Afghanistan: Taliban kill dozens of former soldiers and human rights activists
Afghanistan has witnessed a dramatic increase in Taliban assassination rates against former members of the Afghan army and human rights workers. According to a report prepared by Afghan diplomats, the militant group seeks to suppress anyone who might oppose the regime, as well as to punish all those who cooperated with the United States in past years.
In a report published by the Foreign Policy magazine, the US revealed an increase in the number of deaths, especially during clashes with the so-called National Resistance Front across three Afghan provinces in May, as well as after the armed uprisings in some provinces of eastern and southern Afghanistan. The report concluded that the Taliban arbitrarily detained, tortured and killed dozens of civilians. Anyone who opposes the Taliban is shot in the head, whether male or female.
In one case documented in the report, the son of a former Afghan intelligence official was tortured to death inside the Taliban district police station in Badakhshan; other former Afghan National Army officers were forcibly disappeared without leaving a trace. In another case, the Taliban captured a former army officer outside his home and shot him. The group also fired into the crowd during the funeral of an Afghan police officer, forcing the family to bury the man in a company.
According to former Afghan officials and diplomats who prepared the shocking report, the Taliban have not paid civil servants’ salaries for months. Instead, the group has shared money allocated for salaries among regime loyalists. This is not the first warning of increased Taliban killings. In January, the United Nations reported that more than 100 former Afghan officials were most likely killed since the Taliban took over Kabul in August 2021, and most of the killings were carried out by the militant group. However, former Afghan officials believe that the numbers continue to rise as Afghanistan declines the spotlight with the Russian military operation in Ukraine.
Arif Dustyar, former consul general for Afghanistan in Los Angeles until earlier this year and now senior advisor on Afghanistan affairs at the Kroc Institute, said: “The extrajudicial killings are going after former military and other people who are perceived as a constant threat from the start”, he said. “But then, really, it started rising at a time when the crisis in Ukraine was happening because both the world and the media were distracted from Afghanistan, and the Taliban wanted to take advantage of this opportunity, so they went after the opponents more than before”.
According to the US magazine, with no soldiers on the ground, the US and the NATO-led coalition fighting in Afghanistan have struggled to verify the veracity of the upsurge in killings and summary executions. But Ali Nazari, head of foreign relations at the Afghan National Resistance Front, said hundreds of people had disappeared from areas where the Taliban faced the greatest resistance to their rule, such as the Panjshir Valley, Andarab, Takhar, Khost and Nazari wrote: ”Every time they are defeated in battle, they increase their atrocities against civilians, especially those associated with militants”.
