War-battered Afghanistan took a step towards rejoining the modern world last week
when the country formally took control of its own internet domain, .af, the United
Nations said.The online equivalent of an international telephone code, the .af suffix will be reserved for the sole use of Afghanistan-based e-mail and web surfers, who are slowly increasing in number as the country catches up with technology.
“For Afghanistan, this is like reclaiming part of our sovereignty”, explained Communications Minister Masoum Estanakzai, according to a press release issued by the United Nations Development Program (UNDP). “It’s the country’s flag on the internet”.
The first two sites to claim the suffix belong to the Afghan Ministry of Communication (www.moc.gov.af) and the UNDP (www.undp.org.af), which provided legal and technical support for the domain acquisition.
Use of the Internet was strictly banned during the harsh 1996-2001 rule of the Taliban, under whose fundamentalist and isolationist regime Afghanistan’s communications were virtually severed from the outside world.
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