Zablon Simintov
New York Post: Zebulon Simantov, the famed last Jew of Afghanistan, is getting ready to hit the Big Apple. “I like everything in New York. Everything is exciting,” Simantov, 62, told The Post in his first interview since fleeing Afghanistan two weeks ago. “I would like to be a US citizen.” Click here to read more (external link).
Ariana: Afghans working in the country’s renowned carpet industry say they fear for their future and that business has taken a hit following the Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan’s (IEA) takeover. “Carpet weavers should be supported and the carpet weaving industry should grow as well,” said weaver Najaf Ali Mejrayi, while pausing from his work on an intricate rug in the capital, Kabul. Click here to read more (external link).
More Economic News
By Abubakar Siddique
Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty
September 25, 2021
The austere form of Sunni Islam that Afghanistan’s Taliban rulers follow is rooted in an Islamic seminary in Deoband, a town in the northern Indian state of Uttar Pradesh.
It is an interpretation of Islam that is used by the Taliban to justify their clerical government and their goals for a hard-line Islamic system.
The 82-year-old principal of Darul Uloom Deoband, the Islamic school in Deoband, tells RFE/RL he hopes the Taliban will be tolerant, just, and pragmatic. But he says he also supports the Taliban’s apparent drive to completely segregate men and women in education.
Maulana Syed Arshad Madani says he thinks the Taliban’s seizure of power in Afghanistan was a positive development because the Islamist movement liberated the country from foreign occupation.
“We will welcome them so long as they don’t differentiate between the majority and the minority and will protect the life, property, and honor of everyone,” Madani told RFE/RL’s Gandhara this week.
“[The Taliban-led government] should not have two different yardsticks for the people who are in the majority or minority as Afghanistan is a multiethnic state with Tajiks and Uzbeks living alongside Pashto speakers,” Madani said.
Since taking over Kabul on August 15, the Taliban has appointed mostly its senior leaders, predominantly Pashtun clerics, to top positions in the Taliban-led government.
The Taliban-led cabinet has only a few members from the Tajik, Uzbek, and Hazara minorities. Notably absent are women, non-Muslim minorities, or representatives of smaller ethnic groups such as Baluch, Nuristanis, and Turkmen.
Likewise, members of other Afghan political groups have little representation in what the Taliban had promised would be an “inclusive” government.
Historical Ties
Madani is adamant that his school has no current connection to the Taliban as none of its leaders was educated in his India-based seminary.
But he says the Taliban has some historical ties to the Deoband Movement, whose leaders were staunchly anti-British and established an exiled Indian government in the second decade of the 20th century.
Its goal was to liberate their country from the British through an armed struggle in cooperation with the Ottoman Empire, the Durrani Amir, and the Pashtun tribes straddling the border of British India and Afghanistan.
After the British discovered the plot in 1916, Madani’s father Maulana Syed Hussain Ahmad Madani served a prison sentence in Malta along with his teacher and top Deobandi cleric Maulana Mehmud Hasan.
The elder Madani later allied with Mahatma Gandhi and opposed the founding of Pakistan as a homeland for South Asia’s Muslims, arguing that nation states could not be founded on the basis of religion alone.
“Today, those Afghans who call themselves Deobandis are the children or grandchildren of those people who were associated with that movement and their exiled government there,” Madani told RFE/RL, referring to the orthodox Sunni sect in South Asia.
Deobandis are a prominent strain among Islamists in modern-day Pakistan and Afghanistan.
But unlike most Deobandis in Pakistan, where political parties established by Deobandi clerics engage in peaceful political processes, Afghanistan’s Taliban have seized power twice through military conquest during the past quarter-century.
Pakistani Sunni clerics who call themselves Deobandis have little contact with the original Deoband school in northern India.
Still, their schools follow Deoband’s program of studies. That program focuses on Islamic jurisprudence, interpretations of the Koran, theology, philosophy, and the life and sayings of the Prophet Muhammad.
The major thrust of these studies is what the strict Sunni sect sees as the purification of current Islamic practices of unorthodox additions.
Many, if not all of the Taliban’s leaders and foot soldiers, were educated at these madrasahs in Pakistan.
Alumni from Haqqania, one of the most prominent Deobandi schools in Pakistan’s northwestern province of Khyber Pakhtunkhwa, hold many prominent posts in the current Taliban-led government.
Two members of the Haqqanis, a prominent Taliban family, are now Taliban ministers.
Some Deobandi madrasahs in Pakistan have received funding from Saudi Arabia since Riyadh became a major donor of the mujaheddin guerillas fighting the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan in the 1980s.
However, Madani says he has no issue with the Taliban’s clerical government.
