Afghan YouTuber Arrested for Allegedly Insulting Quran

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Akmal Dawi
VOA News
June 7, 2022

He was famous among Afghans for his comedy and fashion videos on YouTube and Instagram, appearing with a protégé, Ghulam Sakhi. But Tuesday, Ajmal Haqiqi appeared disheveled in two short videos posted to Twitter by the Taliban’s feared intelligence agency.

“I apologize to the Afghan people, to esteemed religious scholars and to the government of the Islamic Emirate,” Haqiqi said while standing before a row of four men, including Sakhi. All but Sakhi wore brown penal uniforms with triangles on their chests.

While Haqiqi does not confess to a crime in the videos, he is understood to be accused of insulting verses of the Quran, Islam’s holy book, in a recent video that he and Sakhi posted to social media.

In that widely circulated video, Haqiqi laughs when Sakhi, who is known to have mental health issues, mimics Arabic scripture recitations in a funny voice. Sakhi is known for his witty and entertaining conversational style.

The identities of the two other men silently standing with Haqiqi and Sakhi could not be confirmed.

“My message to all YouTubers and the youth active in the media is to seriously avoid making any insults to Islamic sacred values,” Haqiqi said in the Dari language.

Taliban officials were not immediately available to specify if the YouTubers will be tried in a court or given specific penalties.

The Taliban, who claim they rule strictly according to Islamic law, consider criticism and anything perceived as disrespectful of Islam a punishable crime.

“In the Islamic sovereignty, no one is allowed to insult or make fun of Quranic verses, sayings of the Prophet and the Islamic sacreds,” the Taliban’s intelligence agency said in a tweet.

Media restrictions

Created in October 2020, Haqiqi’s YouTube channel, which boasts more than 16 million views — a substantial number for Afghanistan’s relatively small YouTube community —remains accessible, although the video in question appears to have been removed.

In the last video uploaded on June 5, Haqiqi and Sakhi appear side by side in front of a wall as Haqiqi apologizes for the video involving Quranic verses and then tries to make Sakhi utter a few words as an apology.

Since the Taliban’s return to power, Afghanistan has lost much of its once thriving media landscape as hundreds of journalists and free press activists have left the country.

The Taliban are widely accused of imposing strict censorship on free media, including the detention and torture of journalists.

Last month, the Taliban banned female anchors from appearing on television without a face covering — a move widely condemned by media and human rights organizations around the world.

Taliban claims good progress in diplomacy

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Muttaqi

Ariana: Amir Khan Muttaqi, acting foreign minister of the Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan (IEA), has said that the government has made good progress in its diplomacy with the world. Speaking at a meeting with the government’s spokesmen, Muttaqi said that IEA’s meetings with the United States and EU helped ease economic sanctions. He went on to say foreign embassies have started to reopen in Kabul and IEA envoys have been accepted in a number of countries. Click here to read more (external link).

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Iran Delivers Back Ex-Military Equipment to Taliban

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8am: The former government had stocked some heavy and light military equipment in Iran to prevent them from being seized by the Taliban group in the very first months of the clash escalation between the Taliban and former government security forces. It is now reported that Iran has returned and delivered back the military equipment to the Taliban. Click here to read more (external link).

Taliban Accused Of Forced Evictions As Fighting Intensifies In Northern Afghanistan

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Taliban fighters (file photo)

By RFE/RL’s Radio Azadi
Mustafa Sarwar
June 7, 2022

PARWAN, Afghanistan — Armed Taliban fighters stopped at Ahmad’s home last week, ordering his family of six to immediately leave their village in Afghanistan’s northern province of Baghlan.

“They didn’t even allow us to take any of our belongings,” Ahmad, who did not reveal his real name for fear of retribution, told RFE/RL’s Radio Azadi. He said the Taliban fighters forced his family into a military vehicle in the Pol-e Hesar district and dropped them off in another area of the province.

Ahmad and his family are among the hundreds of civilians that have been forcibly evicted from their homes in recent weeks in Baghlan, the scene of intensifying clashes between the Taliban and resistance forces, residents and activists say.

The recent surge in fighting in Baghlan and the neighboring province of Panjshir has prompted allegations of widespread Taliban abuses, including extrajudicial killings of civilians, torture, and forced displacement.

“The Taliban are forcing families to flee without even asking what they did wrong,” said Ahmad, who did not reveal his current whereabouts. “The telecommunications networks are limited here so people can’t get their voices heard. The Taliban can do whatever they want.”

