[note: hyperlinks found at linked website article]

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Taliban beheaded female volleyball player, posted photos online, coach says

By Lee Brown
October 21, 2021 9:20am Updated

An Afghan volleyball player on the girls’ national team was beheaded by the Taliban — with gruesome photos of her severed head posted on social media, according to her coach.

Mahjabin Hakimi, one of the best players in the Kabul Municipality Volleyball Club, was slaughtered in the capital city of Kabul as troops searched for female sports players, her coach told the Persian Independent.




Two members of Mahjabin Hakimi managed to flee the country while the rest of the team and her family were threatened into silence about Mahjabin Hakimi’s death.

She was killed earlier this month, but her death remained mostly hidden because her family had been threatened not to talk, claimed the coach, using a pseudonym, Suraya Afzali, due to safety fears.

Images of Hakimi’s severed neck were published on Afghan social media, according to the paper, which did not say how old she was.

Mahjabin Hakimi was slaughtered in Kabul as Taliban troops searched for female sports players.

Conflicting reports online suggested that happened earlier, with an apparent death certificate suggesting she was killed Aug. 13 — the final days of the Taliban’s insurgency before seizing Kabul.

However, the Payk Investigative Journalism Center said its sources also confirmed that Hakimi “was ‘beheaded’ by the Taliban in Kabul.” The governing group has yet to comment, Payk Media said.

Afzali told the Persian Independent that she was speaking out to highlight the risk that female sports players face, with only two of the women’s national volleyball team having managed to flee the country.

“All the players of the volleyball team and the rest of the women athletes are in a bad situation and in despair and fear,” she told the paper. “Everyone has been forced to flee and live in unknown places.”

One of the players who escaped, Zahra Fayazi, told the BBC last month that at least one of the players had been killed.

“We don’t want this to repeat for our other players,” she told the broadcaster from her new home in the UK.

“Many of our players who are from provinces were threatened many times by their relatives who are Taliban and Taliban followers.




Many women face persecution from the Taliban due to the fact the extremist group believes that women should be subservient to men and not be allowed any rights.

PA Images/Sipa USA


Taliban members stop women protesting for women’s rights in Kabul. The Taliban allegedly beat several journalists for attempting to cover the protest.

BULENT KILIC/AFP via Getty Images

“The Taliban asked our players’ families to not allow their girls to do sport, otherwise they will be faced with unexpected violence,” Fayazi said.

“They even burned their sports equipment to save themselves and their families. They didn’t want them to keep anything related to sport. They are scared,” she said.


Afghan women chant slogans and hold placards during a women’s rights protest in Kabul on Oct. 21, 2021.

BULENT KILIC/AFP via Getty Images


A Taliban soldier holds his gun as he stands amid the protesters during the protest in Kabul, Afghanistan.

WANA (West Asia News Agency) via REUTERS

Another teammate who escaped told the BBC everyone was “shocked” when they heard that one of their team had been killed.

“I’m sure it was the Taliban,” said Sophia, a pseudonym to protect her family members still in Afghanistan. “Maybe we will lose other friends,” she said.

Well - one thing is for certain. There won't be any able-bodied men to defend those women - most of them are here in the US.

I am sure the squad will be speaking out against the atrocity any time now…..

What the hell are the knee pads and elbow pads for? Is this guy going skating to decompress after a long afternoon of repressing women?

We left them behind so the Tali figures they must be good for something. Impressive camo coordination there as well.

quote:

Originally posted by Graniteguy:
Well - one thing is for certain. There won't be any able-bodied men to defend those women - most of them are here in the US.

They never did before, why would they do it now?

quote:

Originally posted by r0gue:
What the hell are the knee pads and elbow pads for? Is this guy going skating to decompress after a long afternoon of repressing women?

Accessories, gotta have them, its ties any outfit together.

quote:

Originally posted by r0gue:
What the hell are the knee pads and elbow pads for?

Maybe he remembers his Stokely Carmichael, "The proper position for women in the revolution is prone."

quote:

Originally posted by Sig2340:
Price said that so far the State Department had facilitated the departure of 234 citizens and 144 lawful permanent residents. On Tuesday, Kahl said that number was 240 American citizens and 157 lawful permanent residents, but that those numbers climb to 314 and 266, respectively, when taking into account those who got out via alternative means like private charters and not through the U.S. government.

The point was made earlier in this thread, but still remains all these weeks later, after reading these latest numbers; where are all the interviews with those who have been rescued or escaped on their own? I understand that the Dominant Liberal Establishment Mass Media (DLEMM, stolen from a Conservative radio personality), but there are still multiple news outlets with a track record of accuracy and truth in reporting, so why aren't we hearing their stories?

