Taliban militants attacked protesters on Wednesday, August 18, 2021 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 spoke with senior Afghan officials on Wednesday about a future Government. In a possible complication of any effort to stabilize the country, the head of the country’s central bank warned that US sanctions over the Taliban’s designation as a terrorist organization threatened Afghanistan’s economy, which is already dangerously low in foreign exchange.
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 one of the first signs of protest against the Taliban rule, dozens of people gathered in the eastern city of Jalalabad and a nearby commercial city to raise the national tricolor flag, one day before Afghanistan’s Independence Day, commemorating the 1919 treaty that ended British rule. They lowered the Taliban flag, a white banner with an Islamic inscription, which the militants have hoisted in the areas they captured.
Video footage later showed the Taliban firing into the air and attacking people with batons to disperse the crowd. Babrak Amirzada, a reporter for a local news agency, said the Taliban beat him and a TV cameraman from another agency.
It was a rare resistance to their rule. In the days since the Taliban seized Kabul on Sunday, the militants only faced one other protest by a few women in the capital.
There has been no armed opposition to the Taliban. But videos from the Panjshir Valley north of Kabul, a stronghold of the Northern Alliance militias that allied with the U.S. during the 2001 invasion of Afghanistan, appear to show potential opposition figures gathering there. That area is in the only province that has not fallen to the Taliban.
Those figures include members of the deposed government — Vice President Amrullah Saleh, who asserted on Twitter that he is the country’s rightful president, and Defense Minister Gen. Bismillah Mohammadi — as well as Ahmad Massoud, the son of the slain Northern Alliance leader Ahmad Shah Massoud.