“There is nothing wrong with a government made up solely of religious people who want to reform their country into a peaceful environment in the contemporary world,” Madani told RFE/RL. “If the ulema (Muslim clerics) know Islam’s teachings regarding humanity and are able to deal with everyone without discrimination because of their faith, then that is a good thing.”
Madani says he supports the Taliban’s attempts to segregate men and women.
“They are requiring people to observe the Islamic requirement of hijab,” he said, referring to the Arabic word for veil, which denotes the Islamic concept that members of the opposite sexes should not mix if they are not related.
“Allah created women’s bodies differently from men,” he says. “They must dress in a such a way that does not create fitnah,” or temptation.
Crescendo Of Criticism
Since seizing power, the Taliban has faced a crescendo of international criticism and domestic opposition.
That includes protests by Afghan women who oppose the Taliban’s restrictions and fear they will be deprived of work, education, mobility, and public life.
The Taliban banned women from education and work during their first stint in power during the 1990s, when women were not allowed to even leave their homes without a male relative to accompany them.
The concerns of Afghan women were reinforced last week when the Taliban delayed opening secondary schools and universities for girls after they allowed boys and men to return to education.
Madani cites the example of India, where scores of universities and thousands or colleges are attended only by women.
“If it can happen in our country, what is so wrong with the Afghan government wanting to do the same?” he asked. “If the Afghan government can enforce [segregated education], it will mean the door to education for girls has opened.”
Madani encourages the Taliban to have peaceful and beneficial contact with the world.
“They should adopt all the ways of living in the contemporary world with honor and dignity,” he said. “While embracing their religion, the Taliban should establish relations with the world and aim to develop their country.”
Still, Madani says he is not too keen to host Taliban leaders. He says Deoband’s school will welcome Afghan students only if they obtain student visas from the Indian government.
He also seems reluctant to visit Afghanistan in order to offer his advice to the Taliban.
“I am an 82-year-old,” he told RFE/RL. “I cannot even travel to a mosque. How would I get to Afghanistan?”
Happy Saturday America – aren’t you proud of your leaders & your tax dollars going to support such a good cause? You cannot imagine how excited & happy all Afghans are to have this type of justice back rather than the “failed American experiment”known as freedom & rights. pic.twitter.com/7VTYMjEAiW
— Lara Logan (@laralogan) September 25, 2021
Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty
September 25, 2021
The Taliban hung several dead bodies from cranes in Herat city in western Afghanistan, local media and witnesses reported, in a gruesome display that signaled a return to some of the militant group’s methods of the past.
The BBC quoted two local reporters as saying the bodies of four people accused of kidnapping had been hung in several parts of Herat.
The Afghan Hasht-e Sobh daily reported that the bodies of several men accused of kidnapping had been displayed in several parts of the city. The report said the alleged kidnappers were killed in an exchange of gunfire with the Taliban.
Wazir Ahmad Seddiqi, who runs a pharmacy on the side of the main square in Herat, told the Associated Press that four bodies were brought to the square and three bodies were moved to other squares in the city to be displayed.
Seddiqi said the Taliban announced in the square that the four were caught taking part in a kidnapping and were killed by police.
Taliban provincial Deputy Governor Mawlawi Shir Ahmad Amar said that the men had been killed in direct clashes with Taliban fighters after kidnapping a trader and his son who were later rescued.
“Their bodies were hanged in the town squares as an example to other kidnappers,” he told the dpa news agency. “They were hanged so that no one should dare to commit such a crime.”
In a video shared on social media, a man’s blood-soaked body can be seen wrapped in chains and hanging from a crane in what appears to be the main square of Herat city.
A number of people can also be seen filming the scene on their cellphones.
Ziaulhaq Jalali, a Taliban appointed district police chief in Herat, confirmed that Taliban members rescued a father and son who had been abducted by four kidnappers after an exchange of gunfire. He said a Taliban fighter and a civilian were wounded by the kidnappers but “the four [kidnappers] were killed in crossfire.”
Mullah Nooruddin Turabi, one of the founders of the Taliban and the chief enforcer of its harsh interpretation of Islamic law when they last ruled Afghanistan, told the Associated Press this week that the hard-line movement will once again carry out executions and amputations of hands, though perhaps not in public.
The comments were condemned by the U.S. State Department spokesman Ned Price who said the punishments “would constitute clear gross abuses of human rights.”
“We stand firm with the international community to hold perpetrators of these, of any such abuses, accountable,” Price said on September 24.
During its brutal rule of Afghanistan from 1996 to 2001, the Taliban was known for punishing crimes with public lashings, publicly stoning people to death and amputating people’s limbs.