Are there intelligence or security concerns that would keep these people from sharing their stories? Concerns about who is helping to get them out, or perhaps who they are leaving behind?

I gotta believe they've seen or know things that would give us a better picture of what happened and is happening in Afghanistan.

ChuckFinley originally posted this article in his thread, but I believe it has a place in this thread as well.

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Daughters for sale: Afghans are growing desperate

From magazine issue: 27 November 2021


Shukria Abdul Wahid has nine children, two boys and seven girls. All they had to eat yesterday, she says, were two small pieces of stale flatbread — for the whole family. She and her husband went without. They couldn’t even have tea to quieten their own hunger pangs. The gas bottle used to boil water ran out long ago and there is no money for another one. She tells me it is unbearable having to say ‘no’ to her children all day when she doesn’t have a scrap of food to give them. ‘They are very little. They do not understand the situation, they do not know what’s happening in Afghanistan,’ she says. ‘So they just keep begging — “Give us something to eat. We are hungry” — and they won’t stop crying.’

An aid worker for an Islamic charity found Shukria for me in the Afghan capital, Kabul. He translated as she spoke into his phone and he sent me photographs. She is dressed in a blue burka and sits on a small rectangle of carpet on a bare concrete floor. Her children squeeze on to the carpet around her and look up at the camera, wide-eyed. The room is tiny — perhaps once a storeroom — and there’s no glass in the windows to keep out the bitter cold of a Kabul winter. They don’t have so much as a blanket for the children, she says. That’s because they had to flee their home in the province of Baghlan when the Taliban swept in. Her husband was a soldier and they were afraid he would be killed. The family could not find food in Baghlan and hunger drove them into Kabul. But Kabul is the same. Her husband goes to the bazaar every day to find work. Most days, he comes home empty-handed and they don’t eat.

The UN, aid agencies and human rights groups are warning that Afghanistan is on the brink of famine. Millions of Afghans are already in what the UN calls a ‘food emergency’. They are not starving yet, but a few more missed meals may bring them close to that. For people like Shukria, this means making awful choices to survive. She is terrified of losing a child to hunger (or cold) this winter and so she tells me that only the day before, with nothing left in the house, she came to a decision. ‘We hope from Allah that our lives will be better in the future. But everything is so difficult. It just seems impossible. I told my husband we had to do something. I said we had to sell one of our daughters — to get food for the other children, to stop their hunger, to save everyone.’

The goat trader will take the baby away as soon as she can walk and she will work in his house until marriage

She was talking about selling her daughter into an early arranged marriage. There have been many reports about Afghan families being forced to do this, their daughters given away to whoever can pay. I asked an Afghan journalist in Herat, in the far west of the country, if this was widespread, or just a few stories in the international media. He drove out to a village named Shahrak-e-Sabz, which is known, even in Afghanistan, for its poverty. The place is a collection of mud-brick homes in the midst of a stony desert, a mountain looming in the background. As soon as he arrived — smartly dressed, driving a car, having come from the city — he was surrounded by a crowd who thought he had come to buy a child. Men and women called out to him to come with them so they could sell him one of their daughters. It didn’t take him long before he found a couple who had already done this terrible thing.

Jan Muhammad and his wife Shareen Gull are both in their early twenties. The journalist from Herat sends me a picture of them sitting against the mud wall of their house. He gives them my questions and translates their answers.

As the exchanges takes place, they proudly show off a chubby-faced little girl of seven months named Rahilla. She is their first child, yet they have sold her. They try to explain why. Jan Muhammad works as a labourer and if he’s lucky, and someone takes him on, he gets between 50 and 100 Afghanis a day, between 50 cents and $1. But those days are rare and he usually ends up scavenging for dry bits of bread in Herat. He brings these home and Shareen Gull adds water to make a paste for them to eat. ‘If he finds work, he brings some soft bread [from the bakery],’ she says, ‘but we haven’t had that in months.’

They could have gone on living like this for a long time, but in August there was a disaster. Jan Muhammed’s brother was arrested and taken to the central jail in Kabul. The family had to pay a bribe to get him out: 70,000 Afghanis, about $750. The timing was terrible. These were the last days of the Afghan government. If only they had waited a few more weeks, they tell me bitterly — the Taliban freed all the prisoners anyway. But they went deep into debt to pay the bribe and there was no money left over for food. Shareen Gull says: ‘I didn’t eat for a week because of that. We were in despair.’

