The whole planet’s eyes are on us—on Kabul, freshly captured. But on Wednesday, August 18, a presaging of what may lie ahead for Afghanistan came from a town some 240 northwest of the capital city. The central highlands are a landscape carved with dramatic cliffs and caves, mysterious places that have now revealed the world’s oldest oil paintings. Here, back in March 2001, the Taliban had thrown down perhaps their most stunning challenge to history. Bamiyan: the very name suffices to bring up, with a shiver, memories of the giant 6th century Buddha statues being pulverised into nothing. Now, Abdul Ali Mazari was no Buddha. An advocate of federalism and equal representation, he was also party to the endless civil war that beset Afghanistan before and during the Taliban’s first arrival on the scene in the 1990s—till he was tortured and murdered in 1995. Ashraf Ghani, the deposed president who fled the country on Sunday, had called him ‘Martyr of National Unity’. But on Wednesday, the Taliban dealt Mazari a symbolic second death—blowing up his Grecian-style statue in Bamiyan.
There’s a mismatch between that act and how things were presented in Kabul, post-takeover. Just a day ago, Zabihullah Mujahid, the secretive Taliban spokesman who no one had ever seen, had come out in the open after 14 years and spoken calm, conciliatory words at a press conference. No revenge, no conflict, no internal enemies, no executions, no hounding of journalists, no oppression of women, he said. A day later, the Mazari statue came down. Now, Bamiyan is the heart of Hazarajat region; Mazari was a leader of the Hazaras, a persecuted ethnic minority who follow Shia Islam. This symbolic execution can only be an ominous sign—a sign that the words spoken by the Taliban representative may only have been part of an image-building exercise meant for the international community.
Urban Afghans don’t trust the Taliban either. The international community has left us alone...to fend for ourselves. Fear is palpable. It is everywhere, clinging to you. It is in people’s faces, in their nervous movements, whether in the neighbourhood street corners or the city’s crowded bazaars, in the drawing rooms of the well-to-do, or the slums where people are gathered in small clusters watching the news on their mobile phones.
In Kabul, the people are simply terrified at what tomorrow may bring. Videos are circulating of what the militiamen are doing in places they have captured. The thought in every urban Afghan’s mind for the last 10 days was: this could be my fate when they come into the city. Now that moment has arrived. Reports, pictures and videos of torture circulated everywhere, rumours of beheadings flooded every mind. It all seemed so savage and brutal and scary. Will the Taliban keep its word about preferring peace? No one knows.
Snapshots of life in Kabul and on its outskirts just before the Taliban took over, as seen through Roya Heydari’s lens
Still, after 20 years of a free society, it is traumatising to think of such a radical change in life. For many of us, a nightmare we had never even imagined. I am luckier than most others. I am alone in Kabul. My immediate family and close relatives are abroad. But I see the condition of my friends and colleagues who have wives, children, parents and extended family all living in the country. My female friends are especially mortified. They know well that their careers and their studies would be severely affected. None of us believe that the Taliban have changed—despite the fond hopes of some that this is not the Taliban of Mullah Omar. We don’t buy into the narrative that the times have changed, and that the times have in turn changed the Taliban. In Doha, the Taliban always sing a different tune to the international community. But on the ground in Afghanistan, they are a carbon copy of their past avatar.
No one had thought the government was so unprepared. When we spoke to officials and ministers, they had exuded confidence that the Afghan National Defence and Security Forces (ANDSF) were in a position to defend the cities. And citizens backed the government. In Herat, when the Taliban was initially repulsed, citizens came out to the streets and rooftops shouting Allahu Akbar. After the attack on the defence minister’s residence in Kabul, when the security forces and police destroyed the Taliban squad, there were again cries of Allahu Akbar across Kabul.
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