Its aim, reported by two Afghan officials who had been separately informed of the raid, was to secure the files of Afghan intelligence officers and their informants and to obtain the means to track the telephone numbers of Afghan citizens. .
The speed with which Kabul fell on August 15, when President Ashraf Ghani fled, was potentially disastrous for hundreds of thousands of Afghans who had been working to combat the Taliban threat, from senior officials to middle-level government workers, who have since been forced into hiding. .
Few officials found the time to shred documents and thousands of secret files and payroll lists fell into the hands of the enemy, the two officials said.
As U.S. troops complete their withdrawal before Tuesday’s deadline, much of the nation is afraid of retaliation.
So far, the Taliban’s political leadership has presented a moderate face, promising amnesty to government security forces that lay down their arms, even writing letters of guarantee that they will not be prosecuted, although it reserves the right to prosecute serious crimes. . Taliban spokesmen have also spoken of forming an inclusive government.
A Taliban spokesman Suhail Shaheen said in a Twitter post in English that there was no resolution of scores or that there was a list of successes with which the Taliban were conducting door-to-door searches, as has been reported. rumored.
“General amnesty has been granted,” he wrote, adding that “we are focusing on the future.”
Still, there are growing reports of arrests, disappearances and even executions of Taliban-run officials, in what some current and former government officials describe as a covert and sometimes deadly search for Taliban enemies.
“It’s very clandestine,” said a former lawmaker hiding elsewhere when the Taliban visited his home at midnight.
“This is intimidation,” he said. “I feel threatened and my family is in shock.”
The Taliban swept into cities and districts, often without gunfire, making diplomatic assurances to their opponents and the public. But early commanders have often been replaced by heavier force agents who carry out raids and kidnappings, former government officials said.
The scope of the campaign is unclear, as it is being carried out covertly, nor is it clear what level of Taliban leadership authorized arrests or executions.
It is possible that the people who confiscated the files from the National Security Directorate and the Ministry of Communications were not even Taliban: the men did not speak Afghan languages, officials said, and may have been agents of the security agency. Pakistani military intelligence working alongside the Taliban. forces. The Pakistani inter-service intelligence agency has long supported the Taliban in its violent opposition to the Kabul government.
The fear among Afghans is palpable. All but the youngest remember the authoritarian regime of the Taliban in the 1990s, with its draconian punishments, hangings and public executions.
Many people have gone into hiding, changed their location and phone numbers, and broken off communications with friends and colleagues.
“People don’t trust the Taliban for what they were doing before,” said an Afghan who worked as a translator for the NATO mission and was one of the evacuees.
Human rights organizations, activists and former government officials have also struggled to understand exactly what is happening across the vast, mountainous terrain of Afghanistan, but several government officials who remain in office said they receive calls every time. more frantic than relatives and acquaintances.
“They seem to be doing very threatening searches,” said Patricia Gossman, Asia’s associate director of Human Rights Watch. “It’s very police-state behavior. The message is very clear. ”
One government official said people in the northern province of Badakhshan have been removed from their homes in recent days and have not been seen since. There has been a pattern of persecution of personnel from Afghan special operations forces and intelligence commandos, known as 00 units, as well as from police and security chiefs across the country, he added.
Asked if these actions and reports of killings indicated a Taliban policy or were an ad hoc revenge takeover by people, he said, “It’s too early to judge.”
But the official said he had received information about an internal Taliban meeting at its headquarters in Quetta, Pakistan, where leaders discussed whether to grant amnesty to some highly trained Afghan operatives. The Taliban members had decided not to let them go, as they could cause problems for the Taliban in the future.
“This worries me if this becomes a policy,” he said.
That official, like all interviewees on the subject, asked that they not be identified for fear of retaliation from the Taliban against their relatives still in Afghanistan.
Former southwestern Farah province security police chief Ghulam Sakhi Akbari was shot dead on the main road in Kabul-Kandahar on Friday, according to posts posted on Facebook by activists. “Some activists have blamed the Taliban,” one wrote. “The Taliban have not said anything so far.”
At least a dozen former Ghani provincial government officials have been detained by the Taliban across the country, former government officials said. They appointed three district police chiefs and three security officers in the southern province of Kandahar, two provincial police chiefs, a provincial governor and two provincial intelligence department heads, who are known to have been arrested. .
It is unclear where the officials are detained or whether legal proceedings have been instituted against them. In some cases, they have been reported missing by family members. In the case of the three Kandahar district police chiefs, members of the citizenry had demanded that the Taliban arrest the men, who have long been accused of human rights abuses, a resident said.
A group of political activists has expressed concern that some of its supporters have disappeared and are feared kidnapped.
An activist, Majeed Karar, who is well known for his opposition to the Taliban, posted photographs of a district governor and a young Afghan poet who he said had been abducted and killed in recent days. He said in a Twitter post that he was receiving messages from friends about more murders.
The Taliban have not confirmed the arrests and apparently, with the aim of avoiding international censorship, have blamed some violence on other people who claim to be Taliban.
On the day the Taliban captured three high-level commanders after a final pitched battle at Kandahar airport, the people of the city began to gather frantically at the city stadium, in anticipation of ‘a public execution.
The show, distinctive from the Taliban regime of the 1990s, did not happen.
So far there has been no mass retaliation across the country and the killings may be cases of individual revenge, Gossman said.
Human Rights Watch established that 44 people were taken from their homes and executed in July in the town of Spin Boldak, the main border crossing into Pakistan from southern Afghanistan. The killings were members of forces led by Abdul Raziq Achakzai, a CIA-trained anti-Taliban agent who was widely accused of human rights abuses.
Each of the 44 had received amnesty letters from the Taliban, Gossman said.
Amnesty International reported that nine men, mostly local police officers, were massacred by Taliban members in July in central Ghazni province. Six were shot dead and three were tortured before being killed, the defense group said.
Several former government officials have complained that even after cooperating with the Taliban to hand over their weapons and vehicles, the Taliban have continued to harass them.
Bismillah Taban, head of the Ghani-led Interior Ministry’s police criminal investigation unit, said his aide had handed over all the equipment and weapons he had to the Taliban the day after entering Kabul. .
But he said the Taliban were still looking for him.
“The Taliban arrested my former aide in Kabul, detained him for five hours, tortured him to force him to reveal my hiding place,” he said from an undisclosed location. “I do not believe his promise of general amnesty. They killed one of my colleagues after taking over the government. They will also kill me if they find me. ”