Militias in Afghanistan’s north are taking up the fight against the Taliban
BY PAMELA CONSTABLE AND EZZATULLAH MEHRDAD•
BY PAMELA CONSTABLE AND EZZATULLAH MEHRDAD•
THE WASHINGTON POST • JUNE 22, 2021
KABUL — A sweeping Taliban offensive across northern Afghanistan, unchecked by overstretched government forces, has triggered a sudden resurgence of anti-Taliban militias in half a dozen provinces, raising concerns that the country could plunge into a prolonged civil war.
President Ashraf Ghani, scheduled to visit Washington on Friday to meet with President Joe Biden amid growing concerns here about the withdrawal of U.S. forces, has endorsed the sudden call to arms by former ethnic rival groups and shaken up his top security team, in hopes of stemming the Taliban onslaught and calming public panic.
In a meeting Monday with influential former anti-Soviet and anti-Taliban militia leaders, Ghani called on them to create a “united front” and support the Afghan security forces to “strengthen peace” and “safeguard the republic system.” The Taliban rejects the current democratic governing system and seeks to install an Islamic one.
During a separate ceremony, the newly appointed acting defense minister, Bismillah Khan Mohammadi, called on “my patriots and people everywhere to stand alongside their security and defense forces.” He said the government is “ready to provide them with all equipment and resources.”
The Ghani government hopes the added support will shore up the beleaguered national defense forces, which have struggled to send reinforcements and supplies to troops facing repeated Taliban attacks.
But the prospect of unleashing a hodgepodge of rogue warriors to repel their old enemies also raises the specter of civil war, a state of violent anarchy that Afghans remember all too well from the 1990s. And although the armed groups have pledged to coordinate with government forces, it is also possible that effort could unravel into confused, competing clashes among purported allies.
“The surge in militias is a recipe for disaster and a repetition of a dark history,” said Tamim Asey, chairman of the Institute of War and Peace Studies in Kabul. “It will enlarge ethnic fault lines and undercut government legitimacy.” He said that relying on the militias is a “poison pill” that might give Ghani short-term relief but will ultimately “kill his administration.”
Atta Mohammed Noor, a northern warlord and former governor, posted a tweet Monday calling for a “national mobilization” of former anti-Soviet groups to fight Taliban aggression. He called on all northern factions to “stand alongside” state forces, and in a separate Facebook post he asked their leaders to join in the fight without creating separate “islands of power.”
In the past several days, fighting has been reported in nine provinces across the north, and armed militias or civilian groups have formed to repel the insurgents, often fighting alongside state forces. All are loyal to local leaders from minority Tajik, Uzbek or other ethnic groups that have no love for Ghani, a member of the dominant ethnic Pashtun group based in southern Afghanistan.
In Kunduz province, a strategic area near the northern border with Tajikistan, several officials there said Tuesday that insurgents were fighting against local forces inside the provincial capital city and were either attacking or in control of most rural districts. They also seized a dry port on the border. The Taliban has tried several times in the past to take over Kunduz city and held it briefly in 2015. If the group was to take over the city, it would be a major turning point in the 20-year conflict.
“The city is under attack,” said Ghulam Rabani, a member of the provincial council, reached in Kunduz city on Tuesday evening. He said that local fighters and government forces were defending the city and had recaptured one rural district but that “all others are now ruled by the Taliban.”
Since May, the Taliban has seized more than 50 of Afghanistan’s 370 districts. On Tuesday, the U.N. special envoy to Afghanistan, Deborah Lyons, told the U.N. Security Council that many of those districts surround provincial capitals, suggesting that the insurgents are “positioning themselves to try and take those capitals once foreign forces are fully withdrawn.” Across the nation, scattered fighting has been reported this week in 20 provinces.
The Taliban, historically based in the parched southern region that includes Kandahar, Helmand and Uruzgan provinces, has repeatedly tried to capture major cities there in the past several years. The group’s attacks in the north have greatly intensified in recent months, taking advantage of the relative lack of government forces. At the same time, Taliban peace talks with Afghan leaders in Qatar have stalled.
The most significant confrontation this week has come in Mazar-e Sharif, the country’s fourth-largest city and the capital of Balkh province, long impregnable to Taliban threats. Insurgents breached the city Monday and were pushed back by a mix of local militias and national forces, but area residents remained frightened, and the insurgents posed for videos just outside the city gates.
