Zabihullah Mujahid
NYT: Although he sought to convey a much more tolerant image of the Taliban, Mr. Mujahid did confirm one report: Music will not be allowed in public. “Music is forbidden in Islam,” he said, “but we’re hoping that we can persuade people not do such things, instead of pressuring them.” Click here to read more (external link).
With the Taliban in control of Afghanistan, the European Union is looking to Turkey to bear the brunt of an expected exodus of Afghan refugees heading to Europe. But Turkey is resisting the call. Dorian Jones reports from Istanbul.
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In Pictures: People injured in explosion near Kabul airport pic.twitter.com/WQ8sdjvODG
— 1TVNewsAF (@1TVNewsAF) August 26, 2021
VOA News
August 26, 2021
The Pentagon says an explosion Thursday at the Abbey Gate of the Kabul airport was “the result of a complex attack that resulted in a number of U.S. and civilian injuries.”
“We can also confirm at least one other explosion at or near the Baron Hotel, a short distance from Abbey Gate,” Pentagon spokesman John Kirby said on Twitter.
Thousands of people have flocked to the airport in recent days trying to leave the country following the Taliban takeover Afghanistan.
A senior Taliban source confirmed to VOA that a suicide bomber blew himself up in an area outside the airport where large number of people, including women were present. No one has claimed responsibility for the blast.
Intelligence sources told VOA there was a second explosion near the Baron Hotel, about 200 meters from an airport gate. There were no further details.
Western governments had warned earlier Thursday of the threat of a terror attack at the airport and said those gathered in the area seeking evacuation from the country should move to a safe location.
“Because of security threats outside the gates of Kabul airport, we are advising U.S. citizens to avoid traveling to the airport and to avoid airport gates at this time unless you receive individual instructions from a U.S. government representative to do so,” the U.S. Embassy in Kabul said in a statement. “U.S. citizens who are at the Abbey Gate, East Gate, or North Gate now should leave immediately.”
Several of those wounded Thursday arrived at Kabul’s Emergency Hospital, run by an international NGO that treats victims of war and landmines. Afghan news channels tweeted pictures of civilians transporting their wounded in wheelbarrows.
British Armed Forces Minister James Heappey told BBC radio, “There is now a very, very credible reporting of an imminent attack.”
Australia’s Foreign Affairs and Trade Department also cited an “ongoing and very high threat of terrorist attack,” while Belgian Prime Minister Alexander De Croo said his government ended its evacuation operations after hearing from the United States and other sources about a possible attack.
U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken reiterated Wednesday that the United States sees a potential threat from the Islamic State group’s affiliate in Afghanistan.
“It’s hard to overstate the complexity and the danger of this effort,” Blinken said at the State Department. “We’re operating in a hostile environment in a city and country now controlled by the Taliban, with the very real possibility of an ISIS-K attack. We’re taking every precaution, but this is very high-risk.”
The United States is pledging to continue efforts to extricate Americans, U.S. permanent residents, allies and other vulnerable Afghans, even if it means going past the end-of-the-month deadline for American forces to leave Afghanistan.
There is “no deadline in getting out Americans and Afghans who want to leave past August 31,” Secretary of State Antony Blinken said.
“They will not be forgotten,” Blinken emphasized as he responded to reporters’ questions. “And as I said, we will use every diplomatic, economic assistance tool at our disposal to pressure the Taliban to let people leave the country.”
The White House said Thursday that since August 14, the United States has evacuated or helped evacuate about 95,700 people on U.S. military and coalition flights.
Throughout Wednesday at the State Department, the Pentagon and the White House, officials continued to rebut criticism about chaos at the gates of Kabul’s airport.
“We’re on track to have the largest U.S. airlift in history. And I think that speaks for itself,” Jen Psaki, the White House press secretary, told reporters.
As many as 1,500 American civilians remain in Afghanistan. There were about 6,000 Americans in Afghanistan on August 14, according to Blinken, when Taliban insurgents took military control of the country and evacuations began. But since then, he said, at least 4,500 Americans have been airlifted out of the country, including 500 in the past day.
