year-old sister-in-law, Reva, who recently had open-heart surgery, also lives with several grandchildren in an isolated corner of the reservation. They see few visitors and have a lock on their gate, and they try to protect themselves with herbs and steam treatments. But there is always the risk of what a granddaughter could bring home from work. Tribal health workers say they are also tired and overwhelmed, the strains of fighting COVID compounded by isolation, distance and a lack of resources. The Standing Rock Sioux had to create their own contact-tracing team after tribal officials said governments in North Dakota and South Dakota failed to track the virus. Over the summer, bureaucratic conflicts scuttled an effort to set up a testing site on the southern end of the reservation, forcing people without cars to hitchhike or walk for miles to get swabbed. Those who do recover from the virus often find themselves stranded at hospitals hundreds of miles from the reservation, and have to call a tiny team of drivers to shuttle them home. In October, as an outbreak of coronavirus swarmed across North Dakota, Rita Hunte, 66, woke one morning gasping for breath in her riverside community of Cannon Ball. She called her daughter and said: My girl, I don’t know what to do. She spent two days in the 12-bed Indian Health Service hospital on the reservation, begging to be transferred out, her daughter, Marlo, said. She was taken to a hospital in Fargo where she lingered for weeks, mostly unconscious and on a breathing machine, as her daughter washed her hair and tried to move her arms and legs to reduce the swelling. She died Nov. 29. Hunte was one of just 290 people who still spoke fluent Dakota, and in her work with a tribal cancer program, she would often pray with patients before they traveled to Bismarck or the Mayo Clinic for treatment. Since her death, her widower, Marlon, has been trying to stay busy with church services where he plays acoustic guitar and lays hands on people as they testify to the goodness of the Lord. But his daughter said that Marlon Hunte’s role as a respected elder has paradoxically isolated him even further. Some neighbors now keep their distance because they are uneasy about asking whether he is doing OK, Marlo Hunte said. “I feel a little lost there every now and then,” Marlon Hunte said. Many of the elders now perishing are dying after months of monastic precautions. When the pandemic first erupted, Jesse Taken Alive helped record public-service messages in Lakota urging fellow elders to protect themselves. He set up a computer in the tepee beside his home where he taught remote language classes. But as the pandemic grew worse, requests from his community piled up: Help with funeral prayers. Help with a ceremony. He had been a tribal chairman, and he and his wife, Cheryl, had spent their lives trying to help people on Standing Rock, whether it was fighting for tribal land and sovereignty or addressing a rash of suicides. “We tried our best to keep everyone away,” their daughter Nola Taken Alive said. “But my dad had a hard time saying no when people needed him.” The couple ended up on separate floors of the same hospital in Fargo. When Cheryl died in November, the fight began to fade in Jesse, said his son, Ira, who is also vice chairman of the Standing Rock Sioux Tribe. Jesse Taken Alive died Dec. 14. The family has been reflecting on the loss — Delores, the walking dictionary of Lakota linguistics. Ralph’s quiet dignity. Jesse and Cheryl’s deep faith and love for each other and their people. “We’ll still be here,” Nola Taken Alive said. “But it’s going to be a struggle. How do I fill their shoes?”

Tribal elders are dying from the pandemic, causing a cultural crisis for American Indians

Security officials in Afghanistan are working with local tribal elders to trace the seven Indian engineers <a href="http://www.wionews.com/india-news/taliban-suspected-in-abduction-of-indian-engineers-sources-to-wion-135052">abducted by Taliban gunmen</a> in the restive northern Baghlan province, media reports said today.

Provincial police spokesman Zabiullah Shuja said the Indian engineers of KEC International, an RPG group company, were working on a project for the construction of a power sub-station.&nbsp;

They were abducted by the militants from the vicinity of Cheshma-e-Sher area yesterday while they were travelling to inspect the work progress.

Shuja said the Afghan driver of the engineers is also missing and an operation is underway for their release, according to media reports.

The security officials in the province said efforts are underway by the Afghan forces and the government officials as well as the local tribal elders for the release of the Indian engineers.&nbsp;

Provincial governor Abdul Nemati said the security forces and the local officials are busy tracking the missing engineers and their driver.

He said apart from the security forces and the government officials, the local tribal elders have also stepped up efforts for the release of the Indian nationals.

Nemati assured that the missing Indian engineers and their driver will be released soon.

Baghlan Governor had yesterday said the terror group had abducted the Indian engineers and their driver, believing they were government employees.

No group has, however, claimed responsibility for the abduction.

The External Affairs Ministry had said in New Delhi it is in touch with authorities in Afghanistan.&nbsp;

Many of the earlier abductions in the war-torn country have been linked to Taliban.&nbsp;

In 2016, 40-year-old Indian aid worker Judith D'Souza was kidnapped in Kabul. She was released after 40 days.

India has provided at least USD 2 billion aid to Afghanistan for the economic development of the war-torn nation.&nbsp;

The engineers, employees of KEC International, an RPG group company, were working on the construction of a power sub-station. They were kidnapped on Sunday

Security officials in Afghanistan are working with local tribal elders to trace the seven Indian engineers abducted by Taliban gunmen in the restive northern Baghlan province, media reports said today. Provincial police spokesman Zabiullah Shuja said the Indian engineers of KEC International, an RPG group company, were working on a project for the construction of a power sub-station. They were abducted by the militants from the vicinity of Cheshma-e-Sher area yesterday while they were travelling to inspect the work progress. Shuja said the Afghan driver of the engineers is also missing and an operation is underway for their release, according to media reports. The security officials in the province said efforts are underway by the Afghan forces and the government officials as well as the local tribal elders for the release of the Indian engineers. Provincial governor Abdul Nemati said the security forces and the local officials are busy tracking the missing engineers and their driver. He said apart from the security forces and the government officials, the local tribal elders have also stepped up efforts for the release of the Indian nationals. Nemati assured that the missing Indian engineers and their driver will be released soon. Baghlan Governor had yesterday said the terror group had abducted the Indian engineers and their driver, believing they were government employees. No group has, however, claimed responsibility for the abduction. The External Affairs Ministry had said in New Delhi it is in touch with authorities in Afghanistan. Many of the earlier abductions in the war-torn country have been linked to Taliban. In 2016, 40-year-old Indian aid worker Judith D'Souza was kidnapped in Kabul. She was released after 40 days. India has provided at least USD 2 billion aid to Afghanistan for the economic development of the war-torn nation.

Afghan officials working with tribal elders to find 7 abducted Indian engineers

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