8am: A local journalist in Parwan province claims that armed thieves have stolen his property in this province, wearing Taliban uniforms. Habib Shirzad, one of Parwan’s local journalists, said that armed robbers entered his residence in Jabal Saraj district of the province on Thursday night last week using the name of the Taliban. Click here to read more (external link).
Yaqoob
NPR: Yaqoob is part of the second generation of Taliban leadership. He is a son of Mullah Muhammad Omar, the cleric who led the Taliban during their first time in power from 1996-2001. Asked if he wanted better relations with the United States, Yaqoob laughed. “This is obvious,” he said, adding that recognition of the current regime was in the United State’s own interest because the U.S. had no other regime to deal with. “There are many countries that are more against America than us, but they recognize them officially,” he said. “There are more countries in the world that pose more danger than Afghanistan to America, but still America recognized them officially. I think that recognition is a positive step toward a bigger change.” Click here to read more (external link).
8am: As a result of an explosion in the Sar-e-kariz neighborhood in the west of Kabul, at least six civilians have been killed, eyewitnesses said. The explosion occurred on Friday evening (August 5th) near the Imam Baqir Mosque among people in the Sar-e-kariz area in the 6th security district of Kabul. The Taliban have declared two dead and three wounded. Reports indicate that this explosion was caused by explosives embedded in an ice cream tricycle. Click here to read more (external link).
Tolo News: FBI director Christopher Wray in senate judiciary committee hearing said he is concerned about potential attacks on the United States emanating from Afghanistan. The FBI director was speaking to the committee on Thursday, five days after the attack on Ayman Al-Zawahiri by a US drone in Kabul. “So we are, especially now that we’re out, I’m worried about the potential loss of sources and (intelligence) collection over there.”….. and I am very worried about the possibility that we will see Al-Qaeda reconstitute and ISIS-k potentially taking advantages of deteriorating security environment,” said Wray. Click here to read more (external link).
8am: Sources in Zabul province say that the Taliban have forcibly persuaded people to demonstrate against America for killing the leader of Al-Qaeda. The Taliban in some provinces have conducted protests on Friday (August 5th) in connection with the recent US airstrike and the killing of Ayman al-Zawahiri in Kabul. Sources have added that the Taliban have entered among the demonstrators in private clothes to force the people to protest. Click here to read more (external link).
Sirajuddin Haqqani
Akmal Dawi
VOA News
August 4, 2022
Sirajuddin Haqqani has not responded to allegations that al-Qaida leader Ayman al-Zawahiri lived under his protection in Kabul and he has not appeared in public since al-Zawahiri’s killing was reported, but Sirajuddin Haqqani still carries a $10 million bounty on his head for his alleged terrorist activities.
The 42-year-old Taliban interior minister and leader of the Haqqani network, a powerful faction within the Taliban movement, is not the only designated terrorist in his extended family. His uncle, Khalil Haqqani, also a Cabinet minister in the Taliban’s Afghanistan leadership, and his younger brother, Aziz Haqqani, each has a reward of $5 million offered by the U.S. government in return for information that will lead to their arrest.
Yahya Haqqani, Sirajuddin’s close aide and brother-in-law, has no monetary reward for his arrest but was designated a global terrorist by the U.S. government in February 2014.
The Haqqanis are wanted for their alleged involvement in the execution and organizing of a series of terrorist attacks in Afghanistan over the past several years.
Sirajuddin Haqqani is accused of planning the Jan. 14, 2008, attack on the Serena Hotel in Kabul that killed six people including U.S. citizen Thor David Hesla. In March 2008, the U.S. Department of State designated Sirajuddin Haqqani a Specially Designated Global Terrorist.
In February 2008, Khalil Haqqani was given the same designation. Among other terrorist activities, Khalil Haqqani is accused of aiding al-Qaida operatives in Afghanistan with fighters, weapons and financial resources.
Until the Taliban seized Kabul last August, the Haqqanis were living so secretively that there were no pictures of Sirajuddin and Khalil.
Boasting of their “Allah-aided” victory against an invading superpower, the U.S., both Khalil and Sirajuddin Haqqani now appear in front of cameras acting as the liberators of Kabul.
Return to hiding?
But several Haqqani network leaders, including Sirajuddin, have left Kabul for hideouts in southwestern Afghanistan since the assassination of al-Zawahiri, according to Rahmatullah Nabil, a former director of Afghanistan’s spy agency.
He told VOA that Sirajuddin Haqqani was last seen in several short videos tweeted by the Taliban’s interior ministry on August 1 in which he is seen greeting and talking with people in rural parts of Afghanistan’s Paktia Province.
“After the attack on al-Zawahiri, Siraj had gone to Paktia and all his closest aides have gone into hiding and are not seen in the interior ministry. Siraj is fearful for his relations and policies before and after the attack,” Nabil told VOA.
The Taliban have said they had no knowledge of al-Zawahiri’s residence in the heart of Kabul, less than a kilometer from the Taliban’s intelligence agency.
U.S. officials, however, dispute that.
“There were senior members of the Haqqani Network that were aware,” John Kirby, a White House spokesperson, told reporters when asked if the Taliban knew about al-Zawahiri’s presence in Kabul.