About 10,000 people hoping to escape the country are currently crammed in the airport in Kabul, according to U.S. officials who say a total of 90 U.S. military and international flights flew from Kabul in the past day.
It “will not be an American responsibility” to control security at the airport after August 31, according to Pentagon spokesperson Kirby.
VOA’s Steve Herman, Ayaz Gul, Ayesha Tanzeem and Carla Babb contributed to this report. Some information for this report came from the Associated Press, Agence France-Presse and Reuters.
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DW: Kabul’s airport has reportedly been hit by an explosion. It comes after warnings of a potential terror attack against people evacuating. Click here to read more (external link).
Please don’t go to Kabul airport now,
Heavy explosion in front of Abby Camp, shooting has started, USA troops used 6-8 gas bomb on people on east gate and lots of women got injured and burned,
I was there pic.twitter.com/hGEFlLP08b— Ali Hassani (@Ali2994078) August 26, 2021
Sewage canal where Afghans were vetted after their documents was packed with Afghans including women and children. A suicide attacker blew himself up in the middle of a large crowd. At least another attacker started shooting, multiple eye witnesses in the area&a friend tells me. pic.twitter.com/1MHuLOZnDl
— BILAL SARWARY (@bsarwary) August 26, 2021
Yahoo: The fledgling anti-Taliban resistance in Afghanistan’s unconquered Panjshir province is reportedly growing, but it’s so far been unable to find any takers in its appeal for international support, The New York Times reports. Click here to read more (external link).
Ayesha Tanzeem, Tahir Khan
VOA News / August 25, 2021
ISLAMABAD – A delegation from Panjshir, the last bastion of resistance against the Taliban in Afghanistan, held talks Thursday with a Taliban delegation in Charikar, the capital of neighboring Parwan province, to try to find a peaceful solution to their conflict.
Fahim Dashty, who is working closely in Panjshir with Ahmad Massoud, confirmed the meeting. Ahmad is the son of Ahmad Shah Massoud, the esteemed guerilla leader of the Northern Alliance, who was assassinated in 2001.
“There were some of the former ministers, some of the formers MPs (members of Parliament), not only from Panjshir, but from other provinces, too,” Dashty said, when describing the composition of their delegation.
A Taliban source also confirmed the meeting on condition of anonymity because he was not an official spokesman for the group. He told VOA the Taliban delegation was led by Maulvi Amir Khan Mottaqi.
Dashty said the delegation-level meeting was the outcome of earlier efforts.
“There was a Taliban delegation at least two times in the last week, and even before that, as well as now, back-channel messages were going back and forth,” he said. “The outcome of these meetings, as well as those messages, was to send a delegation from Panjshir, from the resistance, to meet Taliban officials.”
Dashty also said the Taliban had ceased blocking routes to Panjshir valley “after one or a maximum of two days,” and that supplies of food and water were continuing as usual.
On August 24, Amrullah Saleh, the first vice president in the administration of self-exiled President Ashraf Ghani, tweeted that the Taliban had blocked food and fuel from coming into Panjshir.
“The humanitarian situation is dire,” Saleh tweeted. “Thousands of women & children have fled to mountains.”
Saleh also accused the Taliban of abducting and using women and children as “shields to move around or do house search(es).”
Meanwhile, senior Afghan leaders, including former President Hamid Karzai and the head of Afghanistan’s reconciliation council, Abdullah Abdullah, continued to engage the Taliban, hoping for their own version of a peaceful solution.
“Dr. Abdullah spoke to Ahmad last night and encouraged him to form a delegation and to adopt a logical approach to reach an understanding,” an official on Abdullah’s team told VOA.
The Taliban repeatedly have announced they want to form an inclusive government in Afghanistan.
A source told VOA that Karzai and Abdullah had proposed to take their talks with the Taliban and shift them to Doha from Kabul. A third leader, Hekmatyar, insisted on keeping the talks in Kabul.
Due to its geography and demography, conquering Panjshir by force is considered extremely difficult. The Taliban could not conquer Panjshir during their last rule in the 1990s. Eventually, al-Qaida-linked suicide bombers posing as journalists killed Ahmed Shah Massoud in an attack.
Dashty called on the international community to pressure the Taliban into entering meaningful negotiations and allow the establishment of a representative and participatory government that would ensure social justice and protect the rights of all Afghans.
