Reports of civilian killings by Taliban in Panjshir

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Trump censures Biden, says US ‘surrendered in defeat’ in Afghanistan

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Donald Trump

Press TV
September 11, 2021

Donald Trump has denounced US President Joe Biden’s hasty withdrawal of America’s military assets from Afghanistan, censuring the ‘ineptitude’ of the current administration in Washington that has “surrendered in defeat.”

In a video message at the 20th anniversary of the September 11 attacks, the former president of the United States said there has “never been a greater embarrassment” to the country than the Biden administration’s “rushed” withdrawal from Afghanistan.

“They should have never taken the military out first — you take the military out last, after all of the people are out.”

“There has never been anything like this. It looks like we fled.”

Trump also lamented the circumstances following the pullout of US forces from the war-torn country.

“We will struggle to recover from the embarrassment this incompetence has caused.”

In October 2001, the United States and its allies invaded Afghanistan. The proclaimed rationale was “war on terror.” The Taliban’s rule in the country ended as a result, but now not only the Americans have withdrawn in defeat, the Taliban are back in power, too.

Trump, whose administration brokered a deal with the Taliban in Qatar in 2020, claimed what America sees now “never would have happened” during his tenure.

Under the deal, Washington was obliged to pull out all of its forces from Afghanistan by the end of May 2021.

Biden missed the deadline. All US military forces were pulled out from Afghanistan on August 31, two weeks after the country fell to the Taliban.

Trump said he “wanted to get out by May 1, and when they [the Taliban] violated conditions, we bombed and did a lot of things.”

“They knew that if they did, they would be bombed into hell.”

The former president blamed “bad planning, incredible weakness and leaders who truly didn’t understand what was happening.”

He said the Biden administration “created this big open wound, a void, and the Taliban just came in and filled it, and within 24 hours, they controlled the whole country.”

Biden defends his administration’s handling of the withdrawal.

A group of representatives, however, has asked Congress to press the Pentagon to testify on the way Washington ended the country’s longest war, which cost the US tax-payers $2.3 trillion in two decades.

The war has also resulted in the death of 2,324 US military personnel, 4,007 US contractors and 46,319 Afghan civilians, according to the Cost of War Project at Brown University.

COVID-19 rates are soaring in Afghanistan as healthcare facilities collapse, says health minister

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Business Insider: The Afghan healthcare system is on the verge of collapse. To make matters worse, Afghanistan’s acting health minister has told Insider that roughly one-third of all COVID-19 tests carried out on September 7 were positive.  The country – which is struggling to get COVID-19 PCR tests – is facing the potential of a surge of the virus alongside the political and economic turmoil resulting from the Taliban takeover. Click here to read more (external link).

WFP: Afghans Resorting to Extreme Measures to Keep Hunger at Bay

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Lisa Schlein
VOA News
September 11, 2021

GENEVA – The World Food Program warns acute hunger is deepening in Afghanistan and families are resorting to extreme measures to find something to eat and keep their children from starving.

Randomized phone surveys carried out between August 21 and September 5 in all of Afghanistan’s 34 provinces found that 93% of households do not have enough to eat.

World Food Program deputy regional director, Anthea Webb, says many families are teetering on the verge of absolute destitution and are employing negative coping measures to survive.

“Those are things like skipping meals or preferring to give food to children instead of adults, or limiting portion sizes to make food last longer have almost doubled. So, now there are three out of four Afghan families employing at least one if not more of those approaches,” Webb said.

Food insecurity was widespread prior to the takeover of the country by Taliban militants on August 15. Before that date, the WFP phone surveys that got underway June 17, found 81% of households were short of food. The survey found a marked deterioration in food security after August 15, following the collapse of the Afghan government and Taliban seizure of the capital Kabul.

The WFP reports 14 million people are going hungry, including 2 million malnourished children in need of special nutritional feeding to survive. The country’s economy is in shambles. People are out of work and do not have money to buy food.

