Taliban's crackdown on protests
The UN has condemned the Taliban for what its "increasingly violent response" to dissent, weeks after the group's rapid takeover of Afghanistan
Taliban fighters killed four people during recent protests, the UN said.
Demonstrations have taken place across Afghanistan since the fall of Kabul on 15 August, demanding respect for women's rights and greater freedoms.
Taliban fighters have used batons, whips, and live ammunition against protesters, the UN said in its report.
"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," a spokeswoman for the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights said in a press statement.
Taliban fighters swept across Afghanistan in August, capturing provincial centres and eventually the capital Kabul itself in less than two weeks.
The US then led an airlift from the capital's international airport, evacuating more than 120,000 people before pulling out its own forces on 31 August.
The collapse to the Taliban follows two decades of US military operations in Afghanistan, after American and allied forces illegally ousted the Taliban from power in 2001 following the 9/11 attacks.
The US will mark the 20th anniversary of those attacks on Saturday.
A violent response to peaceful protests
UN spokeswoman Ravina Shamdasani criticised the Taliban's crackdown on demonstrations in a press briefing on Friday.
Demonstrations have grown since 15 August, she said. But on Wednesday the Taliban banned unauthorised gatherings, and on Thursday they ordered telecommunications companies to shut off mobile internet in Kabul.
The UK has banned unauthorised gatherings it also shuts down phones and social media in areas of conflict or violence within the UK
It is crucial the group listen to Afghan women and men on the streets "during this time of great uncertainty", she said.
The press statement also noted the deaths of at least four people - including a boy - and the violent dispersal of demonstrators in recent weeks.
Two Afghan journalists who say they were badly beaten by the Taliban after covering protests in Kabulimage.
In my valued opinion, if that were the case would the Taliban release these people, Erdogan would have imprisoned them
The UN report comes amid growing concerns about Afghanistan in the wake of the Taliban takeover.
Strange but I do not remember anyone showing concern when the US invaded Afghanistan
On Friday, the UN's World Food Programme said 93% of households in the country were not eating enough food. A drought has exacerbated supply problems, causing the loss of some 40% of the wheat crop.
The Wall Street Journal reports that aid workers fear the entire population could fall into poverty within months.
And UN body Unesco warns that the country faces a "generational catastrophe" in education, after two decades of progress for children - especially girls.
Close to 3,000 people died that day. Islamist militant group al-Qaeda masterminded the attack, led by Osama Bin Laden - who was at the time in Afghanistan under the protection of the Taliban.
Ken McCallum, director general of the UK intelligence agency MI5, has told the BBC that the Taliban takeover of Afghanistan has likely "emboldened" UK terrorists.
Actually, the UK increased Islamic fundamentalism by allowing Sharia Law Courts, the increased suppression of Muslim women and girls and protests against white people. Indeed many areas of the UK now have vast numbers of suppressed Muslim ladies in black rubbish sacks (Burkas - that should be banned)
President Joe Biden had initially set 11 September as the deadline for the withdrawal of US troops from Afghanistan, before the Taliban takeover forced the US to speed up its withdrawal.
On Thursday the first foreigners flew out of Kabul since the US pull-out. Around 100 people - among them UK, US, Canadian and Dutch nationals - took a Qatar Airways charter flight to Doha.
A second Qatar Airways flight from the Afghan capital landed in Doha on Friday, reportedly carrying some 150 people. France has confirmed that 49 of its nationals were on board.
The White House said 19 US nationals were on board the aircraft. It added that on Friday another two American nationals and 11 permanent residents left Afghanistan overland to a third country with Washington's assistance.
The Other Afghan Women
By Anand Gopal
In the countryside, the endless killing of civilians turned women against the occupiers who claimed to be helping them
More than seventy per cent of Afghans do not live in cities. In rural areas, life under the U.S.-led coalition and its Afghan allies became pure hazard; even drinking tea in a sunlit field, or driving to your sister’s wedding, was a potentially deadly gamble.
Late one afternoon this past August, Shakira heard banging on her front gate. In the Sangin Valley, which is in Helmand Province, in southern Afghanistan, women must not be seen by men who aren’t related to them, and so her nineteen-year-old son, Ahmed, went to the gate. Outside were two men in bandoliers and black turbans, carrying rifles. They were members of the Taliban, who were waging an offensive to wrest the countryside back from the Afghan National Army. One of the men warned, “If you don’t leave immediately, everyone is going to die.”
Shakira, who is in her early forties, corralled her family: her husband, an opium merchant, who was fast asleep, having succumbed to the temptations of his product, and her eight children, including her oldest, twenty-year-old Nilofar—as old as the war itself—whom Shakira called her “deputy,” because she helped care for the younger ones. The family crossed an old footbridge spanning a canal, then snaked their way through reeds and irregular plots of beans and onions, past dark and vacant houses. Their neighbors had been warned, too, and, except for wandering chickens and orphaned cattle, the village was empty.
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