Norway is a country that claims to be peace-loving, humanitarian and certainly not racist. While Hungary is being hounded by other EU nations due to its animosity to refugees, and Poland is being hounded for its disrespect of the justice system, Norway is not hounded by anybody.

However, in all practical terms, Norway has virtually closed its borders to refugees, and today an interesting decision reached by Norway’s Immigration Appeals Board was made known to the press.

It’s a symbolic case, you might say. An Afghan family came to Norway in 2011 and was allowed to live in the small town Dokka, in the forbidding central mountain massive. The current government is, however, adamantly opposed to immigration, probably no less so than Victor Orban’s government, and the family was subsequently ordered to leave the country.

Meanwhile, the town they lived in appeared to have adopted the family that had landed on its doorstep, not least the little girl Farida, and took the case to court. And won. The Immigration Appeals Board appealed. And lost. The matter has been considered by three court instances, and even the Supreme Court upheld the decision to allow the family to live in Norway.

So much for court rulings.

The Immigration Appeals Board’s grounds for flouting the Supreme Court is, apparently, that the situation in Afghanistan is now “stable” (whatever that means!) if not in the part of the country the family came from, at least in Kabul.

Now I have not previously paid any attention to the so-called “Farida Case”. But in the back of my mind I have been wondering how many of the Afghan returnees from sanctimonious Norway have been hit by the rising number of bomb blasts in Afghanistan over the past months. Hardly a week passes without brief news reports from Afghanistan, of a new horrible blood bath, more often than not caused by IS, rather than the Taliban. This is exactly as expected: As IS was being driven out of Mosul and Raqqa, it was clear that they would step up operations in fragile Afghanistan.

I am including a list of incidents gleaned mostly from Reuters (with a filter of “Kabul” + “past month”). The reason I concentrated on Kabul was that this city was specifically referred to as “stable” in the decision to flout the Supreme Court.

30/4/2018	(Reuters about Kabul): In all, 26 people died in the two blasts, which were claimed by Islamic State.
22/4/2018	KABUL (Reuters) – The death toll from Sunday’s blast in the Afghan capital Kabul rose to 48, with 112 others wounded, a public health officer said. Islamic State claimed responsibility for the blast set off by a suicide bomber outside a voter registration center.
12/4/2018	KABUL (Reuters) – The number of civilians killed and wounded by suicide bombings and “complex attacks” in Afghanistan has more than doubled so far this year, the United Nations said on Thursday. Suicide bombings and attacks by militant groups killed or maimed 751 people from January through March, one-third of total civilian cases, the U.N. Assistance Mission in Afghanistan (UNAMA) said. Attacks are considered “complex” when the assailants employ a variety of means. One suicide attack in January carried out in vehicles disguised as ambulances, killed more than 100 people in Kabul. Overall, UNAMA recorded 763 civilian deaths and 1,495 injuries in the first quarter, similar to the same period in each of the past two years. Fighting on the ground was the second-leading cause of civilian deaths and injuries. Cases attributed to anti-government forces, mainly the Taliban and Islamic State, increased 6 percent year-on-year to 1,500.

In addition:

(Wikipedia on the War in Afghanistan): The UN estimates that 1,662 civilians were killed from January through June 2017.

4/5 /2018 (Reuters): In terms of districts, the government controls or influences 56.3 percent of the country, the second lowest level since at least 2015, the latest report from the Special Inspector General for Afghanistan, a U.S. congressional watchdog, shows.