Webb said a major concern is to pre-position food for millions of people before winter sets in. She said it is now a race against time to deliver lifesaving assistance to the Afghan people who need it the most before roads are cut off by snow.

“We need to be reaching 9 million people per month by November, if we are to meet our planned target of 14 million by the end of the year. We have appealed for $200 million, and a number of countries have come forward with offers of help. But we are quite literally begging and borrowing to avoid food stocks running out in October,” Webb said.

The WFP has managed to assist 6.4 million Afghans this year. Webb says it has provided nutrient-dense foods to nearly 600,000 people across the country since mid-August, including meals for tens of thousands of children and mothers.

With support of the international community, Webb said the WFP will be able to purchase and transport food to strategic locations before it is too late.

Would-be Foreign Fighters Dreaming of Afghanistan

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ISIS trainees

Jeff Seldin
VOA News
September 11, 2021

WASHINGTON – Twenty years after the al-Qaida terror group based in Afghanistan launched the Sept. 11 terror attacks against the United States, there are indications a new generation of terrorists is looking to call the country home.

Seemingly encouraged by the Taliban takeover following the departure of U.S. and NATO forces, terrorists in other parts of the world are talking about making the journey, counterterrorism officials and analysts say.

“There’s no doubt that the chatter is about this,” Edmund Fitton-Brown, coordinator of the United Nations team that monitors the Islamic State group, al-Qaida and the Taliban, told an online forum Friday.

“There is definitely a very strong sort of sense of enthusiasm out there for Afghanistan,” he said. “The inspiration is there, people saying this is where it’s happened, this is where the U.S. has been defeated, where the West has been defeated.”

Analysts, too, say talk of a new flow of terrorists to Afghanistan is picking up.

“I’ve heard from a couple Southeast Asian government officials in the last 10 days or so,” said Charles Lister, a senior fellow and director of the Syria and Countering Terror and Extremism programs at the Washington-based Middle East Institute.

“One of them told me 100% of the chatter they were intercepting from known jihadist networks in their immediate region, 100% was focused on, ‘How do we get to Afghanistan?'” Lister said.

“Almost all of that was focused and oriented around ISIS (the Islamic State group), not around AQ (al-Qaida) or the Taliban,” he added.

U.S. officials who spoke to VOA on the condition of anonymity to discuss intelligence declined to comment on any specific “chatter,” but they did not minimize the potential threat.

“There’s a concern,” a U.S. military official said.

More broadly, U.S. officials have said they are bracing for both al-Qaida and the Islamic State group’s Afghan affiliate, known as IS-Khorasan or ISIS-K, to take advantage of the situation.

“I think the nature of al-Qaida and ISIS-K is they will always attempt to find space to grow and regenerate,” Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin told a small group of reporters Thursday during a visit to Kuwait.

“I think the whole (U.S. national security) community is kind of watching to see what happens and whether or not al-Qaida has the ability to regenerate in Afghanistan,” Austin added.

Central Asian nations have also expressed concerns, especially about IS-Khorasan, telling Pentagon officials the group was “creating the potential for destabilization.”

Meanwhile, U.S. intelligence officials have been paying close attention, noting IS-Khorasan has a history of being able to recruit from multiple countries in the region.

There are also doubts about the extent to which the Taliban, already aligned with al-Qaida, would be willing or capable of preventing an influx of foreign fighters, even those seeking to join with the rival Islamic State group.

Complicating matters further, Afghanistan has a long history as a destination for foreign fighters.

According to the International Centre for the Study of Radicalisation, at King’s College in London, the Soviet Union’s invasion of Afghanistan in late 1979 drew up to 20,000 foreign fighters.

Even now, recent intelligence estimates from U.N. member states put the number of foreign fighters in Afghanistan at 8,000 to 10,000.

