The terror of taliban

[Valkie]

Taliban reign of terror begins

KABUL: In a sign that the “new” Taliban is going to be a lot like the old version, one of the first acts of the new Interior Ministry – under the command of Sirajuddin Haqqani, a wanted terrorist with a $US5m bounty on his head – was to beat up two reporters.

Their crime? Reporting on a protest by women in Kabul.

Neamat Naghdi, 28, and Taqi Daryabi, 22, were following a demonstration in the capital when Taliban fighters carrying automatic weapons and sticks began breaking up the gathering. The two were arrested on the spot and taken to a detention centre where they were beaten until they lost consciousness, Zaki Daryabi, editor-in-chief of the Etilaat Roz newspaper, said.

He shared photos on social media showing one of the men with red welts across his legs and back, the other with wounds on his shoulder and arm. Both had cuts and bruising on their faces.

The incident has raised fresh concerns about human rights and press freedoms under the new Taliban regime. Since breaking up the women’s protest, the Islamists have banned demonstrations that do not have official permission and outlawed slogans that have not been approved.

Daryabi said he and Naghdi were beaten for about ten minutes by several men. “They would raise sticks and beat us with all of their strength. After they beat us, they saw that we had passed out. They took us to lock us up in a cell with others,” he said.

His editor said the assault sent a chilling message to the Afghan press, which had flourished since the first Taliban regime was toppled in 2001. “Five colleagues were kept in a detention centre for more than four hours, and two of our colleagues were beaten and tortured brutally,” he said.

The birth of independent newspapers, broadcasters and radio stations, many funded from the West, was hailed as one of the great virtues of the US presence in Afghanistan, despite the years of conflict.

Defying the risks, the burgeoning local media provided job opportunities for a new generation of educated, young Afghans, with many women given the chance to work for the first time.

However, attacks on local media increased sharply after NATO forces ended combat operations in 2014, with the Taliban declaring journalists legitimate targets and dozens being singled out and killed.

After easily sweeping aside the Afghan army and seizing power, the group claimed it would respect press freedoms, insisting that reporters were free to work unmolested. But journalists across the country have denied this, pointing to incidents in which Taliban militants have entered studios to oversee broadcasts and supervise scripts.

Most media organisations have since shut down, with a few surviving only by replacing news reports with Islamic sermons and recitations from the Koran.

Meanwhile, about 200 people, including US, British and other foreign passport holders, left Kabul airport on a Qatar Airways plane, the first flight out of the capital since the US-led evacuation of more than 120,000 people ended on August 30.

About 30 US citizens were said to have been on board, as well as Dutch, Italian, Canadian, German and Ukrainian passengers.

The White House spoke in positive terms about how the Taliban handled the charter flight. “They have shown flexibility, and they have been businesslike and professional in our dealings with them in this effort,” National Security Council spokesperson Emily Horne added, stressing that efforts to facilitate such evacuations of Americans and Afghans who worked with the US mission would continue.

Republicans Mike Waltz and Senator Lindsey Graham, both fierce Republican critics of the withdrawal, welcomed the Qatari flight. But they added in a joint statement that “it was inexcusable that the Biden administration allowed a terrorist regime to dictate the terms of allowing Americans to leave on their own with their families”.

“The United States does not take orders from terrorists,” they said.

It came as Britain said it could deploy a new fleet of drones to conduct strikes in Afghanistan if the Taliban does not deal with the terrorist threat in the country.

The US plans to retain an “over-the-horizon” force of troops and bombers based in Qatar and the UAE.

[Valkie]

The 9/11 kingpin mocks America
GUANTANAMO BAY: As America prepares for the 20th anniversary of the September 11 attacks that killed nearly 3000 people, a grim shadow will lurk in the background – attack mastermind Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, who has yet to be tried and convicted for the heinous crime.

Mohammed, who boasted to interrogators of designing and managing the 9/11 plot, still sits in a high-security cell at the US naval base at Guantanamo Bay in Cuba.


