Ben Farmer comes face-to-face with a Taliban assassin
With grizzled killers stalking the streets, people struggle to believe their new rulers’ assurances
The Taliban commander revealed his disturbing previous duties almost casually while eating dates and drinking tea. Asked about his role before taking charge of security for a small patch of Kandahar, the veteran fighter said he had worked on target killings. For many Afghans, the phrase alone is chilling. It has been used to describe a campaign of urban assassinations striking everyone from members of the security forces and civil servants to journalists and activists. Some of these killings were claimed by the Taliban, others were denied.
The burly, bearded commander would not say how many of these assassinations he had carried out. Further questioning was met with hard stares from his band of fighters. Moments earlier when The Daily Telegraph had been interviewing Kandahar residents in the street, his men had lurked menacingly and demanded to know what was happening. Anyone who looked like they might be willing to talk to a journalist was intimidated away and one fighter used a length of cable to idly whip curious boys.
For the first month of the Taliban’s tenure, the world’s attention has been on the capital, Kabul, but many Taliban consider Kandahar their spiritual heartland.
The movement was founded in villages nearby in the mid-1990s and it used Kandahar rather than Kabul as its capital. It was in this city that their leader Mullah Omar declared himself “Commander of the Faithful” before sweeping to power. A few years later when American troops ousted the Taliban after 9/11, Kandahar was one of their last holdouts and they have since spent the best part of 20 years fighting in the surrounding orchards and vineyards.
The commander who once spent his time infiltrating the city to conduct assassinations has now been given the job of securing it. He said he had joined the Taliban around 20 years earlier because of his religious convictions.
“From childhood we have the belief that if an infidel or a non-muslim is occupying our country by force, we have to do jihad against them. Now things are peaceful and I’m happy with the situation.”
His biggest worry, he said, was thieves and robbers posing as Taliban to take advantage of uncertainty surrounding their takeover.
“Now the security situation is good, but still we are trying to use all techniques to bring security. Currently there are no specific threats.
“There are several reports of people using their beards and turbans to make themselves like Taliban and taking property and vehicles. We have stopped people doing this and we have returned their possessions.”
As he spoke quietly his men scowled. One had a pistol on the carpet in front of him. Yet across town at the same time, one of the commander’s comrades, the new Taliban mayor of Kandahar, was taking part in a photo opportunity that would have made any campaigning local politician proud.
Surrounded by broom-wielding municipal workers in high-visibility vests, Niamatullah Hassan was launching a campaign to keep the streets clean.
These are the two faces of the Taliban government in Kandahar nearly a month after the insurgents took power. Their defeat of the internationally backed government, which in this province was once bolstered by thousands of American and Canadian troops, has allowed them free rein to try to show they can govern better than the government they deposed.
Their victory means that after years of shootings and explosions, the city is now quiet. Meanwhile, like the rest of the country, the economy is in freefall.
If the unnamed commander represented the intimidating side of Kandahar’s new rulers, the mayor tried hard to represent the softer side.
The Taliban veteran from Panjwayi district now oversees 1,200 municipal workers and vowed that his administration would be a far cry from the notorious graft of government under former presidents Hamid Karzai and Ashraf Ghani.
He said he had no objection to women working or girls being educated as long as they abide by Islamic rules. He said he hoped to eventually hire more women on to his staff once arrangements had been made for them to be kept at a modest distance from their male colleagues.
“It is a basic need of life that we should have educated women and especially educated women in the health sector,” he said.
Kandahar’s residents must each day steer a course between these two sides of their new rulers.
One female student said: “Women feel unsafe, they feel they can’t go out, they don’t trust the Taliban even though they say they have no problem with women.
“Security is OK but it’s only for the Taliban, and they were the ones who caused the insecurity. They just stopped doing the bombing and attacks.”
One journalist said there was a difference between the movement’s pronouncements in the media and the reality of enforcement on the street.
“These Taliban on the street are local people, they don’t have understanding and they are very strict. The things the senior people are saying on the television is not acceptable to the local Taliban.
“It feels like something very strange has happened. The government of 20 years has been destroyed, the constitution has been lost and our national values like the flag and anthem and all these things have disappeared.
“Afghans are really worried because Afghanistan is under the control of people who Afghans were really scared of.”
‘Afghans are really worried because Afghanistan is in the control of people who Afghans were scared of’