Tag Archives: Afghanistan

Hundreds throng passport office in Afghan capital

By Gibran Naiyyar Peshimam and Jorge Silva

KABUL (Reuters) – Hundreds of Afghans flocked to the passport office in Kabul on Wednesday, just a day after news that it would re-open this week to issue the documents, while Taliban security men had to beat back some in the crowd in efforts to maintain order.

Taliban officials have said the service will resume from Saturday, after being suspended since their takeover and the fall of the previous government in August, which stranded many of those desperate to flee the country.

“I have come to get a passport but, as you can see here, there are lots of problems, the system is not working,” one applicant, Mahir Rasooli, told Reuters outside the office.

“There is no official to answer our questions here to tell us when to come. People are confused.”

A spokesman for the Taliban officials running the passport department did not immediately respond to requests for comment.

Poverty and hunger have worsened since the Islamist movement took over Afghanistan, which already suffered from drought and the COVID-19 pandemic.

Half a million people have been displaced in recent months, the United Nations says, and the number will only grow if health services, schools and the economy break down.

The hundreds who descended on the passport office came despite advice that distribution of passports would only begin on Saturday, and initially only for those who had already applied.

The crowd pressed against a large concrete barrier, trying to hand documents to an official who stood atop it, in a scene reminiscent of the chaos at Kabul airport in the last stages of evacuation after the withdrawal of U.S. troops.

The official urged them to return home and come back on Saturday.

“I am here to receive a passport, but unfortunately I couldn’t,” said a man in the crowd, Ahmad Shakib Sidiqi. “I don’t know what we should do in this condition.”

The bleak economic outlook drives their desire to leave, said Sidiqi and Rasooli.

“There is no job and the economic situation is not too good, so I want to have a good future for my kids,” said Rasooli.

Sidiqi said he wanted a passport to accompany a member of his family to neighboring Pakistan to seek medical treatment, but added they had no choice except to leave.

“We have to leave Afghanistan,” he said. “It is a bad situation in Afghanistan – no job, no work. It is not a good condition for us to live.”

The Taliban have said they welcome international aid, though many donors froze their assistance after they took power.

(Additional reporting by Islamabad newsroom; Editing by Clarence Fernandez)

Afghan girls stuck at home, waiting for Taliban plan to re-open schools

(Reuters) – As the weeks pass in Afghanistan, the new Taliban administration has yet to announce when it will re-open secondary schools for girls, leaving them stuck at home while their brothers return to class.

Two weeks since boys in classes above the sixth grade were told to go back to school, the government says it is working on making it possible for girls to do the same.

“My request to the Islamic Emirate is that girls be allowed to go to school,” said Marwa, a Kabul schoolgirl, using the term the Taliban use to describe their government. “Also (female) teachers should be allowed to go to school and teach girls.

“I dreamt of becoming a top doctor to serve my people, my country, and my family and work in the community, but now it’s not clear what my future will be,” she added.

The issue has become increasingly important as the rest of the world, whose aid money Afghanistan desperately needs, tries to gauge whether the new Taliban government will give women and girls greater freedoms than the last time it was in power.

“The Ministry of Education is working hard to provide the ground for the education of high school girls as soon as possible,” Taliban spokesman Zabihullah Mujahid told a news conference on Sept. 21.

The ministry put a statement on its Facebook page on Sept. 24 saying no decision had been reached on when girls would be able to go to school, but that work on the issue was continuing and information would be shared as soon as possible.

Girls’ education and literacy rates, while still relatively low by world standards and well below the rates for boys, have risen sharply since the last Taliban government was ousted by a U.S.-led campaign in the wake of the Sept. 11 attacks.

But increasingly, foreign officials and rights activists including U.N. human rights chief Michelle Bachelet and Nobel Peace Prize winner Malala Yousafzai have warned that one of the biggest social gains of the past 20 years may be under threat.

Facing a potentially catastrophic economic crisis that will require large amounts of foreign aid, the movement has tried to present a conciliatory face as it seeks to gain international recognition for its government.

Officials say they will not repeat the harsh rule of the previous Taliban government toppled in 2001, which banned most girls’ education and forbade women from going out in public without a male guardian.

