By C. Douglas Golden, The Western Journal
Published August 22, 2021 at 2:48pm
Remember Muhammad Saeed al-Sahhaf?
You might recall him better by his media-bestowed moniker, “Baghdad Bob.” He was Saddam Hussein’s information minister during the 2003 U.S. invasion of Iraq, legendary for saying patently untrue things any journalist with eyes could debunk in 30 seconds.
Most infamously, as NBC News noted, he told reporters American soldiers “are going to surrender or be burned in their tanks. They will surrender, it is they who will surrender.” That was one day before the fall of Baghdad.
Zabihullah Mujahid is the same kind of pathetic fabulist, except his side just won.
Mujahid is the longtime spokesman for the Taliban. On Tuesday, according to The Associated Press, he gave his first news conference since the Islamic insurgency took over the country and tried to reassure the West that this was Taliban 2.0. They’d learned from their excesses and had curbed them.
During the news conference, Mujahid promised to honor women’s rights, so long as they fit within Islamic law. (The AP noted that he moved on from this point “without elaborating.”)
“Mujahid reiterated that the Taliban have offered full amnesty to Afghans who worked for the U.S. and the Western-backed government, saying ‘nobody will go to their doors to ask why they helped.’ He said private media should ‘remain independent’ but that journalists ‘should not work against national values,’” the AP reported Wednesday.
One might be tempted to give Mujahid a diminutive like “Kabul Kyle” or “Afghani Al,” except it’s not funny this time.
While he promises to offer full amnesty to allies of the former government, the United States or its NATO allies, there are numerous credible reports of roving death squads roving the country, going door-to-door finding anyone who dared help us. And, while they’re promising the West they’ll honor women’s rights, a former Afghan judge has reported a woman being “put on fire” because she didn’t cook well to suit Taliban fighters.
A confidential U.N. document obtained by Axios reported the Taliban was “intensifying the hunt-down” for those who worked with the former government or any of its allies. Furthermore, the Saturday report stated, Afghanistan’s new rulers are conducting “targeted door-to-door visits” and the families of “target individuals” have been threatened or arrested.
The document was authored by the Norwegian Center for Global Analyses, a U.N. intelligence assessment provider. According to the group’s analysis, this crackdown on its former opponents was planned before the insurgents took over the country.
“The Taliban have been conducting advance mapping of individuals prior to the take-over of all major cities,” states the document, dated Wednesday.
“There are priority lists of individuals and unit affiliations to be arrested including intelligence service, SOF [special operations forces] units, police and armed forces.”
It also included a letter sent to a Taliban target who’d worked with both the United States and the United Kingdom, ordering the individual to report to the “Military and Intelligence Commission of Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan.”
“If you do not report to the Commission, your family members will be arrested instead, and you are responsible for this,” the letter read.
As for journalists, German state broadcaster Deutsche Welle reported the Taliban had raided the homes of at least three of its journalists. A relative of one of the employees was shot dead. Another member of his family was seriously injured. The Deutsche Welle journalist is now working in Germany.
“The killing of a close relative of one of our editors by the Taliban yesterday is inconceivably tragic, and testifies to the acute danger in which all our employees and their families in Afghanistan find themselves,” Deutsche Welle Director General Peter Limbourg said, according to Axios.
“It is evident that the Taliban are already carrying out organized searches for journalists, both in Kabul and in the provinces. We are running out of time!”
Things look no better on the women’s rights front. Former Afghan judge Najla Ayoubi, a woman’s rights activist, told Britain’s Sky News that a young woman in northern Afghanistan was “put on fire” by the insurgents earlier this week. Her crime? She was “was accused of bad cooking for Taliban fighters.”
The report is vague. Ayoubi, who lives in exile in the United States, according to the New York Post, did not actually say the woman died, but given the Taliban’s brutal history and customary treatment of women, it’s easy to assume the worst.