But then other families told them how to arrange the sale of a daughter and, at four months old, Rahilla was bought by a wealthy goat trader, a man in his fifties. This man promised that the little girl would eventually marry one of his sons, not him, but if he’s lying about that, there is really nothing her parents can do. The goat trader will take her away as soon as she can walk and she will work in his house as a servant until marriage. The down payment for Rahilla has cleared Jan Muhammed’s and Shareen Gull’s debts and they will get another 10,000 Afghanis — a little more than $100 — when the man comes to collect her. Her mother tells me: ‘If he pays us the rest of the money, we can survive. If he doesn’t come back for her, we will have nothing to live on.’ Both parents dream of somehow getting enough money to buy their daughter back one day. ‘We want to free our small girl,’ says Jan Muhammed. There seems no real chance of that.

The selling of daughters used to be rare in Afghanistan, but it is happening much more because of the country’s desperate situation. The UN calls it the worst humanitarian disaster in the world today. Food is short because of a drought over the summer — the most extreme in 20 years — and because fighting stopped the harvest in many places. What’s more important is the fact that three-quarters of all government spending and 43 per cent of the country’s income overall used to come from foreign aid. That’s all gone now with the Taliban in charge. It didn’t help that the American-backed government appears to have fled with much of the money in the country’s central bank. The Taliban are broke.

Afghanistan’s new leaders want the billions of dollars that belonged to the old government, which sit frozen in American banks. It seems unlikely that the Biden administration will give it to them. Only last month, a senior US official warned that al Qaeda were once again thriving under the Taliban. They had the ‘intention’ to attack the American homeland and would soon have the ‘capability’ as well, he said. An Afghan friend tells me it would be a mistake to give this money direct to the Taliban because ‘they will only steal it’. He is now a refugee in Pakistan and shares with me WhatsApp messages from people who haven’t been able to escape. There are stories of killings and kidnapping, arrests and beatings — and all this while the Taliban are trying to impress the world that they have changed. ‘If the world helps them out now, they will regret it,’ he says. But this is exactly the dilemma facing the international community: whether to trust that the Taliban have changed or watch as millions of people go hungry.


WRITTEN BY
Paul Wood

[Note: embedded FOX News video of Afghan musician who escaped and hyperlinks at linked website article.]

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Taliban accused of using trickery to locate ex-security force members to kill them

By Edmund DeMarche | Fox News

The Taliban made overtures to the international community that they would take a more pragmatic, moderate approach to governing

Taliban forces have killed or disappeared more than 100 former security force members by directing them to register to receive papers supposedly ensuring their safety, but in actuality serves as their death warrant, according to a newly released report by Human Rights Watch.

HRW based its report on interviews with Afghans from four provinces across the country. The organization said it interviewed 40 individuals in person and nearly 30 by telephone. The report blamed the Taliban for failing to keep their end of the bargain when they said these individuals would not be harmed.

"The Taliban leadership’s promised amnesty has not stopped local commanders from summarily executing or disappearing former Afghan security force members," Patricia Gossman, the associate Asia director at HRW said, according to a statement. "The burden is on the Taliban to prevent further killings, hold those responsible to account, and compensate victims’ families."

The 25-page report paints a grim picture of life under Taliban rule. These former security officials tricked into signing these false protection papers are often detained within days after registering. Their bodies are often collected by either family members or by people in their communities. Those who disappear are often taken during nighttime raids, the report, citing a civil society activist in Helmand, said. Families are not allowed to ask about their locations.

A Taliban spokesman told Fox News that the report is one-sided. He said it is unfair to call the arrest and punishment of perpetrators of "all crimes in the country as a violation of human rights." Inamullah Samangani, another spokesman, told Axios that the group is "fully committed to the amnesty" and blamed rogue fighters for the killings.

After the chaotic fall of Kabul in August, the Taliban made overtures to the international community that they would take a more pragmatic, moderate approach to governing in hopes that they would not be alienated by the international community.


Taliban fighters stand guard next to a Taliban flag during a gathering where Afghan Hazara elders pledged their support to the country's new Taliban rulers, in Kabul on November 25, 2021. (Photo by AREF KARIMI/AFP via Getty Images)

Hasan Akhund, the former acting minister of foreign affairs, went so far as to urge Afghans who worked with the U.S. and had fled to return to the country. He assured their safety upon their return.