They say all rights for women and girls will be guaranteed in accordance with Islamic law. But they have not said when and under what conditions girls’ schools will be allowed to re-open.

“If our Taliban brothers want their government to be stable and the international community to recognize it, according to sharia, they should allow girls to study,” said Shaima Samih, a 57 year-old math teacher from Kabul.

(Writing by James Mackenzie; Editing by Mike Collett-White)

About 100 U.S. citizens, permanent residents still waiting to leave Afghanistan -official

WASHINGTON (Reuters) -The United States is aware of about 100 American citizens and legal permanent residents (LPRs) who remain in Afghanistan and are ready to leave the country, a senior State Department official said on Monday.

The State Department was working to get those people on flights out of Afghanistan, said the official, who briefed reporters on condition of anonymity.

“Our highest priority in Afghanistan, of course, remains helping those American citizens who wish to leave the country now to do so,” the official said.

About 124,000 people were airlifted out of Kabul after the U.S.-backed government there collapsed last month and the Taliban took control.

Since U.S. forces departed and handed over the airport on Aug. 31, 85 American citizens and 79 LPRs have left Afghanistan on sporadic flights, according to the official.

However, some American citizens did not want to leave Afghanistan without family members who did not have the required travel documents to enter the United States, the official said.

The United States would soon intensify efforts to help the immediate family members of American citizens who did not have the needed documentation, the official said, but would not do so for their “extended” families, which could include a large number of people.

“I entirely understand how painful that choice may be for them, but for matters of law and policy, up to this point, we have not extended support for expedited departure and resettlement in the U.S. for extended family members of U.S. citizens,” the official said.

(Reporting by Simon Lewis, Humeyra Pamuk and Jonathan Landay; Editing by Bernadette Baum)

U.S. grants licenses for more aid flow to Afghanistan despite sanctions

By Daphne Psaledakis

UNITED NATIONS (Reuters) – The United States on Friday further paved the way for aid to flow to Afghanistan despite U.S. sanctions on the Taliban, who seized control of the country last month, issuing general licenses amid concern that Washington’s punitive measures could compound an unfolding humanitarian crisis.

The U.S. Treasury Department said it issued two general licenses, one allowing the U.S. government, NGOs and certain international organizations, including the United Nations, to engage in transactions with the Taliban or Haqqani Network – both under sanctions – that are necessary to provide humanitarian assistance.

The second license authorizes certain transactions related to the export and re-export of food, medicine and medical devices.

“Treasury is committed to facilitating the flow of humanitarian assistance to the people of Afghanistan and other activities that support their basic human needs,” Andrea Gacki, director of the U.S. Treasury’s Office of Foreign Assets Control, said in the statement.

She added that Washington will continue to work with financial institutions, NGOs and international organizations to ease the flow of agricultural goods, medicine and other resources while upholding sanctions on the Taliban, Haqqani Network and others.

The United Nations said that at the start of the year more than 18 million people – about half of Afghanistan’s population – require aid amid the second drought in four years.

U.N. Secretary-General Antonio Guterres said last week that Afghanistan is on “the verge of a dramatic humanitarian disaster” and has decided to engage the Taliban in order to help the country’s people.

U.S. President Joe Biden’s administration has said it is committed to allowing humanitarian work in Afghanistan to continue despite Washington listing the Taliban as a Specially Designated Global Terrorist group.

The sanctions freeze any U.S. assets of the Islamist militant group and bar Americans from dealing with them, including the contribution of funds, goods or services.

Reuters reported last month that Washington issued a license authorizing the U.S. government and its partners to continue to facilitate humanitarian aid in Afghanistan.

Friday’s move expands on that specific license, allowing international organizations and NGOs to pay taxes, fees, import duties or permits, licenses or other necessary transactions for assistance to reach the people of Afghanistan.

A Taliban offensive as foreign forces withdrew from Afghanistan after a 20-year war culminated in the capture of the capital Kabul on Aug. 15, two decades after they were driven from power by a U.S.-led campaign in the wake of the Sept. 11 attacks on the United States.