He repeated his vow that if war was imposed on them, they would fight not just for Panjshir but “to fight from Panjshir for the rest of Afghanistan.”
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Ron Synovitz
Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty
August 25, 2021
As the Taliban transforms its military chain of command into a governing structure for Afghanistan, alliances and tribal configurations that kept two rival Taliban factions together in recent years are now being tested.
“Conquering a country is always the easy part. Ruling it, in Afghanistan’s case, is the difficult bit,” says historian William Dalrymple, an expert on Pashtun tribal rivalries. “That’s when the tensions and the fault lines become apparent.”
Afghanistan security expert Ted Callahan says decisions now being made by the Taliban on a governing structure will determine whether the movement remains united or splinters into regional Taliban fiefdoms.
Callahan told RFE/RL the possible emergence of Taliban fiefdoms is a question he and many other experts are now considering.
Dalrymple notes that “splintering” is what happened to Afghanistan’s mujahedin government following the 1989 Soviet withdrawal from Afghanistan.
“The regional warlords of the mujahedin command ended up at loggerheads with each other and fighting each other in Kabul” during the early 1990s, he told RFE/RL. “It’s not impossible that this might happen now [between rival Taliban factions]. But this is a question that no one is in a position to answer right now.”
“One of the things that has surprised many Western observers is how coherent and disciplined the Taliban has been up to now,” Dalrymple told RFE/RL. “The recognized idea was that the Taliban were this fractured force and they’d splintered. But what we’ve seen in the last two months has shown an extraordinary discipline and a well-organized campaign with very little tribal dissonance.”
Factional Divisions
Factional divisions began to emerge between the Taliban’s Quetta Shura leadership council and militant commanders farther east after the death of Taliban founder Mullah Mohammad Omar in 2013.
The result was a far-reaching realignment among Taliban factions across Afghanistan and Pakistan – particularly between hard-line groups like the Haqqani network that wanted to escalate fighting and more moderate Taliban leaders who sought accommodation with Kabul and Islamabad.
Signs of the rift were apparent in May 2014 when RFE/RL reported that the leader of the Haqqani network, Sirajuddin Haqqani, had ordered his followers not to obey the orders of the Quetta Shura.
Meanwhile, the eldest son of Mullah Omar, Mullah Mohammad Yaqoob, was seeking support from his allies in the Quetta Shura to fulfill his personal ambition of becoming the next Taliban supreme leader.
With Haqqani opposed to the idea of Mullah Yaqoob as supreme leader, it seemed the Taliban was on the verge of disintegrating.
But the rift was resolved, at least temporarily, by compromises within a new Taliban chain of command.
Three deputy leadership posts were created beneath the Taliban supreme leader but above the Quetta Shura.
Mullah Yaqoob became the deputy leader in charge of military operations in 13 provinces designated as the Taliban’s “western zone.” They include the Taliban’s traditional capital city, Kandahar.
Haqqani was named deputy leader overseeing military operations in 21 provinces of the Taliban’s “eastern zone.” His fighters now control Kabul.
Both Mullah Yaqoob and Haqqani have also overseen appointments of the Taliban shadow government down to the local and district level within their designated territories.
A third deputy leader’s post was created for Taliban co-founder Abdul Ghani Baradar, a member of the Quetta Shura who was released from a Pakistani jail at the United States’ request in 2018 before being placed in charge of the Taliban’s political affairs and its political office in Doha.
But many analysts doubt Baradar has much influence over local battlefield commanders and fighters in Afghanistan — the real source of power within the Taliban.
Despite the easing of tensions brought by the Taliban’s revised chain of command, signs of the rift between the Haqqani network and the Quetta Shura surfaced again after Baradar’s negotiating team signed a peace deal with the United States in Doha in February 2020.
Antonio Giustozzi, a Taliban expert with the Royal United Services Institute in London, attributed attacks in Kabul later in 2020 to the Haqqani network, saying they were being carried out without the approval of the Quetta Shura and exposing divisions between Taliban factions.