"The stage of bloodshed, killing and contempt for people in Afghanistan has ended, and we have paid dearly for this," he said in September. Critics at the time said his comments rang hollow because the Taliban had just named the head of the terror group known as the Haqqani network as their interim interior minister. He kept the post and is seen as one of the group’s most influential leaders.


A vendor sells dates along a road in Kandahar on November 29, 2021. (Photo by JAVED TANVEER/AFP via Getty Images)

Besides the threat from the Taliban, the U.N. has raised the alarm over a hunger crisis in th country, with 22% of the population of 38 million already near famine and another 36% facing acute food insecurity - mainly because people can’t afford food.

The economy was already in trouble under the previous, U.S.-backed government, which often could not pay its employees. The situation was worsened by the coronavirus pandemic and by a punishing drought that drove up food prices. Already in 2020, nearly half of Afghanistan’s population was living in poverty.

The Associated Press contributed to this report

Stone Age savages that have no place in the modern world. Until the good people violently free themselves of the taliban en masse, they are stuck with them. It’ll never happen though.

quote:

Originally posted by gearhounds:
Stone Age savages that have no place in the modern world. Until the good people violently free themselves of the taliban en masse, they are stuck with them. It’ll never happen though.

We should send the ones we brought over here back to their country so they can, I don't know, fight to get their country back?

20 years of war, Americans killed, billions of dollars and they still haven't managed to accomplish anything. Yet they ask for more help.

Well, we know something was accomplished in A'stan...

Now all Taliban fighters look like soldiers. Now they're all equipped with Plate Carriers, Ballistic Helmets, Night Vision, Secure Radios, and fancy new BDU's complete w/ gloves to protect their blood stained hands!

Building the Taliban, Back, Better. What’s scarier is people here still think this administration can deal with Putin and Xi, at least there’s no mean tweets.

quote:

Originally posted by nhracecraft:
something was accomplished in A'stan...

Spot on. The pictures above look like new gear. We have sanctions against people \ countries who do what we ultimately did.

Just a bump to remember those left behind on this Christmas day.

https://www.breitbart.com/nati...s-to-pay-power-bill/

Kabul Suffers Blackout After Taliban Fails to Pay Power Bill

At least 16 Afghan provinces including Kabul province, which contains the nation’s capital city of Kabul, suffered electricity blackouts on Thursday, Afghanistan’s online news service Khaama Press reported.

Afghanistan’s state power monopoly, Da Afghanistan Breshna Sherkat (DABS), issued a statement on January 12 confirming “a shortage of electricity and blackout in 16 provinces including the Afghan capital Kabul.”

DABS attempted to blame the power outages on Afghanistan’s neighbor, Uzbekistan, which it said had “decreased” the amount of electricity it usually supplies to Afghanistan by “60 percent” in recent days. Afghanistan’s state-run power company neglected to mention on Tuesday that the Taliban, which seized control of Afghanistan’s government on August 15, 2021, has failed to pay bills owed to its electricity suppliers, including those in Uzbekistan, since coming to power. Afghanistan does not have its own national power grid and thus relies on foreign imports for roughly 78 percent of its electricity supply.

“Electricity imports from Uzbekistan, Tajikistan and Turkmenistan account for half of Afghanistan’s power consumption nationwide, with Iran providing additional supplies to the country’s west,” the Wall Street Journal (WSJ) reported on October 3, 2021.

“Domestic production, mostly at hydropower stations, has been affected by this year’s drought,” the business-focused newspaper noted of Afghanistan’s power supply at the time.

“Afghanistan usually pays $20 million to $25 million a month in total to Uzbekistan, Tajikistan, Turkmenistan, and Iran and now unpaid bills stand at $62 million,” Safiullah Ahmadzai, then-acting C.E.O. of DABS, told Bloomberg on October 6, 2021.

The DABS C.E.O. said at the time he had recently asked the United Nations (U.N.) for assistance in paying Afghanistan’s overdue power bills but had not received a response.

“We’ve asked the UNAMA in Kabul to assist the people of Afghanistan to pay the country’s power suppliers as part of their humanitarian aid,” Ahmadzai told Bloomberg by phone on October 6, 2021. He referred to “UNAMA,” or the United Nations Assistance Mission in Afghanistan.

Just 38 percent of Afghanistan’s population of 38 million have access to electricity under normal circumstances. The Taliban’s seizure of power last August prompted an ongoing period of political instability in Afghanistan that has affected its power situation.

The country was already beleaguered by decades of war and relied almost entirely on foreign sources — such as the United Nations and the U.S., which backed its previous government in Kabul from 2001 through August 15, 2021 — for financial support.