(Reporting by Daphne Psaledakis; Editing by Mary Milliken and Grant McCool)

U.S. fallout over Kabul drone strike grows with plans for multiple probes

By Patricia Zengerle

WASHINGTON (Reuters) – A senior U.S. Democrat said on Thursday that multiple congressional committees will investigate a drone strike that killed 10 Afghan civilians last month, to determine what went wrong and answer questions about future counterterrorism strategy.

“This is an issue that several committees are going to look at, and we’ve already started to do that,” Representative Adam Schiff, chairman of the House of Representatives Intelligence Committee, told reporters.

The U.S. military apologized on Friday for the Aug. 29 drone strike in Kabul that killed as many as 10 civilians, including seven children, calling it a “tragic mistake.”

The Pentagon had said the strike targeted an Islamic State suicide bomber who posed an imminent threat to U.S.-led troops as they completed their withdrawal from Afghanistan.

The intelligence failure raised hard questions about future risks, particularly whether the United States can keep track of threats from Afghanistan without a presence in the country.

“Particularly as we are going to be moving to an over-the-horizon strategy, we need to understand exactly what went wrong and what that means in terms of the limits of what we are able to do,” Schiff told a meeting with journalists sponsored by the Christian Science Monitor.

“Over-the-horizon” refers to counterterrorism efforts from outside Afghanistan, such as drone strikes from bases located 1,000 miles from their targets.

The confirmation of civilian deaths provided further fuel to critics of the chaotic U.S. withdrawal, which generated the biggest foreign policy crisis yet for President Joe Biden’s administration.

Many of Biden’s fellow Democrats, as well as Republicans, have criticized the conduct of the withdrawal. Congressional committees have scheduled hearings with top administration officials.

Schiff said he backed the withdrawal. “We can’t occupy everywhere,” he said. “Today there is a greater risk in other parts of the world than there is in Afghanistan.”

(Reporting by Patricia Zengerle; Editing by Daniel Wallis)

Islamic State uses Taliban’s own tactics to attack Afghanistan’s new rulers

By Alasdair Pal and Jibran Ahmed

(Reuters) – A little more than a month after toppling the Western-backed government in Kabul, Afghanistan’s new Taliban rulers are facing internal enemies who have adopted many of the tactics of urban warfare that marked their own successful guerrilla campaign.

A deadly attack on Kabul airport last month and a series of bomb blasts in the eastern city of Jalalabad, all claimed by the local affiliate of Islamic State, have underlined the threat to stability from violent militant groups who remain unreconciled to the Taliban.

While the movement’s spokesman Zabihullah Mujahid has downplayed the threat, saying this week that Islamic State had no effective presence in Afghanistan, commanders on the ground do not dismiss the threat so lightly.

Two members of the movement’s intelligence services who investigated some of the recent attacks in Jalalabad said the tactics showed the group remained a danger, even if it did not have enough fighters and resources to seize territory.

Using sticky bombs – magnetic bombs usually stuck to the underside of cars – the attacks targeted Taliban members in exactly the same way the Taliban itself used to hit officials and civil society figures to destabilize the former government.

“We are worried about these sticky bombs that once we used to apply to target our enemies in Kabul. We are concerned about our leadership as they could target them if not controlled them successfully,” said one of the Taliban intelligence officials.

Islamic State in Khorasan, the name taken from the ancient name for the region that includes modern Afghanistan, first emerged in late 2014 but has declined from its peak around 2018 following a series of heavy losses inflicted by both the Taliban and U.S. forces.

Taliban security forces in Nangarhar said they had killed three members of the movement on Wednesday night and the intelligence officials said the movement still retains the ability to cause trouble through small-scale attacks.

“Their main structure is broken and they are now divided in small groups to carry out attacks,” one of them said.

FUNDING DRIED UP

The Taliban have said repeatedly that they will not allow Afghanistan to be used as a base for attacks on other countries. But some Western analysts believe the return of the Islamist group to power has invigorated groups like ISIS-K and al Qaeda, which had made Afghanistan their base when the Taliban last ruled the country.

“In Afghanistan, the return of Taliban is a huge victory for the Islamists,” said Rohan Gunaratna, professor of security studies at Singapore’s Nanyang Technological University. “They have celebrated the return of the Taliban, so I think that Afghanistan is the new theatre.”

