Hassan Kazemi Qomi, Iran's Special Representative for Afghanistan affairs, on Friday, praised what he called Islamabad's constructive role in Afghanistan. Qomi made the comments during a meeting with Pakistan’s foreign minister in Islamabad.
Bilawal Bhutto Zardari, the Foreign Minister of Pakistan, also called for close cooperation with Iran on Afghanistan and regional security.
According to the Iranian government official accounts, Zardari announced Pakistan's firm commitment to establish peace and stability in Afghanistan.
He said that the close cooperation between Iran and Pakistan on issues concerning Afghanistan, including refugee affairs, and ensuring the security of the region, is of high importance.
Qomi stated that stability in Afghanistan is a prerequisite for long-term peace and prosperity in the region.
Reports of the emergence of the Tajikistan Taliban Movement (TTM) in northern Afghanistan has come to the fore, sources confirmed to Afghanistan International. According to AI sources, TTM recruits Tajik citizens and seeks to overthrow the government of Emomali Rahmon.
AI sources said that TTM has around 200 fighters.
Before the collapse of Afghanistan in 2021, the Tajik militants fought in the ranks of the Taliban, but under the Taliban reign, the TTM members settled in several districts in Badakhshan province in the northeast of Afghanistan on the border of Tajikistan.
According to Al sources, the Tajik militants operate under the banner of Jamaat-e Ansarullah, a banned terrorist organization by Russia.
Observers believe that the TTM competes with the Islamic State-Khurasan (IS-K), which has many Tajik citizens in its ranks.
According to AI sources, the Tajik fighters of Jamaat-e Ansarullah, act as the border guards of the Afghan Taliban in Badakhshan province. The emergence of the TTM has reportedly increased concerns of the Tajik authorities.
According to AI sources, in recent days, the TTM fighters have built a watch tower near the border with Tajikistan for surveillance purposes of the territory of Tajikistan.
According to reports, Mahdi Arsalan - the pseudonym of Muhammad Sharipov, from the Nurobod district of Tajikistan, is the leader of the TTM under the Taliban. Some sources said that Arslan is also the leader of Jamaat-e Ansarullah. Mehdi Arslan had previously moved to Afghanistan and has fought in the ranks of the Afghan Taliban.
According to analysts, the emergence of the TTM as a new jihadist project in Central Asia will change the group’s popularity and attract radical Tajik youth.
The emergence of this jihadist movement is bad news for the government of President Emomali Rahmon, as Tajikistan is already struggling with the recent protests that occurred in the Gorno-Badakhshan Autonomous Region, and increasingly long-term economic challenges.
The Taliban’s Acting Defense Minister and Interior Minister visited the 203 Mansuri Corps in Paktia province in eastern Afghanistan on separate occasions, as per the group’s affiliated media organisation, Bakhtar news agency.
No more details about the dates, purpose of the trips and the orders given by the two leaders have been provided. However, Zabihullah Mujahid, Taliban’s spokesperson, published a picture on twitter of Mullah Yaqoob and Sirajuddin Haqqani, the sons of the Taliban and Haqqani network founders together and tried to quell the rumours about tensions between the senior members of the group.
The visit of these two senior Taliban and Haqqani network officials has stirred the pot in news circles as the Mansuri corps is infamously known as the group’s suicide squad. These forces are present in Badakhshan, Kunduz, Samangan, Baghlan, Balkh, Parwan, and in other provinces of Afghanistan.
Mujahid had said that “Mujahideen”, who are members of the suicide attacker group, are part of this group’s army and they will be organized within the structure of the Ministry of defense.
The Taliban ministers trip comes as heavy clashes continue in different parts of Afghanistan with the National Resistance Front (NRF) and other anti-Taliban forces.
The Taliban’s spokesperson tweeted, which seemed to be addressing the opposition, that Mullah Yaqoob and Sirajuddin Haqqani fulfilled all the requirements of Jihad, don’t underestimate their achievements.
Also, Haqqani, during his visit to Paktia said that all the security and defense forces of Taliban should ensure goodwill, sincerity, and obedience as their basic principles and avoid any kind of negligence.
Hamid Karzai, former president of Afghanistan, once again called on the Taliban to let girls above grade 6 to go to school. Karzai on Friday said that he supports the demands of the Ulema and elders of Kunar province regarding reopening of schools for girls.
He asked the Taliban to defy “sinister intentions of foreigners” by reponing the schools for girls.
