Taliban kill police chief despite amnesty
ISLAMABAD • The Taliban have reportedly shot dead a former provincial police chief in a revenge attack that comes despite promises of a general amnesty.
Sakhi Akbari was deployed in the western Farah province, where security forces fought fiercely with the Taliban over several years before the Islamists’ sudden takeover of Afghanistan.
BBC Farsi reported that Akbari had been killed by the Taliban days after the group’s spokesman said there would be no reprisals for former enemies.
A relative of the Akbari family, who did not want to be named, said his body was dumped outside the family home.
His assassination is the latest reported killing, calling into question Taliban assurances that they would not hunt down former opponents.
Meanwhile, Taliban officials in Kandahar have put up billboards celebrating a teenage assassin who killed an Afghan general and nearly shot dead a U.S. commander. Portraits of the killer of Gen. Abdul Razik Achakzai, who was southern Afghanistan’s most senior police commander before he was killed in 2018 by a militant posing as a guard, are reported to have gone on display in central Kandahar.
Gen. Masoud Andarabi, Afghanistan’s interior minister until March, said the Taliban had not kept their promises.
“The situation is chaotic, despite the Taliban assuring us that they will not go after former government officials or they will not be taking revenge, but unfortunately they have started that in some areas,” he told Sky News.
He said that in his hometown the Taliban had gone to people’s houses and started searches.
“A number of civilians are killed, they are capturing people and killing them,” he said. “The situation for a person who worked in the previous government is proving to be dangerous.”
Andarabi predicted that if the Taliban continued reprisals, it would only stiffen “pockets of resistance.”
Hours after the Taliban walked into Kabul, officials announced an amnesty and said Afghans should “restart your routine life with full confidence.”
Yet the militants have been going house-to-house searching for those who worked with the former government or its foreign backers, according to an intelligence analysis drawn up for the United Nations.
It was also reported that Taliban soldiers had beaten up Ziad Yaad, a journalist for independent new channel Tolo News, while he was filming in central Kabul Wednesday. They seized his camera and phone, according to local reporter Bilal Sarwary.
As the Taliban discuss the make-up of their new administration, there were reports that they had begun to make appointments, including picking a former Guantanamo Bay detainee for a senior military post.