“People here have enjoyed a peaceful life for 20 years. Now they are very worried,” said Mohammad Afzal Hadid, head of the Balkh provincial council, noting that seven districts in the province had fallen to the Taliban in the past month. “Government forces lost morale. Bases were falling one after another.” He said that public fear had died down after local militia members came to reinforce government troops, and that hundreds more were preparing to join the fight.
A former Balkh council member, Mohammad Khairandesh, dismissed concerns about the private militias going rogue, saying they were now defending the state rather than themselves. The public, he added, accepts them as a lesser evil. “People now prefer militias over the Taliban,” he said. Without their help, he said, “there is a possibility that Mazar may fall.”
In Baghlan province, where the Taliban captured six districts in the past three weeks, officials blamed poor management and leadership of government forces but said that former militia members are preparing to fight. One provincial council member, Ferozuddin Aimaq, said people are “mobilizing to support government forces” but will “rise up against the Taliban if the government collapses.”
Ahmad Zia Massoud, a former vice president and younger brother of the slain anti-Soviet and anti-Taliban leader Ahmad Shah Massoud, posted a Facebook message Tuesday calling on “all political leaders” in the country to “join the front lines alongside the people and public uprising forces.”
Meanwhile, on the front lines of Baghlan’s Tala Barfak district, Naimatullah Pajwalk, the district chief, spent Tuesday shoring up checkpoints. He said the area had been attacked five times by insurgents in the past 10 days.
“It is chaos, but here the people and the forces are mobilized,” he said. “The Taliban are trying hard to capture this district because it would give them connections to other provinces.”
Pajwalk said that the attackers had Humvees and heavy weapons seized from surrendering government troops, and that they had spread false rumors that he and other officials had fled.
“We are under immense pressure,” he said, “but we will stay with our people until the last drop of blood.”
The Washington Post’s Sharif Hassan contributed to this report.
KABUL — A sweeping Taliban offensive across northern Afghanistan, unchecked by overstretched government forces, has triggered a sudden resurgence of anti-Taliban militias in half a dozen provinces, raising concerns that the country could plunge into a prolonged civil war.
President Ashraf Ghani, scheduled to visit Washington on Friday to meet with President Joe Biden amid growing concerns here about the withdrawal of U.S. forces, has endorsed the sudden call to arms by former ethnic rival groups and shaken up his top security team, in hopes of stemming the Taliban onslaught and calming public panic.
In a meeting Monday with influential former anti-Soviet and anti-Taliban militia leaders, Ghani called on them to create a “united front” and support the Afghan security forces to “strengthen peace” and “safeguard the republic system.” The Taliban rejects the current democratic governing system and seeks to install an Islamic one.
During a separate ceremony, the newly appointed acting defense minister, Bismillah Khan Mohammadi, called on “my patriots and people everywhere to stand alongside their security and defense forces.” He said the government is “ready to provide them with all equipment and resources.”
The Ghani government hopes the added support will shore up the beleaguered national defense forces, which have struggled to send reinforcements and supplies to troops facing repeated Taliban attacks.
But the prospect of unleashing a hodgepodge of rogue warriors to repel their old enemies also raises the specter of civil war, a state of violent anarchy that Afghans remember all too well from the 1990s. And although the armed groups have pledged to coordinate with government forces, it is also possible that effort could unravel into confused, competing clashes among purported allies.
“The surge in militias is a recipe for disaster and a repetition of a dark history,” said Tamim Asey, chairman of the Institute of War and Peace Studies in Kabul. “It will enlarge ethnic fault lines and undercut government legitimacy.” He said that relying on the militias is a “poison pill” that might give Ghani short-term relief but will ultimately “kill his administration.”
Atta Mohammed Noor, a northern warlord and former governor, posted a tweet Monday calling for a “national mobilization” of former anti-Soviet groups to fight Taliban aggression. He called on all northern factions to “stand alongside” state forces, and in a separate Facebook post he asked their leaders to join in the fight without creating separate “islands of power.”
In the past several days, fighting has been reported in nine provinces across the north, and armed militias or civilian groups have formed to repel the insurgents, often fighting alongside state forces. All are loyal to local leaders from minority Tajik, Uzbek or other ethnic groups that have no love for Ghani, a member of the dominant ethnic Pashtun group based in southern Afghanistan.
