Taliban use force, shut down women’s protest
Resistance fighters stall troops’ advance, vow not to give up or bow to terrorism
Taliban fighters violently suppressed a women’s protest Saturday in Kabul, while 70 miles to the north ex-Afghan army and militia members battled the Islamist group in Panjshir province, as pockets of anti-Taliban resistance continued to flare up.
Several of the women, who were demanding inclusion in the yet-to-be named Taliban government, said they were beaten by Taliban fighters — some of the first concrete evidence of harsh treatment of women by the group.
The Taliban have promised an inclusive government and a more moderate form of Islamic rule than when they last ruled the country from 1996 to 2001. But many Afghans, especially women, are deeply skeptical and fear a rollback of rights gained over the past two decades. There was little restraint in evidence at the Kabul protest.
A 24-year-old participant said the Taliban tried to rout the gathering of about 100 women near the presidential palace using tear gas, rifle butts and metal clubs or tools. She said she received five stitches to close a head wound after she was knocked unconscious with a blow from one of the metal objects.
“When I tried to resist and continue the march, one of the armed Taliban pushed me and hit me with a sharp metal device,” said the woman, who The New York Times is identifying only by her first name, Nargis, to guard against retribution.
“They pushed everybody away and forced us to leave
while chasing us with their spray, weapons and metal devices,” Nargis said. “The Taliban kept cursing, using abusive language.” Video of the incident on Afghan news media outlets showed a bearded Taliban member, surrounded by gunmen, exhorting the women to disperse through a megaphone, which was then snatched from his hand by one of the women.
The protest in Kabul was the second women’s protest in as many days, with the other held in the western city of Herat. Around 20 women with microphones gathered under the watchful eyes of Taliban gunmen, who allowed the demonstration to proceed.
“We are concerned about the issues of human rights in Afghanistan, notably on the rights of women,” U.N. spokesman Stephane Dujarric said Friday. “It is imperative that women have the right to work, to work in a safe environment, and those are some of the issues that have been brought to the attention of our interlocutors in Kabul and elsewhere.”
The Taliban have said women will be able to continue their education and work outside the home, rights denied to women when the militants were last in power. But the Taliban have also vowed to impose Sharia, or Islamic law, without providing specifics.
RESISTANCE FIGHTERS
On Friday night, the Taliban pushed farther into the Panjshir Valley in an effort to crush resistance led by Ahmad Massoud, son of legendary resistance commander Ahmad Shah Massoud, who held off the Taliban 25 years ago.
In a video he sent to the BBC, another of the rebels’ leaders, a former vice president, Amrullah Saleh, acknowledged that his forces are under assault but vowed that they would not surrender.
“The situation is difficult,” he said. “We have been under invasion of the Taliban. We have held ground. We have resisted. The resistance is not going to surrender, and it is not going to bow to terrorism.”
He told the BBC that rumors of a Taliban victory were “baseless.” But he admitted that conditions in the valley were difficult, with the Taliban having cut off phone, internet and electricity lines.
It was not possible, from competing reports from the two sides, to get a precise assessment of their respective military positions. Analysts have said the rebels’ chief aim for the moment is to hold off the Taliban until late October when mountain snows will preclude military operations, giving them five months or so to restock arms and perhaps gain outside help.
Reports that the Panjshir Valley had fallen Friday night touched off bursts of celebraOther tory Taliban gunfire in the capital, killing at least two people.
The firing lasted nearly 15 minutes, prompting the Taliban’s spokesman Zabihullah Mujahid to warn his rank and file against wasting their ammunition.
“Avoid aerial firing, instead thank God,” Mujahid tweeted.
Mujahid is likely to be named information minister in a new Afghan government whose composition has been the subject of rumors for days. The naming of the new ruling structure was delayed yet again Saturday, but it appeared increasingly likely that it would include only figures from the Taliban movement. That would contradict early suggestions that the group would reach outside its ranks in an effort to appear inclusive.
In addition to the northern resistance, the local branch of ISIS, Islamic State-Khorasan, or ISIS-K, blamed for the deadly airport bombing in Kabul last month, continued to create problems for the Taliban. A senior official of a prominent Western aid agency in Kunduz reported a number of killings of Taliban members in the last week of August, apparently by ISIS-K members, and even the raising of an ISIS-K flag, later taken down.
Pakistan, whose intelligence agency, Inter-Services Intelligence, has provided funding and sanctuary to Taliban leadership for two decades, showed its hand Saturday. Both the Afghan and Pakistani news media reported that the agency’s head, Lt. Gen. Faiz Hameed, flew into the Afghan capital for talks.
Pakistani officials said Hameed would carry a message that Pakistan “has helped Afghanistan in the past and will do so in the future.” Pakistan has long sought to exert its influence over Afghanistan, which is seen as a battleground in the competition between Pakistan and India for regional influence.
Pakistani officials are seeking to pressure the Taliban to break ties with militants seeking to attack Pakistan. They include Tehrik-e-Taliban Pakistan, a Pashtun militant group that has vowed to carve out an Islamic state from Pakistani territory along the Afghan border.
FALTERING ECONOMY
At a reopened money exchange, traders bemoaned the country’s faltering economy. Government workers are unable to get to their offices and are going unpaid, they said, while cash is increasingly scarce, and prices are rising sharply.
“People are facing challenges,” said Haji Ghulam Hazrat, a money trader at the exchange. “Most of the people were government employees,” he said, referring to his customers, “and now they are jobless and at home,” Hazrat added: “In the last 12 days there have been no transactions, and people were unable to shop.”