With reporting by AP, Hasht-e Sobh, BBC, and Reuters
Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty
September 25, 2021
At least one person was killed and seven others wounded in an explosion in Afghanistan’s eastern province of Nangarhar that hit a Taliban convoy on September 25, local officials said.
The blast occurred in Jalalabad, the capital of Nangarhar Province, a provincial Taliban spokesman told the dpa news agency, without giving more details.
A source in the Nangarhar regional hospital said that one dead Taliban fighter and seven wounded people, including four civilians, had been taken to the hospital.
Local media quoted eyewitnesses as saying that the blast was caused by a roadside bomb, which was detonated when a convoy of Taliban fighters passed the area.
No one claimed immediate responsibility for the bombing, although the Islamic State extremist group’s local branch, Islamic State-Khorasan (IS-K), has taken responsibility for similar attacks in Jalalabad.
Nangarhar is the heartland of IS-K, which is an enemy of Afghanistan’s new rulers.
The two militant groups fought each other even before the Taliban seized control of Afghanistan in mid-August as U.S.-led international forces withdrew from the country.
Based on reporting by DPA, AP and Ariana News
Taliban militants (file photo)
8am: Indigenous Hazaras are being forced to migrate from some villages in the Gizab region of Daikundi province. According to locals, in the first phase on Friday, about 400 families from the Gibab’s Kindir village were forced to flee to neighbouring villages or parts of Kandahar province… According to locals in Daikundi’s Gizab, the Kuchis and Pashtun tribesmen of Chaharchino and Gizab districts have claimed the ownership over the Hazara lands… Click here to read more (external link).
Ghani
The American Prospect: Ghani, during his nearly seven years in power, found ways to enrich his brother, his brother-in-law, and other members of his inner circle. Click here to read more (external link).
Tajik President Emomali Rahmon
By RFE/RL’s Tajik Service
September 24, 2021
Tajik President Emomali Rahmon has called on the Taliban to form an inclusive government in neighboring Afghanistan with the participation of all political and ethnic groups in order to allay tensions in the war-torn country.
In a prerecorded video message to the UN General Assembly in New York on September 23, Rahmon reiterated his concerns over recent developments in Afghanistan, calling them a “serious threat to regional security and stability.”
The Taliban gained control over almost all of Afghanistan’s territory last month following a lightning offensive at the end of a 20-year U.S.-led military presence, triggering alarm among Central Asian states bordering Afghanistan over possible security threats emanating from the country and the potential for tens of thousands of refugees to pour over the border.
The militants have sought to reassure the international community that it poses no threat and suggested that it is now more moderate than during the brutal rule the hard-line Islamist group employed during its first stint in power from 1996 to 2001.
The Taliban promised inclusiveness and a general amnesty for former opponents but has been criticized for forming an all-male government led by hard-line veterans and composed almost entirely of members from the Pashtun ethnic group.
A ban on protests, a crackdown on demonstrators and journalists, and a rolling back of the rights of girls and women also failed to back up the group’s promises to respect human rights.
The international community has warned it would judge the group by its actions, and that recognition of a Taliban-led government would be linked to issues including the treatment of women and minorities.
Tajikistan is one of the few countries in the region that has rejected any talks with the Taliban.
In his address to the UN General Assembly, Rahmon accused the Taliban of not living up to its promises to form an inclusive government and criticized human rights groups for what he called their silence over “violation of the rights of other ethnic groups in Afghanistan.”
In Panjshir, a rugged mountain valley northeast of Kabul where an anti-Taliban resistance front is active, the Tajik president accused Taliban fighters of carrying out killings and depriving residents of access to food, electricity, and Internet connection.
Rahmon called for comprehensive talks with the participation of all segments of Afghan society as one of the main conditions for stability in the country.
Afghanistan’s ethnic Tajiks, who he said make up 46 percent of the country’s population, and other ethnic groups “have the right to have a worthy place in the affairs of state.”
While no reliable current data on ethnicity in Afghanistan exists to back up Rahmon’s claim, the group Minority Rights says previous estimates have shown ethnic Tajiks comprise about 27 percent of Afghanistan’s population, while ethnic Uzbeks are 9 percent and Turkmen 3 percent. The largest group, Pashtuns, are just over 40 percent of the populace.
The Tajik leader also expressed concern about what he called the strengthening of extremist groups such as the Islamic State and Al-Qaeda in Afghanistan, saying that the country “is on the verge of becoming a hotbed of international terrorism again.”
Describing Tajikistan as a “front line” in the fight against terrorism and extremism, Rahmon called for support from the international community.