Friday 20th August 2021
Taliban are targeting people
Reports of civil executions
Many NATO aid workers in Afghanistan fear for their lives. Reports are now circulating that confirm the worst: human rights activists document “civil executions”. The UN has information that the Taliban are using lists of names to search for “collaborators”.
The human rights organization Human Rights Watch (HRW) claims to have received reports of “civil executions” by the Taliban in Afghanistan. The alleged victims are former Afghan government officials and security forces, said the deputy director for HRW in Asia, Patricia Gossman, in an online column with journalists. The extent is still unclear. Many of these incidents were found to take place outside the capital, Kabul, in the Afghan provinces. The Taliban had promised an amnesty after they came to power.
The chairman of the Afghan Independent Human Rights Commission, Shaharsad Akbar, criticized the chaos during the evacuation of vulnerable Afghans. It is extremely difficult to get to the airport in Kabul, she said. There, on the other hand, there is too little coordination between the nations that fly people out and those who protect the airport. For example, your organization identified 90 employees at high risk. 20 of them had received commitments for evacuation flights.
“We weren’t able to evacuate a single person.” Akbar said: “The fear is that the airport, that everything will be left to the Taliban and that the people will be at the mercy of the Taliban and that there will be massacres if the foreign and western citizens are evacuated.” She added, “If the US was planning to withdraw its entire military, why wasn’t it done better? This whole withdrawal situation was badly handled from the start.”
Allegations against US government
Washington HRW director Sarah Holewinski called for US President Joe Biden to be clarified whether the US armed forces should still leave Kabul as planned on August 31. If the number of evacuation flights is not increased dramatically, numerous vulnerable Afghans would not be flown out by then, said Holewinski. “The United States has a moral responsibility to help them.”
The Afghan media had previously reported that several representatives of the previous Afghan government were missing. Relatives of several government officials told ToloNews that their family members have disappeared or are believed to have been held by the Islamists since the Taliban came to power. The previous governor and the previous police chief of the Laghman province in the east of the country had surrendered to the Taliban, but were still held in captivity by the Islamists. The police chief of Gasni in the south-east of the country cannot be found either. The Taliban have issued a general amnesty, which they claim to include everyone – including government officials and members of the security forces.
Videos of executions
Since Thursday, videos have been circulating on social media that the execution is supposed to show police chiefs of Badghis province. In one of the videos, Hajji Mohammed Achaksai mentions his own name; in a second he can be seen on his knees on the floor in the same clothes, his eyes and hands bandaged. A few seconds later he was shot with many bullets. A Taliban comment on the incidents was initially not available.
According to a report prepared for the United Nations, the Taliban are specifically looking for alleged collaborators. They also openly threaten retaliation for their family members. The confidential four-page report by the RHIPTO Norwegian Center for Global Analyzes states that the greatest risk is exposed to people who have held important positions in the military, the police or other investigative agencies. The head of the think tank, Christian Nellemann, does not consider the Taliban’s assurances that it will not undertake any retaliatory actions to be credible. “They just try to keep people in place so that they can arrest them,” said Nellemann.
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