ISIS-K is believed to draw many of its fighters from the ranks of the Taliban or the Pakistani version of the Taliban, known as the TTP, but much of the way it operates remains little understood.

It has fought the Taliban over smuggling routes and other economic interests but it also supports a global Caliphate under Islamic law, in contrast with the Taliban which insists it has no interest in anywhere outside Afghanistan.

Most analysts, as well as the United Nations, peg ISIS-K’s strength at under 2,000 fighters, compared to as many as 100,000 at the Taliban’s disposal. The ranks of ISIS-K were swollen with prisoners released when Afghanistan’s jails were opened by the Taliban as they swept through the country.

According to a June report by the UN security council, ISIS-K’s financial and logistic ties to its parent organization in Syria have weakened, though it does retain some channels of communication.

“Funding support to the Khorasan branch from the core is believed to have effectively dried up,” the report said.

However, the report said signs of divisions within the Taliban, which have already started to emerge, could encourage more fighters to defect as the wartime insurgency tries to reshape itself into a peacetime administration.

“It remains active and dangerous, particularly if it is able, by positioning itself as the sole pure rejectionist group in Afghanistan, to recruit disaffected Taliban and other militants to swell its ranks,” the UN said.

(Reporting by Jibran Ahmed, Alasdair Pal and James Mackenzie; Editing by Raju Gopalakrishnan)

Taliban expand economic team as Afghan crisis deepens

(Reuters) – Afghanistan’s Taliban government bolstered its economic team on Tuesday, naming a commerce minister and two deputies as the group tries to revive a financial system in shock from the abrupt end to billions of dollars in foreign aid.

Nooruddin Azizi, a businessman from Panjshir province north of Kabul, was named as acting minister of commerce and industry and would start work immediately, Taliban spokesman Zabihullah Mujahid told a news conference.

Azizi joins the acting finance minister and minister for economic affairs, both of whom were announced previously, in a team facing a daunting task.

Exacerbated by a drought that threatens to leave millions of people hungry, the economic crisis is among the biggest challenges facing the Taliban 20 years after they were driven from power by a U.S.-led campaign in the wake of the Sept. 11 attacks.

“We are working day and night on this and on making sure that the economic issue is resolved as soon as possible,” Mujahid told reporters.

He did not give concrete proposals as to how this could be achieved, but did promise that government workers who have been unpaid since at least July would start receiving salaries soon.

Underlining the economic pressures building on Afghanistan’s new government, prices for staples like flour, fuel and rice have risen and long queues are still forming outside banks as they strictly ration withdrawals.

Some humanitarian aid has started to arrive and limited trade has returned across land borders with Pakistan, but a severe cash shortage is crippling day-to-day economic activity and decades of war have left much infrastructure in tatters.

Foreign aid payments, which accounted for 40% of Afghanistan’s gross domestic product, have all but stopped as the West considers how to deal with a group that, until August, led a deadly insurgency against the U.S.-backed government.

Amruddin, a former member of the provincial council in the northern city of Kunduz, said farmers caught up in the war during the harvest season and the dire state of some of the country’s roads meant much of the produce had gone to waste.

“Kunduz is known as the bread basket of Afghanistan, but the economic situation, especially the agriculture situation in Kunduz, is miserable,” he said. “Farmers could not get products like melon and grapes to Kabul due to all the problems.”

BUSINESS DOWN

In the cities, normally bustling commercial areas are unusually quiet, and impromptu markets have sprung up where people try to sell their household goods to raise cash.

Even before the Taliban seized Kabul on Aug. 15, 47% of the population lived in poverty, according to the Asian Development Bank, and a third survived on the equivalent of $1.90 a day.

While many people welcomed the end to 20 years of fighting between the Taliban and ousted Afghan forces supported by foreign troops, the economic crisis is causing the new government increasing concern.

Afghanistan’s central bank has been blocked from accessing more than $9 billion in foreign reserves held outside the country, and Mujahid said millions of dollars belonging to the state had disappeared before the Taliban entered the capital.

He said officials were making efforts to find out what happened to the missing cash that he said had been taken out of banks before the government of President Ashraf Ghani collapsed.