In Kunduz province, a strategic area near the northern border with Tajikistan, several officials there said Tuesday that insurgents were fighting against local forces inside the provincial capital city and were either attacking or in control of most rural districts. They also seized a dry port on the border. The Taliban has tried several times in the past to take over Kunduz city and held it briefly in 2015. If the group was to take over the city, it would be a major turning point in the 20-year conflict.
“The city is under attack,” said Ghulam Rabani, a member of the provincial council, reached in Kunduz city on Tuesday evening. He said that local fighters and government forces were defending the city and had recaptured one rural district but that “all others are now ruled by the Taliban.”
Since May, the Taliban has seized more than 50 of Afghanistan’s 370 districts. On Tuesday, the U.N. special envoy to Afghanistan, Deborah Lyons, told the U.N. Security Council that many of those districts surround provincial capitals, suggesting that the insurgents are “positioning themselves to try and take those capitals once foreign forces are fully withdrawn.” Across the nation, scattered fighting has been reported this week in 20 provinces.
The Taliban, historically based in the parched southern region that includes Kandahar, Helmand and Uruzgan provinces, has repeatedly tried to capture major cities there in the past several years. The group’s attacks in the north have greatly intensified in recent months, taking advantage of the relative lack of government forces. At the same time, Taliban peace talks with Afghan leaders in Qatar have stalled.
The most significant confrontation this week has come in Mazar-e Sharif, the country’s fourth-largest city and the capital of Balkh province, long impregnable to Taliban threats. Insurgents breached the city Monday and were pushed back by a mix of local militias and national forces, but area residents remained frightened, and the insurgents posed for videos just outside the city gates.
“People here have enjoyed a peaceful life for 20 years. Now they are very worried,” said Mohammad Afzal Hadid, head of the Balkh provincial council, noting that seven districts in the province had fallen to the Taliban in the past month. “Government forces lost morale. Bases were falling one after another.” He said that public fear had died down after local militia members came to reinforce government troops, and that hundreds more were preparing to join the fight.
A former Balkh council member, Mohammad Khairandesh, dismissed concerns about the private militias going rogue, saying they were now defending the state rather than themselves. The public, he added, accepts them as a lesser evil. “People now prefer militias over the Taliban,” he said. Without their help, he said, “there is a possibility that Mazar may fall.”
In Baghlan province, where the Taliban captured six districts in the past three weeks, officials blamed poor management and leadership of government forces but said that former militia members are preparing to fight. One provincial council member, Ferozuddin Aimaq, said people are “mobilizing to support government forces” but will “rise up against the Taliban if the government collapses.”
Ahmad Zia Massoud, a former vice president and younger brother of the slain anti-Soviet and anti-Taliban leader Ahmad Shah Massoud, posted a Facebook message Tuesday calling on “all political leaders” in the country to “join the front lines alongside the people and public uprising forces.”
Meanwhile, on the front lines of Baghlan’s Tala Barfak district, Naimatullah Pajwalk, the district chief, spent Tuesday shoring up checkpoints. He said the area had been attacked five times by insurgents in the past 10 days.
“It is chaos, but here the people and the forces are mobilized,” he said. “The Taliban are trying hard to capture this district because it would give them connections to other provinces.”
Pajwalk said that the attackers had Humvees and heavy weapons seized from surrendering government troops, and that they had spread false rumors that he and other officials had fled.
“We are under immense pressure,” he said, “but we will stay with our people until the last drop of blood.”
The Washington Post’s Sharif Hassan contributed to this report.
Attacked and Vulnerable, Some Afghans Are Forming Their Own Armies
David Zucchino and Fatima Faizi
Tue, June 22, 2021
People perform a funeral ceremony on May 9, 2021, for a girl killed in powerful explosions outside a high school in a predominantly Hazara neighborhood in Kabul, Afghanistan. (Kiana Hayeri/The New York Times)
KABUL, Afghanistan — The slaughter of students, mostly teenagers, at a tutoring center. The deaths of young athletes in a suicide bombing at a wrestling club. Mothers shot dead with newborns in their arms.
These relentless killings of Hazaras, a persecuted minority in Afghanistan, finally proved too much to bear for Zulfiqar Omid, a Hazara leader in the central part of the country.
