Taliban hunting for ‘collaborators’ in major cities, threat assessment prepared for United Nations warns
(WaPo)
The Taliban has stepped up its hunt for former Afghan security officials and people who may have worked with U.S. or NATO forces, according to a confidential threat assessment prepared for the United Nations and seen by The Washington Post.
The militants are going house to house, setting up checkpoints and threatening to arrest or kill relatives of “collaborators” in major cities, the Wednesday assessment said.
At particular risk are people who were in central positions in military, police and investigative units, according to the analysis, despite a Taliban pledge this week to grant amnesty to former officials.
Separately, a German broadcaster said Taliban fighters killed a relative of one of its journalists — an ominous signal that the Taliban was not following through on pledges to avoid retribution and to respect the media.
The fighters are using the West’s focus on evacuating foreign nationals to “search unrestrained for Afghan targets inside the cities,” the Norwegian Center for Global Analyses document said.
At the same time, the group is screening for individuals outside the Kabul airport, where thousands of Afghans have gathered in recent days in the hopes of fleeing the country.
The Taliban has “established vehicle check points on all major roads and around major cities,” including Kabul and Jalalabad, the assessment said.
It also warned of a “worst case” scenario in which the militants close down Kabul and other cities to conduct mass arrests and public executions.
The relative of the journalist was killed by Taliban fighters going house to house in western Afghanistan to hunt for the reporter, according to Deutsche Welle. The journalist now works in Germany. Other family members were able to flee from the fighters.
… DW’s director general, Peter Limburg, said “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!”
The militants have also raided the homes of at least three of the organization’s journalists, DW reported. Two men also shot and killed a translator who frequently contributed to the German newspaper Die Zeit, according to DW.
“We learn again from Afghanistan that although America can stop bad things from happening abroad, it cannot make good things happen. That has to come from within a country”--Michael Mandelbaum, “Mission Failure: America and the World in the Post-Cold War Era.”
Folks, these are our allies. They are effectively us. This is a bad thing and we have the ability to make this bad thing not happen. The Taliban is a bad thing. We have to stop them.
We have to have the courage to change course when the course changes. We have to have the intellectual honesty to admit when we are wrong. We've got to send U.S. troops back in. Our mission now has to be to stop this and to do that we must obliterate the Taliban. We are, once again, going to have to go street by street in Kabul and the other cities and rout the Taliban, shooting them on site. We should seal the country's borders and once we have them out of the cities and back in the mountains pound them with MOAB's and tactical nuclear weapons. Then get out. We cannot remake Afghanistan. Afghanistan must be destroyed.