Karzai in a tweet said that the development of a society is dependent on girls’ and boys’ education.
He pointed to the gathering of the Ulema and elders in Kunar province and asked the Taliban to respect people’s demands and reopen the doors of schools for girls.
Hamid Karzai advised the Taliban, “With the reopening of schools for girls, the evil intentions of outsiders will be defeated and the country will have a bright future.”
It has been more than 300 days since girls above grade 6 have been deprived of education.
Life under the Taliban’s rule has become hard for Afghan women as they lost their right to work, education and social life in the society.
Two days ago, United Nations Assistance Mission in Afghanistan (UNAMA) published its first report on human rights in Afghanistan since Taliban took over the country.
UNAMA acting SRSG, Markus Potzel, said that deprivation of girls and women of their basic rights is one of the most prominent violations of human rights by the Taliban. This report highlighted specific concerns in relation to the actions of the Taliban’s Ministry of Promotion of Virtue and Prevention of Vice and the group’s intelligence agency.
Based on this report, most of the group’s departments restricted human rights and basic freedoms of Afghans, especially, the rights of women and girls.
Thousands of users with over 40,000 tweets called on Twitter to suspend Taliban's accounts on the platform during the second day of the #BanTaliban campaign.
Some of the Twitter users called the Taliban a “terrorist” group and said that this group deprived Afghans of their freedom, so the group's accounts should be banned.
Chris Blackburn, a British political analyst joined this campaign, and on his twitter handle, wrote, “I'm not from #Afghanistan, but I know that the majority of us don't want to live life under the #Taliban or anything similar."
He added that under the Taliban’s regime, Afghans are not allowed to listen to music, girls aren’t allowed to go to school and women can’t work. Blackburn called on everyone to join this campaign and called on twitter to ban this group’s accounts.
Habib Khan, an Afghan activist, said that the Taliban uses Twitter to show international community that this group has changed. He called the Taliban a terrorist group and added that this group uses Twitter for their propaganda.
Heela Najib, daughter of the former president of Afghanistan who had been executed by the Taliban during their first reign of power, wrote, “I believe in #FreedomOfSpeech, but those who suffocate expression of thought, speech, take away freedom of choice and use violence to silence conscious of human beings should not be given access to social media."
A wide range of people, foreign countries’ citizens, some of the Pashtun Tahafuz Movement members and a number of people who survived Taliban’s attacks, participated in this campaign.
Omar Farooq, a survivor of the Taliban’s attack on their university, as he claims, said, “I demand Twitter to ban Taliban affiliated accounts."
Zala Zazai, a woman police officer in the former Afghan government, said, “I ask Twitter to shut down the voice of the Taliban terrorist group. The activity of the Taliban on Twitter means supporting terrorism. Please do not support terrorist networks."
This campaign had started on Wednesday, July 20, when Meta Inc. banned all the pages of Taliban’s affiliated media, RTA and Bakhtar News agency on Facebook and Instagram.
Ahmadullah Wasqi, Taliban’s head of Radio Television of Afghanistan (RTA), described RTA as the voice of the nation and media of people and said that suspending this media organisation's page is against all media principles and freedom of speech.
However, Meta Inc. told Afghanistan International that closing pages affiliated to the Taliban on Facebook and Instagram was because the Taliban is a sanctioned terrorist group according to the law of the United States.
This firm said that based on their policy about dangerous organizations, they will ban all pages affiliated with Taliban.
Emomali Rahmon, President of Tajikistan, on Thursday said that the Taliban doesn’t want an inclusive government in Afghanistan, despite the promises they have made.
During the meeting of the heads of Central Asian states in Kyrgyzstan, Rahmon added that the Taliban implements an aggressive discriminatory policy against various ethnic groups in Afghanistan.
The Kyrgyzstan meeting is the fourth in a series of consultative meetings of the leaders of Central Asian countries. The first such summit was held in March 2018 in Kazakhstan. The second summit was held in November 2019 in Uzbekistan, and the third round of this summit was held in August 2021 in Turkmenistan.
Before the meeting was initiated, the five countries’ foreign ministries prepared the draft roadmap for the development of regional cooperation from 2022-2024.
The leaders of the Central Asian countries outlined that in 2022, cooperation and stability in the region is high on their agenda.
Most Central Asian countries are worried about the influence of extremists in the region considering the latest developments in Afghanistan under the Taliban.