Taliban kill relative of journalist, hunt for opponents

Taliban fighters in Afghanistan shot dead a relative of a Deutsche Welle journalist on August 19 while hunting for him, the German public broadcaster said amid reports attributing to UN intelligence sources that the Islamist fighters were going house-to-house looking for opponents and their families.

Reports also said Taliban fighters visited closed Indian consulates in Kandahar and Herat on August 18 and took away parked cars. India operated four consulates in the country, besides the embassy in Kabul. Apart from Kandahar and Herat, India also had a consulate in Mazar-e-Sharif, which was shut down days before the Taliban took control.

The German public broadcaster said a second relative was seriously wounded, but others were able to escape. It did not reveal details of the incident. DW director general Peter Limbourg condemned the killing which, he said, showed the danger to media workers and their families in Afghanistan.

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“The killing of a close relative of one of our editors by the Taliban yesterday (August 18) is inconceivably tragic, and testifies to the acute danger in which all our employees and their families in Afghanistan find themselves,” he said.

These reports have ignited fresh fears about Afghanistan’s new rulers reneging on their pledges of tolerance.

After government forces’ tame surrender and taking over Kabul on Sunday to end two decades of war, the hardline Islamist movement’s leaders have repeatedly vowed a complete amnesty as part of a well-crafted PR blitz.

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Women have been assured of their rights under ‘sharia’ and that the Taliban will be “positively different” from their brutal 1996-2001 rule. The Taliban have been conducting “targeted door-to-door visits” of people who worked with the US and NATO forces, according to a confidential document by the UN’s threat assessment consultants seen by AFP.

The report, written by the Norwegian Center for Global Analyses, said militants were also screening people on the way to Kabul airport.

“They are targeting the families of those who refuse to give themselves in, and prosecuting and punishing their families according to Sharia law,” Christian Nellemann, the group’s executive director, said.

“We expect both individuals previously working with NATO/US forces and their allies, alongside their family members to be exposed to torture and executions,” said Nellemann.

The Taliban have denied such accusations in the past and have several times issued statements saying Taliban terrorists were barred from entering private homes.

They also insist women and journalists have nothing to fear under their new rule, although several media workers have reported being thrashed with sticks or whips when trying to record some of the chaos seen in Kabul in recent days.

During their first stint in power, women were excluded from public life and girls banned from school. People were stoned to death for adultery, while music and television were also banned.