Tribal Rivalries
Dalrymple says those who want to understand the Taliban’s shifting dynamics in the weeks and months ahead should be looking at Afghanistan’s tribal configurations and age-old Pashtun tribal rivalries.
“All through Afghan history, the tribal allegiances have shifted like pieces in a kaleidoscope and different factions have allied with different factions,” Dalrymple tells RFE/RL. “The key thing to understand, though, is how much these alliances are based on tribal lines.”
“Unless you make the tribal calculation, you can’t understand what’s going on in Afghanistan,” Dalrymple says. “It isn’t like there are permanent tribal divisions. Alliances and oaths of allegiance can move from month to month, week to week. But the basic divisions are pretty clear.”
Dalrymple concludes that the key “fault line” relevant to what happens next with the Taliban leadership is the age-old Pashtun tribal rivalry between the Durrani and the Ghilzai clans — a rivalry that predates the Taliban by centuries.
Very broadly speaking, Dalrymple explains, the Durrani clan comprises the historical “aristocrats and the landlords” while “the Ghilzai are the nomads, the day laborers, and the dispossessed.”
“Those are the units one has to be looking at and studying” as a new Taliban governing structure begins to “develop like a polaroid photograph coming into shape in front of you,” he says.
Baradar, like many key figures in the Quetta Shura, is a member of the Durrani clan – who mostly live in southern parts of Afghanistan like the provinces of Kandahar, Helmand, and Uruzgan.
Mullah Yaqoob is from the Hotak tribe, a branch of the Ghilzai clan. But he is also from southern Afghanistan and has strong ties and allegiances with Durrani Taliban.
His supporters, including members of the Durrani clan, have argued that he should be the natural successor to become the Taliban’s supreme leader.
Fighters under his command control the region where the Taliban was created, as well as the cities of Kandahar and Herat, Helmand Province, the Spin Boldak border crossing into Pakistan, Afghanistan’s entire border with Iran, and the border with Turkmenistan.
Those fighters seized sophisticated U.S. military equipment from Afghan government forces when they captured Kandahar Airfield in the south and Shindand Airfield in Herat Province.
Sirajuddin Haqqani is from the Zadran tribe of the Ghilzai clan. Its power base is in southeastern Afghan provinces like Khost and Paktia, as well as Pakistan’s North Waziristan tribal region.
Haqqani is seen as the most powerful militant commander in Afghanistan. As head of the notorious Haqqani network, the territory now under the control of his fighters includes Kabul and the northern city of Mazar-i Sharif, in addition to key border crossings into northwestern Pakistan, Uzbekistan, and Tajikistan.
Haqqani’s fighters also seized significant amounts of U.S. weaponry from Afghan security forces — including armor and aircraft — when they captured Bagram Airfield to the north of Kabul and other military posts in northern Afghanistan.
Sanctioned by the United States as an international drug trafficker and an officially designated terrorist leader, Sirajuddin Haqqani is purported to have the Taliban’s strongest ties to both the Al-Qaeda terrorist network and Pakistan’s Inter-Service Intelligence (ISI) agency.
Security analyst Callahan concludes that, out of all Taliban factions, the activities of Haqqani and his fighters have been the most favorable for the interests of the Pakistani state.
Emerging Government Structure
Taliban talks on forming a new government have included meetings with some former Afghan officials and political figures — including former President Hamid Karzai, a member of the Popalzai tribe of the Durrani Pashtuns.
In a Twitter statement, Karzai said he’d urged the Taliban to form an “all inclusive” government.
The Taliban has yet to announce its broader plans to restructure for the role of governance as opposed to fighting a guerrilla war. But some details have begun to emerge.
Wahidullah Hashimi, a senior Taliban figure familiar with the decision-making process, has outlined a power structure similar to the way Afghanistan was governed from 1996 to 2001.
At that time, Supreme Leader Mullah Omar stayed in the shadows and left the daily running of the country to a ruling council.
Hashimi told Reuters that current Supreme Leader Malawi Hibatullah Akhundzada will likely remain in charge above any new ruling council — the ultimate authority on religious, military, and political questions.
But he suggested one key difference from Mullah Omar’s Taliban regime: He said a new post could be created that works as a kind of “president.”