Some intelligence agencies warned that Afghanistan was already seeing a “trickle” of incoming foreign fighters earlier this year, prior to the completion of the U.S. military withdrawal.

Whether that trickle ever develops into more of a flow, though, remains to be seen.

“I think, now, Afghanistan is a pole of attraction. … How fast that happens is another matter,” said the U.N.’s Fitton-Brown, pointing to what happened with the thousands of foreign fighters who never really left Syria and Iraq after traveling from all over the world to fight with IS until the collapse of its self-declared caliphate.

“At least up until the last time we looked at this, there was still more Afghan veterans in Syria than there were Syria or Iraq veterans in Afghanistan,” he said. “In other words, the relocation effect, although it’s real, it’s probably slower than people thought it would be.”

Afghanistan, 20 Years After the September 11 Attacks

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Afghan woman today, under Taliban rule

Ayesha Tanzeem
VOA News
September 11, 2021

ISLAMABAD – Twenty-four-year-old Tamana Zaryab Paryani is too young to remember the last Taliban rule, from 1996-2001, but she recalls the horror stories her mother told her.

“My mother said Taliban were a terrorist group … it was a brutal time. They used to stone people to death,” Paryani told VOA in a WhatsApp call from Kabul, where she and nearly 20 other women are regularly protesting in the streets against the very group her mother warned her about.

“Our agenda is to get our rights, the right to education and work, freedom of expression, the right of women to be part of the Cabinet, to have equal rights for women and men,” the political science student said.

Unlike the tens of thousands who left the country since the Taliban takeover on August 15, Paryani wants to stay and fight. She said she also refuses to believe the Taliban of 2021 are different from the Taliban of 2001.

“They don’t have a single woman in their Cabinet. They will never change. They are still beating up women and harassing them. And when we protest, they beat us up too,” she said.

Some of her sentiments are shared by the international community.

“Those who hoped for, and urged for, inclusivity will be disappointed. There are no women in the names [of Cabinet members] listed. There are no non-Taliban members, no figures from the past government, nor leaders of minority groups. Instead, it contains many of the same figures who were part of the Taliban leadership from 1996 to 2001,” Deborah Lyons, the top United Nations official in Afghanistan, told the Security Council on Thursday.

Still, Lyons and other diplomats dealing with the Taliban think the new reality is still taking shape and there is space for the international community to make a difference.

The Taliban have said they need and want international assistance in running the country and, according to Lyons, have asked for “patience and even advice as they attempt to transition from a military insurgency to a government.”

They have also promised they would respect human rights and the rights of women under Islam. And while the Taliban Cabinet looks much like it did in the 1990s, the country it intends to run looks much different.

When Wadir Safi, a law professor, arrived in Kabul in 2002 after living in Australia during the Taliban regime, the city did not have any of the high-rise buildings, bright lights, or the plethora of wedding halls and restaurants that mark its landscape today.

“Slowly by 2010, the face of Kabul changed,” he said.

The country’s population nearly doubled over the last 20 years, from 21.61 million in 2001 to more than 38 million, according to World Bank estimates.

The gross domestic product that was $2.46 billion in 2001 has now grown to nearly $20 billion, according to a website called Trading Economics that gathers official data for 196 countries.

The per capita income has grown from $330 to $549; official exports increased from $166 million in 2000 to $776.73 million in 2020, and official imports increased from $2.45 billion in 2003 to $6.5 billion in 2020. These figures to not include unofficial trade through smuggling.

Under the Taliban, almost no girls and few boys went to school. The universities and institutions that existed before the Taliban takeover in 1996 were left devastated by years of war starting with the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan in 1979.

UNESCO estimated that over the next two decades, Afghanistan lost an estimated 20,000 experts and academics. After the fall of Taliban in 2001, with help of international community, things started to change.

By 2017, 46% of Afghan girls and 66% of Afghan boys were attending primary schools, according to Afghanistan Living Conditions Survey conducted by the country’s Central Statistics Organization. Half of those girls and most of those boys went on to receive a secondary education. The national youth literacy rate in people ages 15-24 climbed to 53%.