In April, Omid began mobilizing armed men into militias to defend Hazara areas against the Taliban and the Islamic State affiliate in Afghanistan. He said he now commands 800 armed men at seven staging areas mustered into what he calls “self-protection groups.”
“Hazaras get killed in cities and on highways, but the government doesn’t protect them,” Omid said. “Enough is enough. We have to protect ourselves.”
As U.S. and NATO forces withdraw from Afghanistan, and talks falter between the Taliban and the American-backed government, ethnic groups across the country have formed militias or say they plan to arm themselves. The rush to raise fighters and weapons evokes the mujahedeen wars of the early 1990s, when rival militias killed thousands of civilians and left sections of Kabul in ruins.
A concerted and determined militia movement, even if nominally aligned with Afghan security forces, could fracture the unsteady government of President Ashraf Ghani and once again divide the country into fiefs ruled by warlords. Yet these makeshift armies may eventually serve as the last line of defense as security force bases and outposts steadily collapse in the face of a fierce onslaught of attacks by the Taliban.
Since the U.S. troop withdrawal was announced in April, regional strongmen have posted videos on social media showing armed men hoisting assault rifles and vowing to fight the Taliban. Some militia leaders fear the flagging peace talks in Doha, Qatar, will collapse after foreign troops depart and the Taliban will intensify an all-out assault to capture provincial capitals and lay siege to Kabul.
“For the first time in 20 years, power brokers are speaking publicly about mobilizing armed men,” the Afghanistan Analysts Network, a research group in Kabul, wrote in a June 4 report.
Hazaras have the most to fear from a return to power by the Taliban, which massacred thousands of the predominantly Shiite group when the Sunni Muslim militants governed most of Afghanistan from 1996 to 2001. The Taliban consider Hazaras heretics.
The most prominent Hazara militia commander is Abdul Ghani Alipur, whose militiamen in Wardak province, a mountainous area that borders Kabul, have clashed with government forces. Alipur had been implicated in the shooting down of a military helicopter in March. In an interview, he denied any involvement, although an aide said at the time that Alipur’s militiamen had shot at the aircraft.
“If we don’t stand up and defend ourselves, history will repeat itself and we will be massacred like during the time of Abdul Rahman Khan,” Alipur said, referring to the Pashtun “Iron Emir” who ruled in the late 19th century, massacring and enslaving Hazaras. Afghan folklore says he displayed towers built from severed Hazara heads.
“They forced us to pick up guns,” Alipur said of the government, which has failed to protect Hazaras. “We must carry guns to protect ourselves.”
Over the past two decades, Hazaras have built thriving communities in west Kabul and in Hazarajat, their mountainous homeland in central Afghanistan. But with no militias of their own, they have been vulnerable to attack.
Hazara demands for an army escalated after up to 69 schoolgirls were killed in a bombing in Kabul on May 8. Less than a month later, three public transport minivans were bombed in Kabul’s Hazara neighborhoods, killing 18 civilians, most of them Hazara. Among them was a journalist and her mother, the police said. Since 2016, at least 766 Hazara have been killed in the capital alone in 23 attacks, according to New York Times data.
“Tajik have weapons, Pashtuns are armed,” said Arif Rahmani, a Hazara member of parliament. “We Hazaras must also have a system to protect ourselves.”
Mahdi Raskih, another Hazara member of parliament, said he had counted 35 major attacks against Hazaras in recent years — a campaign of genocide, he said. He said he had lost patience with government promises of protection for Hazara schools, mosques and social centers.
“If they can’t provide security, be honest and admit it,” Raskih said. “People believe the government feels no responsibility for them, so our people must pick up guns and fight.”
Hazara soldiers, police and intelligence officers have quit or have been forced out of the security forces because of discrimination, Raskih said, providing militias with a valuable source of trained men. Many Hazara politicians, including Ghani’s second vice president, Sarwar Danesh, have called on the government to stop what they call a genocide of Hazaras. Hundreds of Hazaras have taken to Twitter, at #StopHazarasGenocide, to demand government protection.
Even as some Hazaras mobilize, some Tajik and Uzbek groups never completely disbanded the militias that helped U.S. forces topple the Taliban in 2001. Other ethnic commanders have recently begun forming militias as the Taliban continue to overrun government bases and outposts.
Many of these power brokers are locked in an enduring struggle with the Ghani administration, vying for control, while trying to gain the upper hand in a post-withdrawal Afghanistan.
