UN: Taliban’s crackdown on protests intensifying

GENEVA/LONDON: The UN rights office on Friday said the Taliban government’s response to peaceful marches in Afghanistan is increasingly turning violent, with authorities using live ammunition, batons and whips and causing the deaths of at least four protesters so far.

Protests seeking the protection of rights, often led by women, pose a challenge to the new Islamist Taliban administration as it seeks to consolidate control after seizing the capital Kabul in mid-August.

Ravina Shamdasani, a UN rights spokesperson, told a briefing in Geneva that recent reactions from the Taliban regime have been “severe”. Shamdasani said the UN documented four protester deaths from gunfire.

She said that some or all may have resulted from efforts to disperse protesters with firing.

She added that the UN also received reports of house-tohouse searches for those who participated in the protests. Journalists covering the protests have also been intimidated.

“In one case, one journalist was reported to have been told, as he was being kicked in the head, ‘You are lucky you haven’t been beheaded’,” Shamdasani said. “There has been lots of intimidation of journalists simply trying to do their job.”

In the UK, the head of Britain’s MI5 domestic spy service said on Friday that the Taliban’s takeover of Afghanistan will give a “morale boost” to extremists plotting attacks elsewhere, and could again give them a base to operate as they did in the run-up to the 9/11 terror attacks in America.

Ken McCallum, director general of the UK’s security service, best known as MI5 (Military Intelligence Section 5), told the BBC that the threat to Britain from terrorism was “a real and enduring thing”.

“We do face a consistent global struggle to defeat extremism and to guard against terrorism,” McCallum said on the eve of the anniversary of the September 11, 2001 attacks.

Reaction from the Taliban has been severe. RAVINA SHAMDASANI, UN rights spokesperson

Pak denies involvement in Panjshir offensive Pakistan has rejected reports that it had aided the Taliban offensive in Afghanistan’s Panjshir Valley, terming these as a “mischievous propaganda campaign”.

Pakistan’s foreign office spokesperson Asim Iftikhar said, “These malicious allegations were part of a desperate attempt to malign Pakistan and to mislead the international community.”