TALIBAN VIOLENTLY DISPERSE PROTEST
KABUL, Afghanistan — Taliban militants attacked protesters Wednesday in Afghanistan who dared to take down their banner and replace it with the country’s flag, killing at least one person and fueling fears about how the insurgents would govern this fractious nation.
While the Taliban have insisted they will respect human rights, unlike during their previously draconian rule, the attack in Jalalabad came as many Afghans were hiding at home or trying to flee the country, fearful of abuses by the loosely controlled militant organization. Many people have expressed dread that the two-decade Western experiment to remake Afghanistan will not survive the resurgent Taliban, who took control of the country in a blitz that took just days.
Taliban leaders talked Wednesday with senior Afghan officials about a future government. In a potential complication to any effort to stabilize the country, the head of the country’s central bank warned that American sanctions over the Taliban’s designation as a terrorist organization threatened Afghanistan’s economy, which already is dangerously low on hard foreign currency.
One figure who was not at the talks in Kabul: Afghan President Ashraf Ghani, who fled as the Taliban closed in on the capital. The United Arab Emirates acknowledged
Wednesday that the Gulf nation had taken him and his family in on humanitarian grounds.
In an early sign of protest to the Taliban’s rule, dozens gathered in the eastern city of Jalalabad and a nearby market town to raise the tricolor national flag, a day before Afghanistan’s Independence Day, which commemorates the 1919 treaty that ended British rule. They lowered the Taliban flag — a white banner with an Islamic inscription — that the militants have raised in the areas they captured.
Video footage later showed the Taliban firing into the air and attacking people with batons to disperse the crowd. A local health official said the violence killed at least one person and wounded six. The Taliban did not acknowledge the protest or the violence.