Ahmad said the Taliban has turned many of the homes it has seized into military posts and barracks.

Zabihullah Farahmand, an activist in Baghlan, said the Taliban has forcibly evicted at least 50 families from their homes in the districts of Pol-e Hesar, Deh Salah, and Andarab in recent weeks. The districts comprise the long, narrow Andarab Valley.

“They have been forcibly relocated by the Taliban and no assistance has been provided to these refugees,” says Farahmand. “These families find refuge in other northern provinces with a lot of hardship. They need help and care.”

The National Resistance Front (NRF), an anti-Taliban militia, claimed that at least 70 families have been evicted from their homes in the Andarab Valley in recent weeks.

Mawlawi Hezbullah, the Taliban’s governor of Baghlan, suggested that the militant group had forcibly evicted civilians from their homes in “some mountainous areas” of the Andarab Valley but rejected claims that the “problem” was widespread.

The Taliban captured Baghlan and Panjshir in early September, weeks after toppling the Western-backed Afghan government and seizing power in Kabul. Since April, deadly clashes have erupted between resistance forces and the Taliban in both provinces.

Last month, heavy clashes broke out in parts of Panjshir, a traditional hotbed of ethnic Tajik resistance to the Pashtun-dominated Taliban. Residents alleged that some civilians accused of having links with the NRF were executed. Others were beaten and tortured in Taliban custody, they said.

‘People Are Fleeing’

Richard Bennett, the UN special rapporteur on human rights in Afghanistan, in a May 26 statement expressed “concern about allegations, which require verification, that civilians have been exposed to violations of international human rights law and international humanitarian law.”

He said that included “arbitrary arrests, extrajudicial killings, torture, and forced displacement in Panjshir and other northern provinces.”

In the latest incident, the family of a 40-year-old farmer in Panjshir’s Bazarak district said he was arrested and tortured to death by the Taliban. The militant group admitted that Munir Ahmad had died in its custody on June 2. l

“This is not the first time that local people have been arrested, tortured, imprisoned, and even killed,” a relative who did not want to be named told Radio Azadi.

Meanwhile, locals told Radio Azadi that the Taliban detained more than 100 civilians in the Paryan district of Panjshir in the past week. Their whereabouts are unknown. Earlier, the Taliban said it had detained an unspecified number of people accused of having links with the NRF.

Locals have also alleged that Taliban fighters have recently beheaded several NRF fighters who were captured, a claim the Taliban has rejected.

The ongoing fighting has forced thousands of people to flee their homes in Panjshir.

“It is a battlefield and war is raging,” said a resident of Panjshir’s Dara district who did not want to be named for safety reasons, adding that many residents were on the run.

“Some people were beaten and killed by the Taliban,” he added. “People are fleeing with their families out of fear.”

Among those who have managed to escape Panjshir is Anisa, a resident of the Shutul district. Two weeks ago, clashes forced her family of six to flee their home.

She said that her family trudged for day through the mountains by foot. Once they reached the main road to Kabul, they were able to catch a ride to the capital.

“We left our homes because of the fighting,” said the 35-year-old. “We came to Kabul from the mountains with just the clothes on our backs. We left all our belongings behind.”

Based on reporting in Afghanistan by RFE/RL’s Radio Azadi. The correspondent’s identity has been withheld for security reasons.

Copyright (c) 2022. RFE/RL, Inc. Reprinted with the permission of Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty, 1201 Connecticut Ave NW, Ste 400, Washington DC 20036.

Can Iran get along with the Taliban?

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War on the Rocks: Based on a number of interviews with former Afghan officials, we believe that Tehran will struggle in its efforts to forge a cooperative relationship with the Taliban. Although the fight against the Islamic State in Afghanistan could create common ground, there are plenty of other pitfalls. The Taliban’s resistance to sharing power with ethnic minorities, its own factionalism, and the potential for more fighting on the Iranian-Afghan border are all likely to create continued security challenges for Iran. Click here to read more (external link).

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Germany Says Taliban Are Leading Afghanistan ‘Into Downfall’

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Ayaz Gul
VOA News
June 7, 2022

Germany urged the global community Tuesday to collectively tell Afghanistan’s Islamist Taliban rulers that they “are heading in the wrong direction” and called for strictly linking any economic aid for the war-torn country to the human rights of Afghans.

“The situation is dire and the Taliban are leading the country into a downfall,” German Foreign Minister Annalena Baerbock told a news conference during a visit to neighboring Pakistan.