Civil servants haven’t been paid for months, ATM’s have been shut down and banks are limiting withdrawals to $200 per week, causing large crowds to form outside them. Aid groups have warned of widespread hunger amid a severe drought.
With the aid-dependent country’s economy in freefall — nearly 80% of the previous government’s budget came from foreign aid that has been cut off — the United Nations has convened a “high-level ministerial humanitarian meeting” in Geneva for Sept. 13 to appeal for aid. Nearly half of the country is “malnourished,” said the U.N.’s humanitarian coordinator in Afghanistan, Ramiz Alakbarov. Nearly half of all children under the age of 5 are predicted to be acutely malnourished in the next 12 months, the U.N. said.
Still, there were signs of a creeping return to a kind of normality, as domestic flights resumed and the U.N.’s humanitarian flights restarted. Two cash transfer agencies, Western Union and MoneyGram, reopened for business, a vital step for a country with a large diaspora.
The Taliban say they will allow free travel outside the country for anyone with proper documents, but it remains to be seen whether any commercial airlines will offer service.
But for all the hints of resumption of daily life, there were as many that bespoke a future in Afghanistan very different from the immediate past. The violent suppression of the women’s demonstration was one of them.
Saturday’s marchers had wanted to “pay our respect to those soldiers” who had fought for the now-defunct republic, one of the protesters, a female ex-Afghan army company commander, said in a telephone interview. But after placing flowers at the former Defense Ministry “we were surrounded by armed Taliban from all sides,” said the woman, who The Times is identifying only by her first name, Rukhshana.
The Taliban fighters beat them when they would not stop the protest and “treated us like animals,” Rukhshana said.
She vowed to keep protesting. “We will continue our struggle until we get our rights back in this government. They took over our country by the force of their weapons.”
OFF TO KOSOVO
Meanwhile, the U.S. intends to send Afghan evacuees who fail to clear initial screenings to Kosovo, which has agreed to house them for up to a year for additional processing, a U.S. official said Saturday.
The U.S. plan is likely to face objections from refugee advocates, who already complain of a lack of public disclosure and uncertain legal jurisdiction in the Biden administration’s use of overseas transit sites to screen many of roughly 120,000 Afghans, Americans and others evacuated from Taliban-held Afghanistan.
The U.S. official spoke on condition of anonymity to discuss the plan. It was the first disclosure of what the U.S. intends to do for Afghans or other evacuees who have failed to clear initial rounds of screening or whose cases otherwise require more time.
Other countries have been reluctant to take evacuees who may pose security problems off U.S. hands.
Most Afghan evacuees are clearing processing in a matter of days at large transit sites that U.S. government employees set up quickly at military bases in Qatar, Germany and Italy, along with smaller sites elsewhere. Those evacuees then fly through Philadelphia or Washington Dulles airports for resettling in the U.S.
Other U.S. officials have said they expect most or all Afghans whose cases may initially raise red flags or questions to pass further screening.
Germany and Italy each have set time limits of no more than two weeks for U.S. processing of any one evacuee on their soil.
The U.S. official said the transit centers “provide a safe place for diverse groups … to complete their paperwork while we conduct security screenings before they continue to their final destination in the United States or in another country.”
U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken is expected to head to the Qatari capital of Doha today to thank the country’s leaders for their assistance with the Afghanistan evacuation efforts and to meet with Afghan evacuees and U.S. officials.
The small Persian Gulf state played an outsize role in extricating thousands of Western citizens and Afghan allies from the country. Qatar has also played a key role in acting as an intermediary between the Taliban and Western governments.
Blinken said Friday that he would also visit the United States’ Ramstein Air Base in Germany, where many Afghan evacuees are staying, to hold a virtual ministerial meeting with more than 20 nations “that all have a stake in helping to relocate and resettle Afghans and in holding the Taliban to their commitments.”
CALIFORNIA REQUEST
California’s Gov. Gavin Newsom and legislative leaders Friday requested $16.7 million in state money to help resettle Afghan refugees in that state.
The request to use general fund money to help those fleeing the Taliban takeover signals “that California stands ready to assist those in need,” Newsom said in a statement. “As the nation’s most diverse state, we don’t simply tolerate diversity, we celebrate it.”
The funding request by Newsom, Senate President pro-tempore Toni Atkins, and Assembly Speaker Anthony Rendon was expected to be considered during next week’s legislative session.
With support from leaders of both houses, the request is unlikely to face serious opposition in the Democrat-controlled Legislature.
The money would provide cash assistance and other help for refugees who don’t qualify for certain federal refugee benefits and public assistance programs because they don’t hold special visas but are being admitted into the U.S. on humanitarian grounds, Newsom said.
Some arriving refugees are potentially eligible for Medi-Cal and state-funded aid, but only those arriving with children are eligible for CalWORKs, the state-funded public assistance program.
“These refugees gave our service members help in Afghanistan, and it is only fitting we give them hope when they come to California,” said Atkins, a Democrat. Information for this article was contributed by Adam Nossiter of The New York Times; by Kathy Gannon, Tameem Akhgar, Edie Lederer, Ellen Knickmeyer of The Associated Press; and by Rick Noack, Siobhan O’Grady, Gerry Shih, Shaiq Hussain, Haq Nawaz Khan and Ezzatullah Mehrdad of The Washington Post.