In the final days before Afghanistan’s second-largest city fell to the Taliban, residents worried about the incoming “terrorists” and the country’s cycles of brutality
08/18/2021 04:30 AM EDTShelly Kittleson is a journalist who has reported on the ground from Central Asia and the Middle East for the past decade, including from Afghanistan, Iraq and Syria.In the days before the Taliban seized the city, the insurgents’ white flags appeared ominously on a hill overlooking a prison that held hundreds of Taliban fighters as well as common criminals. Cell phone service would stop around 6 p.m., when the nightly fighting resumed, and start again around 6 a.m.
It would be several days before the Taliban finally did enter central Kandahar — a prime target, as the southern city was the birthplace of Mullah Omar and the former capital of the Taliban regime before the 9/11 attacks and the subsequent U.S. invasion. And it also signals that the cycles of revenge that have long plagued this country, which has seen successive civil wars and regimes for decade after decade, might be about to resume if the Taliban seeks to settle scores in the wake of their victory.
“If Raziq had been here, the Taliban would not have dared to get this close to Kandahar” was a common refrain I heard from city inhabitants ranging from drivers to an adviser to the governor. As part of a 2020 agreement between the U.S. and the Taliban that the Afghan government was against but was pressured into accepting, 5,000 Taliban prisoners were released. That move was felt by many here as a betrayal of the Afghan forces who had lost comrades in arms capturing those very men. Many of those released went back to fighting.
“He didn’t torture innocent people,” Pashtoon stressed, adding: “Whatever he did, we are proud of him.” Rumors that some U.S. forces were back at the city’s airport were discussed with hope by residents who, though not particularly fond of the U.S. in general, saw it as the only way to prevent being thrust back under the yoke of a regime they were even less fond of.
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