Now living in comparative freedom in Iran, 26-year-old Mahtab Eftekhar describes facing motherhood at 12 and explains why seeking justice for other women means she no longer fears death

At the age of 10, while still in the third grade, I received news from my mother and stepfather that we would travel to Helmand province for my brother’s wedding. Little did I know, it was to be my own wedding, as my family had arranged my marriage to my cousin and sold me for 40,000 Afghanis [£500], without my knowledge or consent.

That night, after the wedding, I went to sleep beside my mother and little brother, only to wake up next to my cousin. Trembling from confusion and fear, I fled the room in tears and screams. But my mother and her sister coerced me back into that room. It was then that I was told I had been married to my cousin.

Lords also press ministers to allow independent Rwanda monitoring as deportation bill returns to Commons

• UK politics – latest updates

Rishi Sunak’s government is considering concessions on the Rwanda deportation bill to allow exemptions for Afghans who served alongside UK forces, parliamentary sources say.

Ministers are also being pressed to give ground to an amendment to the legislation so that the east African country could be ruled unsafe by a monitoring committee.

Findings also detailed how a ‘bald man in black’ thought by service members to be the bomber was misidentified

The suicide bombing at the Kabul airport that killed US troops and Afghans in August 2021 was not preventable, and a “bald man in black” spotted by US service members on the morning of the attack was not the bomber, according to a new review by US Central Command.

The findings, released on Monday, refute assertions by some service members who believed they had a chance to take out the would-be bomber but did not get approval. And, for the first time, the USmilitary confirmed that the bomber was Abdul Rahman al-Logari, an Islamic State militant who had been in an Afghan prison but was released by the Taliban as the group took control of the country that summer.

Families of those who helped British forces could be deported from Pakistan despite promise to resettle them in UK

Afghan families who helped UK forces and then fled to neighbouring Pakistan are in danger of being deported back to the Taliban due to Home Office delays in bringing them to the UK.

In the chaotic evacuation period in the Afghan capital, Kabul, in August 2021 some family members eligible for resettlement in the UK became separated from the rest of their families. Some boarded flights while others were unable to due to crushes at the airport and instead fled over the border to Pakistan.

Shah Muhammad Rais was devastated when Taliban destroyed his shop, but now he is sending books to Afghanistan via the internet

Shah Muhammad Rais first opened his bookshop in the Afghan capital in 1974. By 2003, when his story was made famous by the bestselling novel The Bookseller of Kabul, the business had collected about 100,000 books, in different languages, about literature, history and politics. The collection included works of fiction and nonfiction, with everything from richly illustrated children’s tales to dense academic tomes.

After the Taliban stormed Kabul in 2021, Rais fled to the UK, telling the Guardian last year that he feared the group would destroy his cherished business. His fears came true.

The Belfast academic offers vitally important lessons about government strategies, from Northern Ireland to the Middle East, warning that few campaigns are a complete success

In January 2002, during his State of the Union address, President George W Bush said that in “four short months” the US had “rallied a great coalition, captured, arrested and rid the world of thousands of terrorists … and terrorist leaders who urged followers to sacrifice their lives are running for their own”.

The term “war on terror” had been coined a few days after al-Qaida’s attacks of 9/11 to describe the most extensive and ambitious counter-terrorism operation the world had seen. As Bush spoke, it all seemed to be going rather well.

The veteran American photojournalist has documented the US’s foreign wars and its divisions​ at home. He talks about his new book, which brings the two together with ambiguous and often disturbing results

Peter van Agtmael was nine years old in August 1990 when America went to war with Iraq for the first time. Mesmerised by the wave of patriotic fervour that ensued, he cut out and cherished a newspaper diagram showing the array of technological weaponry deployed by the US military. In the introduction to his new photo book, Look at the USA: A Diary of War and Home , he writes: “This was very exciting stuff for an impressionable kid who felt like a weirdo outcast with a lot of time to dream.”

Van Agtmael, who was born in Washington DC, grew up “middle-class” in Bethesda, Maryland and has a degree in history from Yale, is now a seasoned war photographer and photojournalist with the Magnum photo agency. He is also a deep thinker who, he tells me at one point, often feels “stuck inside my own head”. He describes the book, which juxtaposes his reportage from Iraq and Afghanistan with unsettling images of everyday American life, as “a collection of fragments from the post-9/11 era”. Threaded through with often deeply personal, self-questioning reflections, it is also a fraught conversation with himself about the nature and thorny ethics of his vocation.

Afghan regime’s return to public stoning and flogging is because there is ‘no one to hold them accountable’ for abuses, say activists

The Taliban’s announcement that it is resuming publicly stoning women to death has been enabled by the international community’s silence, human rights groups have said.

Safia Arefi, a lawyer and head of the Afghan human rights organisation Women’s Window of Hope, said the announcement had condemned Afghan women to return to the darkest days of Taliban rule in the 1990s.

Johnny Mercer given 10 days to reveal source of claims British troops engaged in war crimes

The minister for veterans’ affairs, Johnny Mercer, has been given 10 days to reveal the source of allegations British troops engaged in war crimes in Afghanistan, or face a potential prison sentence.

Mercer in effect admitted last month in front of the public inquiry into the claims that he believed members of the SAS had engaged in dozens of unlawful killings of Afghan civilians between 2010 and 2013.