KABUL, Afghanistan (AP) – The Taliban raised the flag on Saturday over the Afghan presidential palace on Saturday, a spokesman said, as the United States and the world marked the twentieth anniversary of the 9/11 attacks.
Ahmadullah Muttaqi, head of the multimedia branch of the Taliban cultural commission, said the white banner, adorned with a Koranic verse, was hoisted by Mullah Mohammad Hassan Akhund, prime minister of the Taliban interim government, in a discreet ceremony.
The raising of flags marked the official start of the new government’s work, he said. The composition of the all-male and all-Taliban government was announced earlier this week and the international community received the disappointment that it hoped the Taliban would fulfill a previous promise of inclusive training.
Two decades ago, the Taliban ruled Afghanistan with a heavy hand. Television was banned, and on September 11, 2001, the day of the horrific attacks on the United States, news spread from the crackling radios through the darkened streets of the Afghan capital Kabul.
The city rarely had electricity and at that time barely a million people lived there. The US-led coalition took only two months to expel the Taliban from the capital and on December 7, 2001, they were defeated, expelled from their last location south of Kandahar, their spiritual center.
Twenty years later, the Taliban return to Kabul. The United States has left, ending its “war forever” two weeks before the twentieth anniversary of 9/11 and two weeks after the Taliban returned to the Afghan capital on August 15.
Some things have changed since the first period of Taliban rule in the 1990s.
This time, the armed fighters do not run through the streets of the city with their vans. Instead, they go through a chaotic and obstructed traffic in the city of more than 5 million. In Kabul, controlled by the Taliban, in the 1990s, hairdressing was banned. Now Taliban fighters are getting the latest haircuts, even if their beards don’t touch in line with their religious beliefs.
But the Taliban have begun posting harsh changes that have affected women the most, such as banning women’s sport. They have also used violence to prevent women demanding equal rights from protesting.
Inside a high-end women’s store in the city’s Karte Se neighborhood on Saturday, Marzia Hamidi, a Taekwondo competitor with ambitions of being a national champion, said the return of the Taliban shattered her dreams.
She was one of the women attacked by the Taliban and called “agents of the West” during one of the recent protests. He said he was not surprised by the withdrawal from the United States.
“This year or next year they had to finally leave,” he said. “They came in their own interest and left in their own interest.”
Hamidi hopes the Taliban will give in and ease their restrictions, but with a look at the store’s owner, Faisal Naziri, he said that “most men in Afghanistan agree with what the Taliban say about women and their rules against them “.
Naziri nodded, saying preserving women’s rights is not a cause for taking Afghan men to the streets.
On Saturday, the Taliban even organized a march of their own for women. Dozens of darkened women from head to toe, hidden behind layers of black veils, took part in it. They filled an auditorium at the Kabul University education center in a well-choreographed speech from the last twenty years of Western efforts to empower women.
Speakers read scripted speeches celebrating the Taliban’s victory over a West they accused of being anti-Islam. The women marched briefly outside the center’s grounds, waving banners that said “the women who left do not represent us,” referring to the thousands of people who fled for fear of Taliban repression against women’s rights. “We don’t want co-education,” another banner said.
Outside the lobby, Taliban Higher Education Director Maulvi Mohammad Daoud Haqqani said September 11 was the day “the world began its propaganda against us calling us terrorists and blaming us” for the attacks on United States.
At a dusty bookstore in Kabul’s Karte Sangi neighborhood, Atta Zakiri, a self-proclaimed civil society activist, said the United States was wrong to attack Afghanistan after 9/11.
He blamed the invasion that followed the 9/11 attacks for creating another generation of Taliban fighters.
“The Taliban should have been allowed to stay. Why didn’t we work with them? Instead, they went to fight,” he said. “And now we’re going back to where we were 20 years ago.”