Last year, according to an Afghan Ministry of Education report, enrollment in regular schools reached 9,710,824, of which 38% were girls.

Of the 4,385 Afghans who enrolled in vocational training centers, half were female.

When Safi started teaching in Kabul university in 2002, the students were terrified. The girls, many of whom returned to college after the fall of the Taliban, would wear a burqa and were afraid to show their faces.

By the time he retired in 2017, he said things had drastically changed.

“It seemed like you were in a university in Europe. The girls and boys sat together in classes,” he said.

Those changes in attitudes were reflected in the explosive growth of mainstream and social media in Afghanistan.

From no local free press under the Taliban, the country developed more than 100 newspapers, 170 radio stations, and multiple news and entertainment television channels, according to Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism. One sixth of Afghanistan’s population is active on social media.

The Afghan constitution, adopted in 2004, promises equal rights to men and women. The Taliban have called that constitution un-Islamic and are expected to change it.

In the last 20 years, Afghanistan developed a thriving community of artists, including females. An artists’ collective called the ArtLords, formed in 2014, took it upon itself to convert Kabul, a city full of blast walls, into the “street art capital of the world.”

Over the next six years, the group turned Kabul’s gray concrete walls into canvasses for their murals, depicting everything from schoolchildren to a Japanese aid worker who dedicated his life to Afghanistan to the historic Doha deal between the Taliban and the U.S. that led to the withdrawal of foreign forces from the country. According to its website, the collective has painted more than 2,100 murals.

Apart from “transforming the aggressive face of Kabul,” the collective also aimed to create “social transformation and behavioral change through employing the soft power of art.”

That soft power is being wiped from Kabul’s walls and replaced with black and white messages celebrating the Taliban and their ideology.

But women like Paryani have vowed that they would not be wiped away like murals.

“We don’t have an option. Our rights are being taken from us. We have to protest,” she said.

Not Keeping Its Word: Afghan Woman Quits Job After Pressure From Taliban

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Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty
September 11, 2021

KABUL — A young Afghan woman has quit her job at a private foreign-language center in Kabul after what she described as intimidation and harassment by Taliban fighters stationed outside her workplace.

The 24-year-old English teacher — whose name is being withheld for her protection — returned to her office this week when it reopened for the first time since the Taliban took control of the Afghan capital on August 15.

“I was excited to go to work after staying home for three weeks,” she said. “I put on Islamic clothing and went to work, but the moment I arrived there I faced insults and shouting from Taliban fighters standing at the entrance.”

The teacher said armed Taliban militants were guarding the commercial building that houses several companies and offices in a crowded neighborhood in downtown Kabul.

“When I tried to enter my office, one of them asked me, ‘Where are you going?’ I told them that I work here. He said: ‘Who told you to come? Go back home, fast,'” the woman told RFE/RL on September 10.

The language instructor said she was particularly concerned when the fighters called her an “infidel.”

“One of them said, ‘Look, she works at the place which teaches the language of infidels, so she is an infidel.’ Yes, they called me an infidel even though I was wearing the Islamic hijab,” the woman said.

Terrified by the comments from the gun-wielding men, she decided to immediately leave work.

Further harassment and insults came from several other Taliban fighters standing outside public buildings and along the roads in central Kabul. As she walked past they scolded her for being “out on the streets” on her own.

In some provinces, the Taliban has reportedly banned women from leaving home unless accompanied by a male relative.

No such demand was made publicly yet for women in Kabul. But the English teacher said Taliban fighters shouted at her, “What the hell are you doing walking alone outside your home?”

‘Within Islamic Norms, But Not Yet’

Two days after taking Kabul, the Taliban said women were allowed to return to work “within Islamic norms.” However, a Taliban spokesman said women should stay at home for now, as the Taliban fighters were “not trained” to respect women.