Targeting Haqqanis
U.S. officials say they will not allow the Taliban to once again turn Afghanistan into a hub for international terrorists.
“If we have credible evidence that a terrorist [is] operating in Afghanistan or anywhere else, the president will take action to defend this country and the American people,” Kirby said on Tuesday.
VOA asked the White House and the National Security Council whether leaders of the Haqqani Network might qualify as targets for U.S. counterterror strikes, but the White House responded that it had nothing to add.
Nabil, the former Afghan intelligence official who closely worked with U.S. intelligence agencies, said the Haqqanis could fall on the U.S. target list.
“Given the depth of Taliban, particularly the Haqqani branch’s ties to other terrorist groups, which are unbreakable, it is likely that U.S. will target them, and Siraj Haqqani will not be an exception,” Nabil said.
While the U.S. has not hit Taliban targets over the past year, a U.S. drone strike in 2016 killed Mullah Akhtar Mansour, a former Taliban leader, in southwest Pakistan near the Afghan border.
“I don’t believe the U.S. will conduct any strike against Taliban leadership in the short term; this goes against the interests of the current policy of the U.S. in the region, which is limited to preventing the use of Afghan soil as a harbor for terrorist organizations that want to attack the U.S. and its allies,” Riccardo Valle, an independent researcher on jihadism and security in Afghanistan and Pakistan, told VOA.
By harboring al-Zawahiri in Kabul, U.S. officials say, the Taliban violated their commitment in the Doha Agreement that they will not allow any terrorist groups or individuals, including members of al-Qaida, to operate in Afghanistan.
U.S. officials have accused the Taliban, specifically the Haqqani Network, of violating the agreement by allowing al-Zawahiri in Kabul, adding another item in the U.S.’ terrorism case against Sirajuddin Haqqani and his top collaborators.
TRT World: Factional rift and competing interests to move up the power ladder are among the key factors pushing the former insurgent group to the brink of implosion. There are four major divisions in the Taliban administration. The first is between the movements’ pragmatist and hardline leaders. The second division is between the Taliban fighters and top leaders. The third division is between the Taliban’s Haqqani Network and the Kandhari Taliban faction. The fourth division is between the Pashtun and non-Pashtun or Uzbek and Tajik Taliban. The non-Pashtun Taliban feel marginalized and discriminated against by their Pashtun counterparts. Even the Taliban chief of army staff, Qari Fasihuddin Fitrat, an ethnic Tajik credited with the Taliban’s speedy military victories, also feels alienated. He does not have the authority to appoint or transfer commanders. Click here to read more (external link).
Ryan Crocker
Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty
August 4, 2022
A group of former U.S. ambassadors has called on the United Nations to reimpose travel restrictions on Taliban leaders in response to the radical group increasingly reverting to its practices from the years when it first ruled Afghanistan.
In a letter published by the Atlantic Council think tank on August 3, the six former diplomats said the killing last week of Al-Qaeda leader Ayman al-Zawahri in Kabul, where he had taken shelter in a safe house, highlighted the Taliban’s continued close ties with the terrorist group, despite denying such ties since returning to power last year following the withdrawal of U.S.-led international forces.
Furthermore, after returning to power in August, the Taliban has steadily reimposed extreme restrictions on human rights, especially targeting women and girls “by refusing them education, restricting their travel, dictating their dress, and limiting their movement,” it added.
“The bottom line remains: If the United States cannot find any actions to support its words, then its words are hollow. The women of Afghanistan will remain unsupported, and the terrorist threats emanating from Afghanistan will remain –no matter what Secretary of State Antony Blinken and other senior U.S. and partner nation officials say,” the letter says. “Reimposing the travel ban is one of the few actions the United States can take to show that it’s serious. It should use this opportunity.”
The letter was signed by James Cunningham, Ryan Crocker, Hugo Llorens, P. Michael McKinley, Ronald E. Neumann, and Earl Anthony Wayne, all of whom held positions at the U.S. Embassy in Afghanistan over the past 15 years.
A U.S.-led invasion ousted the Taliban in late 2001 following proof that the radical group had sheltered and aided Osama bin Laden in his September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks on the United States, which killed some 3,000 people.
In the agreement signed with the United States in February 2020, the group’s leaders vowed not to harbor terrorist groups once U.S. forces withdrew from Afghanistan and subsequently pledged to respect women’s rights in line with Islamic traditions.
“The juxtaposition of the Taliban’s evident and continuing support for international terrorism and the violation of the most fundamental rights of women and others justifies a next step in demonstrating global rejection of what they stand for,” the letter said.
The UN travel-ban waiver was originally granted to Taliban leaders in 2019 to allow them to travel to peace negotiations.
“But the Taliban now takes advantage of it to allow its leaders to take business-class jaunts to multiple foreign capitals and conferences in efforts to bolster their perceived legitimacy,” the letter said, urging the UN Security Council to rescind the waiver when it comes up for review later this month.
HRW: Afghanistan’s humanitarian crisis cannot be effectively addressed unless the United States and other governments ease restrictions on the country’s banking sector to facilitate legitimate economic activity and humanitarian aid, Human Rights Watch said today. Human Rights Watch issued an updated question-and-answer document outlining the economic crisis and steps to overcome it. Click here to read more (external link).