Banks are limiting withdrawals to $200 or 20,000 afghani a week for private citizens and many people say they cannot even access that. Potentially more serious in the longer term is the lack of work.

“Unfortunately, there are no job opportunities for us,” said one Kabul resident, who declined to give his name. He said he earned 1,000-1,500 afghani a day before the Taliban arrived but now had nothing.

(Writing by James Mackenzie)

World wary of Taliban government, Afghans urge action on rights and economy

(Reuters) – Foreign countries greeted the makeup of the new government in Afghanistan with caution and dismay on Wednesday after the Taliban appointed hardline veteran figures to top positions, including several with a U.S. bounty on their head.

Small protests persisted in Afghanistan, with dozens of women taking to the streets of Kabul to demand representation in the new administration and for their rights to be protected.

More broadly, people urged the new leaders to revive the Afghan economy, which is facing steep inflation, food shortages exacerbated by drought and the prospect of overseas investment disappearing as the outside world eyes the Taliban warily.

The Islamist militant movement swept to power nearly four weeks ago in a stunning victory hastened by the withdrawal of U.S. military support to Afghan government forces.

It has taken time to form a government, and although the posts are acting rather than final, the appointment of a cabinet of hardline veterans has been seen by other nations as a signal that the Taliban are not looking to broaden their base and present a more tolerant face to the world.

The group has promised to respect people’s rights and not seek vendettas, but it has been criticized for its heavy-handed response to protests and its part in a chaotic evacuation of tens of thousands of people from Kabul airport.

“The announcement of a transitional government without the participation of other groups and yesterday’s violence against demonstrators and journalists in Kabul are not signals that give cause for optimism,” German Foreign Minister Heiko Maas said.

The European Union voiced its disapproval at the appointments, announced late on Tuesday in Kabul, but said it was ready to continue humanitarian assistance. Longer term aid would depend on the Taliban upholding basic freedoms.

The U.S. State Department said it was concerned about the “affiliations and track records” of some of the people named by the Taliban to fill top posts.

“The world is watching closely,” a spokesperson said.

The new acting cabinet includes former detainees of the U.S. military prison at Guantanamo Bay, while the interior minister, Sirajuddin Haqqani, is wanted by the United States on terrorism charges and carries a reward of $10 million.

His uncle, with a bounty of $5 million, is the minister for refugees and repatriation.

The Taliban’s sudden victory, which took even its leadership by surprise, has presented the rest of the world with a dilemma.

They want to keep aid flowing and to help those with the appropriate paperwork who want to leave, but they may have to engage with a movement that, until a few weeks ago, was an insurgency blamed for thousands of civilian deaths.

MORE PROTESTS

The last time the Taliban ruled Afghanistan, from 1996 to 2001, women were banned from work and girls from school. The group carried out public executions and its religious police enforced a strict interpretation of Islamic law.

Taliban leaders have vowed to respect people’s rights, including those of women, in accordance with sharia, but those who have won greater freedoms over the last two decades are worried about losing them.

In Kabul, a group of women bearing signs reading “A cabinet without women is a failure” held another protest in the Pul-e Surkh area of the city. Larger demonstrations on Tuesday were broken up when Taliban gunmen fired warning shots into the air.

“The cabinet was announced and there were no women in the cabinet. And some journalists who came to cover the protest were all arrested and taken to the police station,” said a woman in a video shared on social media.

Zaki Daryabi, head of the daily newspaper Etilaatroz, said some of his reporters had been beaten while covering Tuesday’s protests, which came hours before the new government was revealed.

Taliban officials have said that protests would be allowed, but that they must be announced in advance and authorized.

For many Afghans, more pressing than the composition of the cabinet was the economic fallout of the chaos triggered by the Taliban’s conquest, including its impact on healthcare.

Shukrullah Khan, manager of a restaurant at Qargha Lake, a popular local resort near Kabul, said business had slumped to next to nothing.

“The business and bazaars compared to the previous government, has been decreased by 98%,” he said.

“The banks are closed, there’s no jobs, people no longer spend money. Where does the money come from so that people can have fun here?”

Aid flights have begun to arrive at Kabul airport, but many more will be needed over the coming months.

The president of the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) appealed to other humanitarian organizations to return to Afghanistan and for the World Bank to unlock funds to support the tottering healthcare system.

