KABUL, Afghanistan (AP) – The Taliban hoisted their flag at the Afghan royal court on Saturday, a spokesman said, as the US and the world turn 20 on September 11.
The white plaque, containing a verse from the Quran, was erected by Mullah Mohammad Hassan Akhund, the Taliban’s prime minister, at a lower ceremony, said Ahmadullah Muttaqi, head of the multimedia department at the Taliban’s cultural committee.
Raising the flag is a signal of the official start of a new government, he said. The structure of all men, all Taliban governments were announced earlier this week and was disappointed by foreign powers who hoped the Taliban had made an old promise to have a coalition.
In a tweet, Afghanistan’s first president following the fall of the Taliban in 2001, Hamid Karzai, called for “peace and security” and expressed hope that a new caretaker minister for women and non-Taliban would become “a coalition government that could be the real face of Afghanistan.” ”
He wrote the 20th anniversary of the 9/11 attacks in the United States and a meeting of tribal elders living on his fortified walls in Afghanistan where he remained with his family since the Taliban returned to Kabul in August.
Twenty years ago, the Taliban ruled Afghanistan with a heavy hand. Television was banned, and on September 11, 2001, the day of the massacre in the United States, the story spread from the radio in the dark streets of Afghanistan’s capital, Kabul.
The city had no electricity, and about one million people lived in Kabul at the time. It took a US-led deal just two months to drive the Taliban out of the country and by December 7, 2001, they were defeated, driven to their last city south of Kandahar, their spiritual homeland.
Twenty years later, the Taliban returned to Kabul. The United States has left, ending a ‘perpetual war’ two weeks before the 20th of 9/11 and two weeks after the Taliban returned to Afghanistan’s capital on August 15.
Things have changed since the beginning of the Taliban regime in the 1990’s.
This time, gunmen do not run through the city streets in their pursuits. Instead, they drive full-time cars over a city of over 5 million people. In the Taliban-occupied Kabul in the 1990’s, shopping malls were banned. Now Taliban fighters have just been cut off, though their beards do not conform to their beliefs.
But the Taliban have begun making radical changes that have had a profound effect on women, such as the ban on women’s sports. They have also used violence to restrict women who want equal rights in protests.
Inside the Karte Se high-end women’s shop on Saturday, Marzia Hamidi, a Taekwondo contestant aspiring to become a world champion, says the Taliban’s return has shattered her dreams.
She was one of the women the Taliban persecuted and called “Western agents” at some recent demonstrations. He also said he was not surprised by the removal of America.
“This year or next year, they have to leave at the end of the year,” he said. “They came because of their interest and set out to benefit from it.”
Hamidi hopes that the Taliban will change their mind and reduce their restrictions, but looking at the store’s manager, Faisal Naziri, he said “many Afghan men accept what the Taliban say about women and their anti-apartheid laws.”
The Nazirite shook his head, saying that maintaining women’s rights was not something that would bring Afghan men to the streets.
On Saturday, the Taliban resumed their women’s travels. This affects many women who are hidden from head to toe, hidden behind black veils. She filled the hall in the academic center at Kabul University in a well-trained building over the past 20 years for western women’s empowerment experiments.
Speakers read the statement in celebration of the Taliban’s victory in the West, which he calls anti-Islam. The women marched briefly outside the central area, throwing placards saying “women who have left do not represent us,” meaning thousands who fled for fear of violating the rights of women and the Taliban. “We don’t want chair education,” he read in one post.
Outside the hall, the head of higher education in the Taliban, Maulvi Mohammad Daoud Haqqani, said 9/11 was the day when “the world began to spread lies about us calling us terrorists and singing” about what was happening in the United States.
At a dusty bookstore in the Kabul area of Karte Sangi, Atta Zakiri, an independent journalist who claims that America made a mistake in invading Afghanistan after 9/11.
He also mentioned the uprising that followed the 9/11 uprising by creating another generation of Taliban warriors.
“The Taliban should be allowed to stay. Why didn’t we join them? Instead they went to war,” he said. “And now we are back to where we were 20 years ago.”