Afghanistan crisis live updates: 'Afghan evacuee flights halted from two key bases'

China on Wednesday announced $31 million as aid to Afghanistan, its first after the Taliban seized power in Kabul, as it backed the Afghan militant group's interim government, saying it is a “necessary step” to restore order and “end anarchy”. Foreign Minister Wang Yi said China will provide Afghanistan with 200 million yuan (USD 31 million) worth of grains, winter supplies, vaccines and medicines as per its requirements, official media here reported.

A new Taliban interim government drawn exclusively from loyalist ranks formally began work Wednesday. They are already facing opposition to their rule, with scattered protests -- many with women at the forefront -- breaking out in cities across the country. A small rally in the capital Kabul on Wednesday was quickly dispersed by armed Taliban security, while Afghan media reported a protest in the northeastern city of Faizabad was also broken up.

Speaking in Islamabad, PML-N Vice President Maryam Nawaz said that Pakistan should jointly work with the international community for rehabilitating people and rebuilding infrastructure in the war-torn country, Dawn newspaper reported. She also said, Afghanistan was a sovereign country and stressed that Pakistan must not interfere in its internal matters. This statement comes a day after hundreds of Afghans took to the streets in Kabul and demonstrated in front of the Pakistan embassy in Afghanistan demanding Islamabad to stop meddling in their affairs and helping the Taliban.

The last member of Afghanistan's Jewish community has left the country. Zebulon Simentov, who lived in a dilapidated synagogue in Kabul, kept kosher and prayed in Hebrew, endured decades of war as the country's centuries-old Jewish community rapidly dwindled. But the Taliban takeover last month seems to have been the last straw. The 62-year-old Simentov and 29 of his neighbors, nearly all of them women and children, have been taken to a "neighboring country,'' a report said.

Pakistan Foreign Minister Shah Mahmood Qureshi on Wednesday hosted the first ministerial meeting of Afghanistan's neighbours since the Taliban took over in Kabul, saying that even though the situation in the war-weary country is "complex and fluid", its "new reality" required the world to discard "old lenses" and proceed with a "realistic approach". He said that at the centre of the endeavours must remain the well-being of the Afghan people, who have suffered enormously due to conflict for over 40 years.

"No Phd degree, master's degree is valuable today. You see that the Mullahs and Taliban that are in power, have no Phd, MA or even a high school degree, but are the greatest of all," Taliban's Minister of Education Sheikh Molvi Noorullah Munir is heard saying in a video.

"The announcement of a transitional government without the participation of other groups and yesterday's violence against demonstrators and journalists in Kabul are not signals that give cause for optimism," Heiko Maas said. Germany was willing to keep talking to the Taliban in a bid to ensure more people are able to leave the country, he added.

Terming the Taliban-unveiled new 'caretaker' government in Afghanistan as 'illegal', the anti-Taliban forces in the country have urged the international community not to recognise it. The Panjshir province based National Resistance Front (NRF) asserted that the announcement of the Taliban's caretaker cabinet is "a clear sign of the group's enmity with the Afghan people." A Taliban spokesman said the appointments of the interim government are not final as these are acting positions, and the remaining posts will be announced at a later date. The spokesman stressed that it is an "acting" government and the group will try to induct people from other parts of the country.