“Our influence on what happens inside Afghanistan is very limited. It depends on the Taliban making rational choices in their own economic interests and that is not what they are doing right now,” Baerbock said.

The insurgent-turned-Islamist rulers seized power from the now defunct Western-backed government in August as U.S.-led international forces withdrew from Afghanistan following almost two decades of fighting with the Taliban.

The interim male-only Taliban cabinet has rolled back many human rights Afghans enjoyed over the past 20 years, particularly those of women. It has suspended secondary education for most teenage girls and prevented female employees in some government departments from returning to their jobs.

The Ministry for Vice and Virtue, tasked with interpreting and enforcing the Taliban’s version of Islam, has ordered women to cover up fully in public, including their faces, and barred them from traveling beyond 70 kilometers unless accompanied by a male relative.

Baerbock criticized the restrictions, saying they have “almost excluded” women from participation in public life.

“The international community must stand united and together tell the Taliban loud and clear; you are heading in the wrong direction,” she said. “As long as they go down this path there is no room for normalization and even less for recognition of the Taliban as the legitimate rulers of the country.”

No country has yet recognized the new Taliban government, citing concerns the Islamist group has reneged on pledges it would respect rights of all Afghans and prevent terrorist groups, including al-Qaida, from using the country for international attacks.

An already bad humanitarian crisis in Afghanistan has worsened since the return of the Taliban to power in Kabul in the wake of international financial sanctions on the group, pushing the national economy to the brink of collapse.

Baerbock acknowledged that the Afghan economy was grinding to a halt and advocated sustained humanitarian assistance to Kabul, saying it was not the Afghan people’s fault that their government was overthrown by the Taliban.

“But anything else above humanitarian aid must be strictly conditionalized,” the German foreign minister emphasized.

Baerbock thanked Pakistan for evacuating and facilitating the transit of more than 14,000 at-risk Afghans to Germany since the fall of Kabul to the Taliban. The refugees served German troops during their stay in Afghanistan.

Pakistani Foreign Minister Bilawal Bhutto Zardari, while speaking at the joint news conference with the German counterpart, urged the world to actively engage in preventing the brewing humanitarian crisis in Afghanistan threatening lives of the country’s 40 million people. He also called on the Taliban to take steps to address international concerns about the rights of Afghans.

“It is our hope that the Afghan authorities will be responsive to the expectations of the international community, including inclusivity, respect, human rights for all, including women and take effective actions against terrorism,” Zardari said.

For their part, the Taliban have urged the world to “show respect” for Afghan values and rebuffed calls for reversing restrictions on women, saying they are in line with local religious and cultural values.

The Taliban have said public secondary schools are open in about a dozen out of 34 Afghan provinces and efforts are underway for allowing girls to return to their classes across the country. They insist a of Afghan female civil servants, or 120,000, have returned to work, included 94,000 in the education ministry and 14,000 in the health ministry.

Baerbock arrived in Islamabad on her maiden two-day tour and met with Zardari as well as other Pakistani officials but she canceled rest of her activities after testing positive for COVID-19.

Related

Internal Clashes Among Taliban in Badakhshan Kill 1 Child and Injure 8 Rebels

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8am: As a result of internal clashes among the Taliban in Darayim district of Badakhshan province, a nine-year-old child is killed and 8 Taliban fighters are injured, local sources reported. The clashes took place over the arrest of a resident of Darayim district, sources told Hasht-e Subh on Tuesday. Click here to read more (external link).

Ex-Afghan Leaders Made Off With Less Than $1 Million While Fleeing Taliban Advance

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Ashraf Ghani

Jeff Seldin
VOA News
June 6, 2022

WASHINGTON — Tales of Afghanistan’s former president and his senior advisers fleeing the country in helicopters laden with millions of U.S. dollars, as Taliban fighters closed in on Kabul, appear to be overblown, according to an interim report by American investigators.

Russia’s embassy in Kabul first floated the allegations of the Afghan cash heist August 16, a day after Afghan President Ashraf Ghani and senior aides departed, telling the RIA news agency that the ex-president left the country with four cars and a helicopter full of cash, worth an estimated $169 million.

The charges were then echoed by Afghanistan’s ambassador to Tajikistan. But in a statement less than a month later Ghani denied the accusations, labeling them as “completely and categorically false.”

Now, interim findings from the U.S. Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction (SIGAR) finds the truth is likely somewhere in between.

