Taliban endorse prayers on unity while fears rise
Reports of killings, abuses incite rush at Kabul airport
KABUL, Afghanistan — Reports of targeted killings in areas overrun by the Taliban mounted Friday, fueling fears that the extremists will return Afghanistan to the repressive rule they imposed when they were last in power, even as they urged imams to push a message of unity at weekly prayers.
Terrified that the new rulers would commit such abuses and despairing for their country’s future, thousands of people have raced to Kabul’s airport, where chaotic scenes continued unabated. People seeking to escape struggled to get past crushing crowds, Taliban airport checkpoints and U.S. bureaucracy. Video images showed crowds gathered in the dark outside the walls topped with barbed wire. Occasionally someone shot a stream of gunfire into the air.
What appeared to be American troops stood in the distance. In one dramatic image, a Marine reached over the razor wire atop a barrier and plucked a baby by the arm from the crowd and pulled the child up over the wall.
Reports of planes leaving at least partly empty underscored how difficult it still is for people to get into the airport. In an indication of
the extent of the chaos, the Belgian Foreign Affairs Ministry confirmed that one of its aircraft took off from Kabul without a single passenger because the people who were supposed to be on board got stuck outside the airport.
Also Friday, American officials confirmed to The Associated Press that U.S. military helicopters flew into Taliban-held Kabul to scoop up evacuees. And President Joe Biden pledged to bring all Americans back from Afghanistan — along with Afghans who aided the war effort.
“We will get you home,” Biden said from the White House.
The Taliban say they have grown more moderate since they last ruled Afghanistan in the late 1990s and have pledged to restore security and forgive those who fought them in the 20 years since the U.S.-led invasion toppled them from power.
But many Afghans are skeptical, fearing that the Taliban will erase the gains, especially for women, achieved in the past two decades. Opposition to the takeover has included street protests, acts of defiance that Taliban fighters have suppressed violently.
An Amnesty International report Friday provided more evidence that undercut the Taliban’s claims that they have changed.
The rights group said its researchers spoke to eyewitnesses in Ghazni province who recounted how the Taliban killed nine ethnic Hazara men in the village of Mundarakht from July 4 to July 6. It said six of the men were shot and three were tortured to death. Hazaras are Shiite Muslims who were previously persecuted by the Taliban and who made major gains in education and social status in recent years.
Amnesty International warned that more killings may have gone unreported because the Taliban cut cellphone service in many areas they captured.
Reporters without Borders expressed alarm at the news that Taliban fighters on Wednesday killed a family member of an Afghan journalist working for Germany’s Deutsche Welle. The broadcaster said fighters conducted house-to-house searches for their reporter, who already had gone to Germany.
Meanwhile, a private intelligence group in Norway that provides information to the United Nations said it obtained evidence that the Taliban have rounded up Afghans on a blacklist of people they believe worked in key roles with the previous Afghan administration or with U.S.-led forces.
In an email, the executive director of the Norwegian Center for Global Analyses said the organization knew about several threat letters sent to Afghans.
A report from the group that was obtained by The Associated Press included one of the letters, but the AP could not independently verify the group’s claims.
‘CRAZY SITUATION’
It’s not clear whether the reports of abuses indicate that Taliban leaders are saying one thing but doing another or whether they simply do not have full control over their forces. The scale and speed of their takeover seems to have challenged the leadership’s ability to control their fighters.
Under the Taliban’s previous rule, women were largely confined to their homes, television and music were banned, and public executions were held regularly.
In the uncertainty, thousands have tried to flee the country.
Mohammad Naim, who said he used to be an interpreter for U.S. forces, has been in the airport crowd for four days trying to escape. He said he put his children on the roof of a car on the first day to save them from being crushed by the mass of people. He saw other children killed when they were unable to get out of the way.
He urged others not to go to the airport.
“It is a very, very crazy situation right now,” he said.
A widely seen video on social media showed some of the chaos when a U.S. Marine at the airport pulled a baby out of the crowd. A spokesman for the Marine Corps, Maj. Jim Stenger, confirmed that the Marine was a member of the 24th Marine Expeditionary Unit and said the baby was “cared for by medical professionals.” The child was later reunited with the father, and they are safe at the airport, Stenger said.
It was not clear when the incident happened.
The United States is struggling to pick up the pace of evacuations. American military planes paused flights from the airport for six to seven hours Friday because of a lack of places available to take evacuees, but they later resumed.
So far, 13 countries have agreed to host at-risk Afghans at least temporarily, U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken said. Another 12 have agreed to serve as transit points for evacuees, including Americans and others.
Biden’s pledge to bring home all Americans and to evacuate all Afghans who assisted the war effort represented a potentially vast expansion of the administration’s commitments on the airlift so far. Tens of thousands of Afghan translators and others, as well as their close family members, are seeking evacuation.
European countries also are working to get their citizens out as well as those who have worked with them. But Spanish Defense Minister Margarita Robles said Friday that the country’s military transport planes are leaving Kabul partly empty in the tumult.
“Nobody’s in control of the situation,” Robles told Spanish public radio RNE.
Germany was sending two helicopters to Kabul to help take small numbers of people from elsewhere in the city to the airport, officials said.
HUNT FOR ‘COLLABORATORS’
According to the confidential threat assessment prepared for the United Nations and seen by The Washington Post, the Taliban have stepped up their hunt for former Afghan security officials and people who may have worked with U.S. or NATO forces.
The militants are going house to house, setting up checkpoints and threatening to arrest or kill relatives of “collaborators” in major cities, the Wednesday assessment said.
The document produced by the Norwegian Center for Global Analyses describes an empowered Taliban eager to seek out and interrogate or punish those affiliated with the U.S.-backed government.
At particular risk are people who were in central positions in military, police and investigative units, according to the analysis, despite a Taliban pledge this week to grant amnesty to former officials.
The fighters are using the West’s focus on evacuating foreigners to “search unrestrained for Afghan targets inside the cities,” the Norwegian document said.
At the same time, the militants are screening people outside the Kabul airport. The Taliban have “established vehicle checkpoints on all major roads and around major cities,” including Kabul and Jalalabad, the assessment said.
It also warned of a “worst case” scenario in which the militants close down Kabul and other cities to conduct mass arrests and public executions.
Information for this article was contributed by Ahmad Seir, Tameem Akhgar, Rebecca Santana, Jan M. Olsen, Frank Jordans, Barry Hatton, Kathy Gannon, David Rising and Rod McGurk of The Associated Press; and by Erin Cunningham and Claire Parker of The Washington Post.
An Amnesty International report Friday provided more evidence that undercut the Taliban’s claims that they have changed.