He has been here for 15 years, as the attempt to hold him accountable in a US military court plods on in fits and starts, stuck on whether his being tortured by the CIA renders his boastful confessions inadmissable.

He remains, after the now-dead Osama bin Laden, the most reviled figure tied to the 9/11 terror attacks.

Ali Soufan, a former FBI agent who investigated the attacks, calls Mohammed (pictured) a “wildeyed killer” whose “demented” plotting set him apart from others in al-Qaeda.

Most people know him by the photograph taken of him when he was captured, his thick body clothed in a nightshirt, wearing a thick moustache and dishevelled hair.

Appearing in the Guantanamo military courtroom for the first time in over 18 months this week, Mohammed was thinner, with a long, greying red-dyed beard, wearing more traditional Pakistani dress.

He walked in easily, chatting with a fellow defendant in the death-penalty case, and knelt on a small carpet between the tables for prayers.

The official 9/11 Commission report and a Senate report about the CIA’s torture program describe the 56-year-old “KSM” as a capable and bloodthirsty lieutenant of bin Laden.

A Pakistani citizen, he was raised in Kuwait. He learned English well enough to study mechanical engineering at a US university.

By the time he graduated in 1986, he was already a Muslim hardliner. Working for the Qatar government in the early 1990s, Mohammed appears to have been inspired to action by a nephew, Ramzi Yousef, who undertook the bombing of New York’s World Trade Centre in 1993. After that, the two joined forces with a plan to blow up US-bound jetliners flying from the Philippines.

Yousef was arrested in Pakistan after the first attempt failed, while Mohammed lay low in Qatar before relocating to Pakistan in 1996 to evade capture. It was then that he first proposed the 9/11 attacks to bin Laden. “Highly educated and equally comfortable in a government office or a terrorist safehouse, KSM applied his imagination, technical aptitude, and managerial skills to hatching and planning an extraordinary array of terrorist schemes,” the 9/11 Commission report said.

After the attacks, Mohammed was captured in Rawalpindi, Pakistan in March 2003 and taken by the CIA to a black site for interrogation.

The Senate report described him as deeply resistant, frustrating interrogators with lies and fabrications. But following his transfer to Guantanamo in September 2006, he proudly confessed to the military court and compared himself to George Washington, fighting to escape oppression.

[sprintcyclist]

The free world has removed their financial support for Afghanistan. It is financially in free fall.
Within a year almost all in there will be in poverty.

Blame islam for this.

[Valkie]

The free world has removed their financial support for Afghanistan. It is financially in free fall.
Within a year almost all in there will be in poverty.

Blame islam for this.

There is nothing new in this,
They will simply beg for aid like all parasites.
And our stupid grubberment, after continual harping of the UN, will hand over millions.
Millions which will come back at us in bombs.

Nuke the joint
The muzzo nutcases deserve it
The muzzos shelas and children would be saved from enduring an existence of horror.

[Valkie]

UN demands Taliban allow protests
KABUL

Qatar security at airport.

Evacuees escape.

THE United Nations has slammed the Taliban for violently repressing protests by using whips, sticks and firing live ammunition.

UN High Commissioner for human rights Ravina Shamdasani said: “As Afghan women and men take to the streets during this time of great uncertainty in their country to press peacefully for their human rights to be respected, including women’s right to work, to freedom of movement, to education and political participation, it is crucial that those in power listen to their voices.

“We call on the Taliban to immediately cease the use of force towards, and the arbitrary detention of, those exercising their right to peaceful assembly and the journalists covering the protests.”

It follows reports of protesters being shot and beaten, as well as journalists covering these protests being arrested and tortured.

The Taliban did not reply.

Meanwhile, flights bringing Afghan refugees to the United States out of Kabul have been suspended after four cases of measles were detected among recent arrivals, a White House spokesman said.

[Black Orchid]

The UN is useless.

[Valkie]

The UN is useless.

The UN is populated by muzzo countries