No Information on al-Zawahiri's Presence in Kabul Shows Weakness of Taliban, Says Mujahid

According to AI sources, Ariana airlines’ senior management have "verbally" told the female attendants that they are no longer needed in their roles.

However, the Taliban have always denied firing female employees of the government.

Female employees of the airlines were allowed to work, fully dressed briefly under the Taliban. But, in the past five months, they are only required to sign attendance twice a month and receive 5,000 Afghanis as a monthly allowance.

With these flight attendants now forced to stay at home, female passengers on Ariana flights can receive no help, especially, in emergency situations.

Ariana is not the first state-run organisation where female employees have been forcibly removed from work by the Taliban. Previously, the Taliban had asked female employees of the Ministry of Finance to be replaced with male family members.

While noting that this massacre should be recognized as a genocide, Nazary has warned that the people of Afghanistan are once again facing a similar situation under the Taliban reign in Afghanistan.

After entering Mazar-e-Sharif city in northern Balkh province on August 8, 1998, the Taliban killed many civilians, particularly those belonging to the Hazara ethnicity.

In their report about the massacre, human rights organisations too said that the Taliban "killed thousands of civilians" by recapturing the city of Mazar-e-Sharif in 1998.

Human Rights Watch had said in a report that the massacre at Mazar-e-Sharif by the Taliban was in "revenge" for the killing of 2,000 members of this group's forces in 1997, who had been killed after capturing the cities of Mazar-e-Sharif and Shaberghan.

The Taliban have also been accused of shooting eight Iranian diplomats and a journalist after entering the Iranian consulate in Mazar-e-Sharif, on the same day. However, the group has never taken responsibility for that incident.

Some Iranian social media users remembered Mahmoud Saremi, an Iranian journalist who was killed on this day. Asma Qaidizada wrote on Facebook, "Today is the anniversary of the killing of a journalist and eight Iranian diplomats in a brutal Taliban attack on the Iranian Consulate in Mazar-e-Sharif.”

Asma criticised the statement published by the Iran's Foreign Ministry on this occasion and said that in this announcement, the Taliban as a group had been not condemned, and the perpetrators of this terrorist attack were mentioned as anonymous.

On August 8, Iran's Foreign Ministry had issued a statement calling for the clarification regarding the killing of its diplomats in Mazar-e-Sharif and various aspects of this attack.

Haqqani, who is currently in Helmand to meet local Taliban officials, met with the group’s fighters who had been injured or disabled during the Taliban insurgency against the Islamic Republic of Afghanistan and international forces.

It has been reported that Haqqani left Kabul after the US drone strike on the al-Qaeda leader's residence in Sherpur area of the capital city, last Sunday.

During the twenty years of Taliban’s insurgency against the international forces and the former government of Afghanistan, thousands of people have been injured, and many were left disabled.

The Taliban and the Haqqani network, along with other militant groups, have been one of the main causes of Afghans becoming disabled.

Taliban currently faces economic challenges and a crisis of legitimacy coupled with providing support and services to thousands of victims of the group's war in Afghanistan.

The group’s main challenge is meeting the expectations of those families who sent their children to the war front to fight against the former Afghan government and its international allies for the Taliban.

This comes even though every year many Afghan students complain of lack of books and teaching materials in Afghanistan.

Recently, a Taliban official had called the school curriculum "inappropriate”. Seyed Ahmad Shahidkhel, the Admin and Finance Deputy Minister of Education of the Taliban, had recently told TOLOnews that secondary and high schools have not been opened to female students since a revision of the curriculum by the group is underway.

According to him, soon "the science of ethics, belief, the science of raising children and marriage", will be added to the curriculum of these students.

Officials of the Ministries of Education and Higher Education of the Taliban have already expressed dissatisfaction with the Afghan educational system and the generations educated under the Islamic Republic of Afghanistan.

Previously, in 2021, Abdul Baqi Haqqani, the Acting Minister of Higher Education of the Taliban, had also said that they can’t expect much from graduates of universities under the Islamic Republic of Afghanistan.

Haqqani had stressed that the foundations of education in Afghanistan must be restructured, and students should be educated according to “the Islamic values”.

Meanwhile, the Taliban have made extensive changes in the curriculum of Afghan universities. After the takeover of Afghanistan by the group, hours of Islamic culture teaching in all departments of universities across the country have tripled.

In a statement, the ministry condemned the attack and called it an “unforgettable crime”.

The Iranian Foreign Ministry added that the international community's widespread condemnation of that crime and the solidarity of the Afghan people made Iran display self-restraint.

In 1998, when the Taliban entered Mazar-e-Sharif city in northern Balkh province, armed men attacked the Iranian consulate and killed eight Iranian diplomats and one journalist.

At that time, the Taliban had denied involvement in the attack.

Meanwhile, Iran's Foreign Ministry stressed that it stands by the people of Afghanistan and supports any solution that leads to permanent peace and stability in the country.

Iran, however, has emphasized on the formation of an inclusive government with the representation of all ethnic groups of Afghanistan.