Hashimi said that post should be above the ruling council and work to run the day-to-day business of government while Akhundzada issues edicts from behind the scenes.
Of the Taliban’s three current deputy leaders, Haqqani appears to be the most active in trying to position himself for a chief executive role under Akhundzada.
Since his fighters led the Taliban advance into Kabul on August 15, he has sent his uncle, Kahili-ur-Rehman Haqqani, to seek out declarations of allegiance from key Afghan political figures and tribal chieftains.
RFE/RL’s Radio Azadi cites claims by Kahili-ur-Rehman Haqqani that he obtained declarations of allegiance from Heshmat Ghani Ahmadzai, the brother of exiled Afghan President Ashraf Ghani, as well as Ghani’s former minister of borders and tribes, Gul Agha Sherzai.
He also claims he received an allegiance pledge from Ahmad Masud, the son of the late anti-Taliban commander known as the “Lion of Panjshir,” Ahmad Shah Masud.
Masud’s aides confirm that “negotiations” with Haqqani are under way. But they insist Masud has pledged alliance to neither Haqqani nor the Taliban.
Masud and other anti-Taliban figures, including Afghan Vice President Amrullah Saleh, have formed an anti-Taliban resistance movement based in the Panjshir Valley north of Kabul – one of the few parts of Afghanistan that is not currently under Taliban control.
Meanwhile, Taliban sources said on August 24 that a former Guantanamo detainee, Mullah Abdul Qayyum Zakir, has been appointed as the Taliban’s acting defense minister.
Zakir was born in the Kajaki district of Helmand Province and is a member of the Alizai tribe, which is part of the larger Durrani clan.
The Pajhwok news agency reports that some Taliban figures have also already been appointed to posts such as the governorship of Kabul, the head of intelligence, acting interior minister, and acting finance minister.
Whatever governing structure is finalized, and whoever is appointed to the Taliban leadership posts, Hashimi said it is certain Afghanistan will not be a democracy.
“There will be no democratic system at all because it does not have any base in our country,” Hashimi said. “We will not discuss what type of political system we should apply in Afghanistan because it is clear. It is Shari’a law and that is it.”
With reporting by RFE/RL’s Radio Azadi, whose correspondents’ names are being withheld for their protection.
Jamie Dettmer
VOA News
August 25, 2021
“We are really in danger — it is dreadful here now, and they are searching for us,” the 22-year-old Afghan student says.
Esin, like other female students, especially those who also worked with Western embassies, missions and NGOs in the Afghan capital, Kabul, as she did, is desperate to get out of Afghanistan.
Some of her fellow students want to flee because they fear that they won’t be able to continue their academic studies under Taliban rule. Others calculate they will be targeted by wrathful militants.
For Esin, evacuation looks highly likely to be a matter of life or death. But as she explains her plight, she knows her chances of escaping the Taliban are now diminishing by the minute. Her evacuation application has gone nowhere. And this knowledge overshadows her conversation with VOA as she expresses bewilderment about why she and others like her are being left behind.
Esin is in hiding now, along with her mother and two sisters. She has much to fear, and not only because she is a student and worked as a volunteer for the U.S. government.
Two years ago, she broke off an engagement to a young man from her home province. The engagement was foisted on her family. Her fiancé instructed her to stop her studies, and it turned out he was a member of the Taliban.
Since then, the man has been threatening her and her family and he reported them to the Taliban. “He says I am outside of Islam and should be killed and that he will marry one of my sisters according to a cultural rule called Bad dadan, where a girl is given to settle a family dispute. We have had to move several times after he tracked us down. I, and my sisters, are in real danger now that the Taliban rules,” she said in a phone call.
“Can you help?” she asks.
Taliban spokesmen say women have nothing to fear under their rule.
Suhail Shaheen, a spokesman based in Qatar, assured Western broadcasters this week that women “will lose nothing.” The only thing is “they will have to wear a hijab,” he said. “Right now, the teachers have returned to work. They have lost nothing. The journalists — I mean female journalists. They have resumed their work. Lost nothing,” he added.
That is not how many educated Afghan women see it. They say the Taliban is already saying one thing but all too often doing another, and they are certain their plight will only worsen once Western forces are gone and they are left alone with the Taliban.