(Reporting by Reuters bureaus; Writing by Mike Collett-White; Editing by Angus MacSwan)

Analysis: The West owes Qatar a favor over Afghanistan. That was the point

By Alexander Cornwell

DUBAI (Reuters) – Since the U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan, the world’s top diplomats have been beating a path to Qatar, long the gateway to the Taliban and now the essential go-between as the West tries to deal with the new Kabul government. This is no accident.

Analysts describe Qatar’s emergence as a broker in Afghanistan as a part of a carefully nurtured strategy by the tiny but rich state to bolster its own security, by becoming indispensable as a venue for international mediation.

The world’s biggest liquefied natural gas producer, the small desert peninsula country is one of the wealthiest nations per capita. It is home to barely 3 million people, 85 percent of them foreigners with guest worker visas. Yet it has long held outsized ambitions, hosting both the Middle East’s biggest U.S. air base and its most influential TV channel.

It squandered much of its regional clout over the past decade by overreaching in the wake of the 2011 Arab Spring revolts, when it backed pro-democracy movements and rebels across the region. Furious neighbors led by Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates, with their ally Egypt, punished it with trade sanctions and diplomatic isolation.

Now, Qatar is back. Its dispute with the Arab powers was finally resolved this year, and next year it will host the soccer world cup. But few moves appear to have paid quite as large a diplomatic dividend as its role over Afghanistan, cultivated since it let the Taliban open the group’s main international office in 2013 and provided the venue for peace talks that led to last year’s U.S. agreement to withdraw.

That “patient diplomatic facilitation” was a classic means for a small state to elevate its international relevance, said Kristin Diwan, senior resident scholar at the Arab Gulf States Institute in Washington.

“Given its population size, substantial military projection is a tough proposition. But Qatar can bring real value through the relationships it maintains, especially across both Western and Islamic parties – and especially those the U.S. is loath to approach directly.”

In the weeks since the militants swept into power, more than 58,000 of the 124,000 Western citizens and at-risk Afghans who were airlifted out of Afghanistan flew through Qatar.

And now, as temporary home to the evacuated Afghanistan embassies of the United States and several European allies, it is serving as the main mediator for Western efforts to engage.

STEPPING UP

“As we carry forward, our diplomacy here, we know that Qatar will be our partner, because this is not the first time that Qatar has stepped up to help in Afghanistan,” said U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken, who visited this week with Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin.

A Qatari official said that as an impartial mediator, Qatar has engaged with all sides to provide freedom of movement for those in Afghanistan, and “fight terrorism to prevent any future instability in the region.”

Working with its close ally Turkey, it has helped the Taliban reopen Kabul airport, allowing humanitarian and domestic flights to resume.

During Afghanistan’s hasty evacuation, Qatari diplomats on the ground in Kabul helped escort fleeing Afghans through checkpoints to the airport.

As a small state surrounded by better-armed rivals that would no doubt covet its gas fields, Qatar has long felt the need to protect itself with ambitious diplomacy. Four years ago, it found itself in peril when Saudi Arabia, the UAE, Egypt and their allies, with the apparent tacit approval of the Trump administration, imposed trade bans and diplomatic isolation.

The neighbors accused Qatar of backing Sunni Muslim Islamist groups across the region while simultaneously growing too cozy with Shi’ite Iran. Some in the region wondered whether Saudi Arabia and its allies might even invade, although Riyadh denied harboring any such plan.

Qatar, shielded from the economic impact by its $300 billion sovereign wealth fund, denied wronging its neighbors and held out until the dispute was resolved this January. But the feud underscored the need for it to cultivate powerful friends.

Being useful to the West can help, said James Dorsey, a senior fellow at Singapore’s S. Rajaratnam School of International Studies.

“It’s much an issue about influence as it is an issue about being relevant to the international community in ways in which the international community – if you are under threat – will step in for you.”

(Reporting by Alexander Cornwell, additional reporting by Humeyra Pamuk in Doha; Editing by Aziz El Yaakoubi and Peter Graff)

Haibatullah Akhundzada: Shadowy Taliban supreme leader whose son was suicide bomber

(Reuters) – In one of the only known photographs of Taliban supreme leader Haibatullah Akhundzada, he stares directly at the camera – an expressionless face between a white turban and a long, grey beard.

