Meet the cruellest Taliban whom even the Taliban feared - India Today

In November 2020, news agency Reuters told the story of a woman who was shot and her eyes gouged out by the Taliban for securing a job. She was working as a policewoman in Afghanistan’s Ghazni province. She had been attacked in October.

Identified as 33-year-old Khatera, the last thing she saw were three men on a motorcycle shooting at her and putting a knife into her eyes, Reuters reported.

Since then, the Taliban have captured not just parts of Ghazni but the whole of Afghanistan. They are spreading the word that they have changed in their second coming.

But in May-end, when the Taliban sweep was in the final phase, The Wall Street Journal talked about Kamaluddin, an Afghan citizen in Kandahar.

Kamaluddin had visited a barber’s shop. He had planned “to obtain the illicit pleasures of clean-shaven cheeks and a fashionable moustache”. But he dropped the idea, recalling the horror experienced by his father and brother, who were caught earlier using smartphones by the Taliban. Kamaluddin feared incurring the wrath of the Taliban.

His father and brother had their mobile phones confiscated and were forced to swallow their SIM cards. The Taliban wanted to ensure that they did not indulge in un-Islamic behaviour of playing music or watching pleasure-seeking videos.

LONG READ | Who are the Taliban?

Kamaluddin’s fears were not imaginary. This is corroborated by the surge in the sale of burqas in Afghanistan with the Taliban coming back to rule the country.

Under Taliban rule, a woman is not only required to wear a burqa but also a mesh-like veil covering her eyes.

This prelude to Taliban 2.0 has revived memories of the barbaric Taliban rule of the 1990s. And, the cruellest among them during those days was Mullah Dadullah.

He was generally regarded as “the worst of the worst”.

MULLAH DADULLAH

During the 1990s, when the Taliban emerged as a power in Afghanistan, Mullah Dadullah was considered the backbone of the Islamic fundamentalist group. He had a rivalry with Taliban chief Mullah Omar within the group and enjoyed almost equal authority.

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Both Mullah Omar and Mullah Dadullah had fought as mujahideen against the Soviet forces in the 1980s. While Mullah Omar lost an eye, Mullah Dadullah lost a leg in the “jihad” against the Soviets.

Mullah Dadullah was reported to have burned entire villages and ordered general massacres in areas his or the Taliban’s words were resisted. It was he, who is credited to have started chopping off the heads of enemies, infidels or captives. Some accounts say he did not spare even infants.

The reports of killing of infants are said to have disturbed even Mullah Omar, who in 1997 dismissed him from his position.

But he came back boasting of having thousands of armed men including suicide bombers under his command.

In 2000, Mullah Dadullah ordered his forces to massacre ethnic Hazaras in the Bamyan province of Afghanistan. The Hazaras were resisting the Pashtun-dominated Taliban. Hundreds of Hazaras were killed on Mullah Dadullah’s orders without discriminating whether those massacred were part of the resistance force.

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In 2001, Mullah Dadullah supervised the bombing of the two Buddha statues in Bamiyan. The same year, he boasted on radio of committing massacres of Shia Muslims in Afghanistan. Mullah Dadullah escaped to safety when the US forces drove Taliban out of power in Afghanistan in 2001. He was killed six years later in a US-Nato raid.

PIR AGHA

Pir Agha was widely held as Mullah Dadullah’s successor in savagery. Incidentally, his shot to fame was the massacre of the family of Mullah Dadullah in 2015.

Reports cite instances when Pir Agha would gather all boys and men aged 8-80 in an enemy village to punish them for giving shelter to a fugitive Talib or his personal detractor.

With the cruel manner in which he punished anti-Taliban people, villages or tribes, Pir Agha endeared himself to Mullah Mansoor, who took up the Taliban leadership after Mullah Omar died in 2013. Pir Agha was killed in a Nato raid in 2018.

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2021-08-18 08:42:58Z