They are convinced that once again they will suffer the harsh treatment they encountered during the 1990s, the last time the Taliban ruled Afghanistan and imposed their own hard-line interpretation of Sunni Islam. “It will be open season on us,” a 23-year-old schoolteacher told VOA in a phone call.
Restrictions starting
This is the lull before the storm, women contacted by VOA, say. And there are already squalls buffeting them.
Some female broadcast journalists have been allowed back on the air, but others, who worked for the state broadcaster, have reported they have been told not to show up for work. Some female civil servants were instructed last week to leave their ministries. In far-flung provinces the hijab is not sufficient and there are reports that women have been commanded to wear the head-to-toe burqa and told they must not leave their homes unless accompanied by a male relative.
Taliban spokesman Zabihullah Mujahid told reporters this week that some individual fighters and commanders are being excessive, adding that they are “not trained to talk to women.” He said allegations of harassment would be investigated and advised “women to stay home for the time being” until “we have a full system in place.”
Kushaaneh, a 20-year-old student, doesn’t need an invitation to stay indoors. She’s too terrified to go out now. “My mother was a schoolteacher and was badly beaten by the Taliban in the 1990s the last time they ruled Kabul,” she says.
She dismisses what Mujahid said as “presenting a face to the global community, to make it think that maybe the Taliban has changed, but it absolutely hasn’t changed,” she said.
She worked voluntarily for the U.S. mission in Kabul for three years and was the deputy director of a women’s activist group that’s now disbanded and was part of a network of 16,000 activists. Because of the COVID-19 pandemic much of their activity in recent months has been online in outreach and discussion forums that some activists fear now were being monitored by the Taliban, giving the militants the opportunity to identify activists.
Kushaaneh, her sister and mother swapped apartments as Kabul fell to the Taliban earlier this month after receiving threats from neighbors, who told them they were going to report them to the Taliban. “They knew I spoke English and that I promoted women’s rights and they said I was brainwashing Afghan girls and trying to change their religion,” she says.
The three of them have stayed indoors for the past 10 days, especially as they have no male relatives to accompany them, if they go outside. Two of her brothers — they both once worked for the U.S. Embassy — emigrated to America after one of them was beaten nearly to death by militants.
Adding to her terror is the presence nearby of Taliban fighters, who are manning two checkpoints outside their apartment block. “The other day I asked a male neighbor to buy some groceries,” but aside from that like many other women, she says, we are “prisoners at home, just waiting.” And, she says, wondering why they are being left behind.
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Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty
August 25, 2021
The Taliban has appointed senior veterans as finance and defense ministers, media reports say, following the seizure of much of Afghanistan by the hard-line Islamist group.
Afghanistan’s Pajhwok news agency reported that Gul Agha had been named as finance minister and Sadr Ibrahim acting interior minister.
Mullah Abdul Qayyum Zakir, a former Guantanamo detainee, was chosen for the post of acting defense minister, according to Al Jazeera.
A Taliban member in Kabul confirmed the appointments made after the militant group took control of government offices, the presidential palace, and parliament, the Reuters news agency reported on August 25.
He said that provincial governors would be selected from among some of the most experienced commanders from the 20-year war that had just ended.
A Taliban commander said the appointments were provisional.
Gul Agha would appear to be Gul Agha Ishakzai, who was designated as a target of UN sanctions in 2020.
According to a UN sanctions notice, he was a childhood friend of late Taliban founder Mullah Omar, and served as his “principal finance officer and one of his closest advisors.”
Mullah Abdul Qayyum Zakir is described as a veteran Taliban battlefield commander and a close associate of Omar.
Media reports said he was captured following the U.S.-led invasion of Afghanistan in 2001 and incarcerated at the U.S. military prison at Guantanamo Bay in Cuba until 2007, when he was handed over to the Afghan government.
Sadr Ibrahim is also said to be a powerful figure within the Taliban.
Last week, the militant group named Haji Mohammad Idris as acting head of the central bank.
According to a senior Taliban member, he had long experience working on financial issues with the movement’s previous leader, Mullah Akhtar Mansur, who was killed in 2016.
With reporting by Reuters