“Although SIGAR found that some cash was taken from the grounds of the palace and loaded onto these helicopters, evidence indicates that this number did not exceed $1 million and may have been closer in value to $500,000,” John Sopko, the special inspector general, wrote in a letter to top U.S. lawmakers.

“Most of this money was believed to have come from several Afghan government operating budgets normally managed at the [presidential] palace,” Sopko added, noting another $5 million also reportedly went missing after being left behind.

“The origins and purpose of this money are disputed, but it was supposedly divided by members of the Presidential Protective Service after the helicopters departed but before the Taliban captured the palace,” Sopko wrote.

SIGAR’s interim report, published Tuesday, was compiled without any input or explanation from Ghani, who has so far not responded to a series of questions.

Former Afghan officials

More than 30 other former Afghan officials, many in key offices, did talk however, telling the U.S. investigators that luggage was minimal on at least three of the helicopters used to flee the Presidential Palace.

Only a suitcase belonging to Presidential Protective Service chief, General Qahar Kochai, and a backpack belonging to Deputy National Security Adviser Rafi Fazil, contained cash, they said, with SIGAR estimating that the bags contained a total of about $440,000 worth of money.

The rest of the cash was held by the officials themselves.

“Everyone had $5,000 to $10,000 in their pockets,” a former senior Afghan official told SIGAR. “No one had millions.”

The admission contradicts earlier assertions by some former senior Afghan officials, like ex-National Security Adviser Hamdullah Mohib, who when asked by CBS News in December 2021 about the allegations of cash being taken from Kabul, said, “absolutely not … we just took ourselves.”

This past February, though, Mohib told VOA he was cooperating with the SIGAR investigation.

“I also gave [SIGAR] my bank accounts and details of all my assets,” he said at the time.

Despite such initial discrepancies, SIGAR investigators found little to back up the Russian claims that the fleeing Afghan officials made off with a sum of $169 million.

“This amount of cash would have been difficult to conceal,” the SIGAR report said, explaining that much money would have weighed nearly 2 tons.

“According to both SIGAR interviews and press reports, the helicopters were already overloaded with passengers and fuel and could not have taken off with significant additional weight,” the report added. “That these helicopters were allegedly armored for presidential travel would have reduced their payload capacity even further.”

Additionally, the SIGAR report said the Afghan ambassador to Tajikistan who publicly backed the Russian claims, Zahir Aghbar, refused to talk to investigators or provide any evidence.

The estimated $500,000 in cash did not last long.

Senior Afghan officials told SIGAR that $120,000 was used to charter a flight from Uzbekistan, where four helicopters with a total of 54 passengers landed after running out of fuel, to Abu Dhabi.

After arriving in Abu Dhabi, the remaining cash was reportedly divided among the 54 Afghans, most of whom spent weeks at the St. Regis Hotel.

“Some was sent to family members of PPS [Presidential Protective Service] guards still in Afghanistan, some was sent to senior staff still in Afghanistan, some was given to senior staff for commercial airfare to third countries where they had citizenship, and the rest was distributed among the group as they departed the St. Regis,” the report said.

Questions remain

Although SIGAR is confident in its findings that Ghani and other top aides did not smuggle hundreds of millions of dollars out of Afghanistan as they fled the country, questions remain about other money that reportedly disappeared.

SIGAR, citing multiple and sometimes contradictory accounts of various eyewitnesses, said it could not draw a “definitive conclusion” about the fate of the $5 million that reportedly was left at the Presidential Palace in Kabul.

One former senior official told SIGAR the money was divided into three to four bags and loaded into cars belonging to Ghani’s motorcade.

Another official, who was unaware of allegations the cars carried bags of cash, said he was told the motorcade was then sent to pick up former Afghan President Hamid Karzai, which the official described as bizarre.

Yet other officials differed on the origins of the $5 million, with some saying it was Ghani’s personal money while others suggested it may have been provided by the United Arab Emirates for Ghani’s 2019 reelection campaign.

Similarly, investigators have unresolved questions about the fate of the former Afghan government’s operating budget of the National Directorate of Security, which reportedly had as much as $70 million in cash in the months before the Taliban takeover.

One official told SIGAR much of the money was being spent right up until the end.

“We used a lot of money to send and buy weapons,” the official said. “The governors told us to push the people to help them protect different areas. … We carried a lot of money to different people, like tribal leaders.”

But other officials told SIGAR the money may well have been stolen by corrupt officials.