Those who consider the Taliban unsophisticated and backward fail to understand that the group has largely honed skills it found useful while operating as a terrorist organization, writes BWBailey85. 'Chief among those are violence and deception.'
On taking power in Afghanistan, the Taliban promised amnesty for Afghans who worked in the former government or with foreign forces. The promise was quickly broken, with both the United Nations and Human Rights Watch saying they possessed credible evidence of Taliban killings. While the Taliban continued denying these activities publicly, they released private guidance in October 2021, ordering their fighters to conduct further reprisal attacks in secret.
On or around Feb. 22, the Taliban quietly issued new guidance to its personnel banning all NATO and U.S. allies from leaving Afghanistan. The Taliban have not spoken of their latest order on official media or government channels, but when the guidance is weighed against their arrest of Afghans attempting to fly out of Mazar-e Sharif around January 26, it seems highly plausible.
The majority of these individuals are living in either Kabul, a city of more than 4,000,000, or Mazar-e-Sharif, a city of around 500,000, where they fled in hopes of evacuation in August 2021. Especially in Kabul, evacuation groups tell me that the Taliban are methodically conducting house-to-house searches each night to seek these individuals out.
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