As the Islamist movement unveiled its new government on Tuesday after it swept to power as U.S.-led forces withdrew last month, the mysterious Akhundzada retained the role of supreme leader, the ultimate authority over the group’s political, religious, and military affairs he has held since 2016.

“We will rebuild our war-torn country,” Akhundzada said in a written statement released by the Taliban after Tuesday’s appointments, his first comments since the group retook Afghanistan.

Akhundzada said the Taliban were committed to all international laws, treaties and commitments not in conflict with Islamic law, which would henceforth regulate all governance in Afghanistan.

A hardline cleric whose son was a suicide bomber, Akhundzada has spent most of his leadership in the shadows, letting others take the lead in negotiations that ultimately saw the United States and their allies leave Afghanistan after 20 years of grinding counter-insurgency war.

Even basic details such as his age are hard to verify. He is thought to be around 60.

Yet some analysts who have studied the Taliban say he was a guiding hand, healing divisions within the movement and managing the handling over international allies and foes ahead of military victory.

“Through guile, through deception, through manipulation and through patience, he was able to bring the Taliban back to power,” said Rohan Gunaratna, professor of security studies at Singapore’s Nanyang Technological University.

Others, however, say he is more of a figurehead, picked as a compromise candidate during a time of flux in the movement, while the real power is held by the Taliban’s military factions.

“There is very little information available about him. You don’t see him saying anything in person in public. And combined with the circumstances of his appointment, that feeds into the placeholder argument,” said Rajeshwari Krishnamurthy, a South Asia security expert at the Institute Of Peace & Conflict Studies, a think tank in New Delhi.

A LOT OF FORCE

Born into a strict religious family in Afghanistan’s second largest city Kandahar, Akhundzada was an early member of the Taliban – a movement that emerged in the surrounding southern province of Helmand from the ashes of the Afghan civil war.

When the Taliban ruled between 1996-2001 with a strict interpretation of sharia law that banned women from working and imposed punishments such as stonings, Akhundzada served as the chief of its justice system, according to the United Nations.

In the wake of the U.S. invasion of Afghanistan and ouster of the Taliban after the Sept. 11 attacks, Reuters exclusively reported that Akhundzada fled to Pakistan where he taught and preached at a mosque for 15 years.

Colleagues and students at that mosque described Akhundzada as a studious disciplinarian and a fierce orator.

“He spoke with a lot of force about the U.S. and the war and that we would not give up our jihad,” one former pupil said, recalling a speech he gave at a public rally in Quetta in 2014.

Akhundzada was not the obvious selection when senior members of the Taliban met in 2016 to appoint a new head after the death of leader Mullah Akhtar Mansoor in a U.S. drone strike.

While Akhundzada hailed from the large and powerful Noorzai tribe, his stock within the regime was seen as more scholarly than soldierly, unlike previous leaders.

But he was a compromise between the young and inexperienced son of late Taliban founder Mullah Mohammad Omar, and Sirajuddin Haqqani, who was wanted by the U.S. in connection with a deadly 2008 attack on a Kabul hotel, sources told Reuters at the time.

Al Qaeda leader Ayman al-Zawahri pledged allegiance to Akhundzada in an online audio message soon after the Taliban leader took over, Reuters has reported.

Unlike other Taliban leaders, Akhundzada is not on the U.N. sanctions list. However, his son Abdur Rahman died in carrying out a suicide bombing at an Afghan military base in Helmand in July 2017, according to a spokesman for the Taliban.

Early in his leadership, Akhundzada instituted reforms that consolidated his influence over an insurgency weakened by division and defection.

But he kept a low public profile. The only photo Reuters has been able to verify of him was an undated image posted on a Taliban Twitter feed in May 2016. It was identified separately by several Taliban officials, who declined be named.

This shadowy existence has led to constant speculation about his whereabouts and health. So secretive are the Taliban about their leaders that the death of the movement’s founder Mullah Omar in 2013 was only confirmed two years later by his son.

(Reporting by John Geddie; Editing by Raju Gopalakrishnan and Mark Heinrich)