The Taliban’s interim government doesn’t include any women. But senior Taliban officials have said women employees at the ministries would be allowed to continue their work.

But the former Kabul English teacher said the Taliban promises were a sham. She doesn’t believe the Taliban government genuinely wants women to have careers.

“Taliban statements about letting women work are just a fake show for the international community to get aid. Once the Taliban gets what it wants from the outside world, it will end everything,” she said.

The teacher said three other women in her circle experienced similar assaults by Taliban fighters when they tried to go to work. They all quit their jobs rather than face the harassment, she said.

Speaking from her home in Kabul, the teacher told RFE/RL she was “too scared” to return to work.

“I used to work hard, sometimes I would stay in the office until 8 p.m. or work on the weekends, too,” the teacher said. “All my efforts, all my hard work, my education became nothing at the end.”

The teacher fears she might never be able to work or even freely walk alone on the streets as long as the Taliban remains in power in Afghanistan.

Written by Farangis Najibullah based on reporting by RFE/RL’s Radio Azadi

Copyright (c) 2021. RFE/RL, Inc. Reprinted with the permission of Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty, 1201 Connecticut Ave NW, Ste 400, Washington DC 20036.

Afghan Cricket Board Says Women’s Team Could Still Play

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By RFE/RL’s Radio Azadi
September 11, 2021

The head of the Afghanistan Cricket Board (ACB) has told an Australian broadcaster that the Afghan national women’s team could still be allowed to play cricket.

ACB Chairman Azizullah Fazli told SBS Radio Pashto late on September 10 that the governing body would outline “very soon” how women would be allowed to play — a development that, if true, would mark a reversal of the Taliban’s hard-line stance on the issue.

Fazli also said that all 25 members of the women’s team had remained in Afghanistan and had chosen not to leave on evacuation flights.

“We will give you our clear position on how we will allow women to play cricket,” Fazli told the broadcaster. “Very soon, we will give you good news on how we will proceed.”

Ahmadullah Wasiq, the deputy head of the Taliban caretaker government’s culture commission, told the Australian broadcaster on September 8 that it was “not necessary” for women to play sports.

However, Wasiq told Radio Azadi late on September 10 that the Taliban-led government “has not yet announced its stand on women’s sports.”

“The policies might be announced in future,” Wasiq said. “What I had said in the past was my opinion based on the country’s cultural and security situation.”

Following Wasiq’s earlier remarks, Australia threatened to cancel a historic maiden men’s test between the two countries that is scheduled to take place in Hobart, Australia, in November.

Australian captain Tim Paine said on September 10 that he thinks teams could pull out of the Twenty20 World Cup in October to protest a Taliban ban on women in sports or could boycott playing the Afghan men’s team.

The ACB early on September 11 urged Australia not to punish or “isolate” its men’s team over the Taliban’s apparent ban, saying it was “powerless to change the culture and religious environment of Afghanistan.”

Cricket Australia said on September 11 that it remains in regular contact with the ACB and that it had made its position “very clear” in a September 9 statement in which it supported “the game unequivocally for women at every level.”

Cricket Australia had also said on September 9 that it would have “no alternative” but to cancel the Hobart test if the Taliban banned women.

Under International Cricket Council regulations, countries with test status must also have an active women’s team.

Despite recent reports that many of the women’s team were in hiding in Kabul and that members of the Taliban had come looking for them, Fazli insisted they were safe.

“The women cricket coach, Diana Barakzai, and her players are all safe and living in their home country,” Fazli said. “Many countries have asked them to leave Afghanistan. But they have not left Afghanistan, and at the moment, they are in their places.”

With reporting by AFP and SBS Radio Pashto

Copyright (c) 2021. RFE/RL, Inc. Reprinted with the permission of Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty, 1201 Connecticut Ave NW, Ste 400, Washington DC 20036.