Nationally, one prominent leader to maintain a militia is Ahmad Massoud, 32, son of Ahmad Shah Massoud, a charismatic commander of the Northern Alliance that helped U.S. forces rout the Taliban in late 2001.
Ahmad Massoud has assembled a coalition of militias in northern Afghanistan. Calling his armed uprising the Second Resistance, Massoud is purportedly backed by a few thousand fighters and about a dozen aging militia commanders who fought the Taliban and the Soviets.
Some Afghan leaders say Massoud is too inexperienced to effectively lead an armed movement. But some Western leaders view him as a valuable source of intelligence on al-Qaida and Islamic State groups inside Afghanistan.
Elsewhere, the roll call of regional leaders who appear to be mobilizing reads like a who’s who of the country’s civil war in the 1990s. But their forces are nowhere near as commanding now.
Gen. Abdul Rashid Dostum, a brutal Uzbek strongman, has long maintained a private army of thousands from his base in Jowzjan province. Dostum, who has been accused of war crimes and sodomizing an Uzbek rival with an assault rifle, would nonetheless be a central figure in any armed uprising against the Taliban.
Another power broker whose actions are being watched closely, Atta Muhammad Noor, is a former warlord and commanding figure in Balkh province, which includes Afghanistan’s commercial hub, Mazar-i-Sharif. He said Tuesday that he would mobilize his militia forces alongside government troops to try to retake territory that had fallen to the Taliban in recent days after the insurgents’ rapid offensive in the north.
In Herat province in the west, former Tajik warlord Mohammed Ismail Khan, another Northern Alliance commander who helped defeat the Taliban, recently broadcast a raucous gathering of armed men on his Facebook page.
Khan told supporters that a half-million people in Herat were poised to take up arms to “defend you and keep your city safe” — a clear signal that he intended to mobilize his militia if peace talks between the Afghan government and the Taliban collapsed.
Also in Herat, Kamran Alizai, a Pashtun who leads the provincial council, said he commanded a large number of armed men ready to mobilize at a moment’s notice.
If government forces were unable to hold Herat, Alizai said, “We will stand by them and fight the Taliban.”
The Afghanistan Analysts Network reported that Abdul Basir Salangi, a former militia commander and an ex-police chief in Kabul, said in a speech in January that militias were forming in the Salang district in north-central Afghanistan in case talks collapsed. “Such talk has become more blatant since the U.S. troop withdrawal announcement,” the report said.
For Hazara militias, a wild card are thousands of Hazara former fighters of the Fatemiyoun Division, trained by Iran and deployed to Syria in 2014 through 2017, ostensibly to protect Shiite Muslim religious sites from the Sunni Muslim-dominated Islamic State. Others were sent to Yemen to fight alongside Houthi rebels against the Saudi-backed government.
Many Fatemiyoun fighters have returned to Afghanistan, raising fears they will be incorporated into Hazara militias, providing Iran a proxy force inside the country. But analysts and Hazara leaders say former Fatemiyoun have been turned away because of their Iranian ties and potential prosecution by the Afghan government.
In Kabul, many Hazaras say they are ready to take up guns. Mohammad, a shopkeeper who like many Afghans goes by one name, said he crossed a ditch flowing with blood when he ran from his shop to help after explosions rocked the neighboring Sayed Ul-Shuhada high school on May 8, killing the dozens of schoolgirls as they left for home.
“I’m 24, and there have been 24 attacks in my lifetime” against Hazaras, he said.
Mohammad said several of his friends have recently joined militias led by Alipur and Omid.
“If this situation continues,” he said, “I’ll pick up a gun and kill whoever kills us.”
This article originally appeared in The New York Times.
© 2021 The New York Times Company
David Zucchino and Fatima Faizi
Tue, June 22, 2021
People perform a funeral ceremony on May 9, 2021, for a girl killed in powerful explosions outside a high school in a predominantly Hazara neighborhood in Kabul, Afghanistan. (Kiana Hayeri/The New York Times)
KABUL, Afghanistan — The slaughter of students, mostly teenagers, at a tutoring center. The deaths of young athletes in a suicide bombing at a wrestling club. Mothers shot dead with newborns in their arms.
These relentless killings of Hazaras, a persecuted minority in Afghanistan, finally proved too much to bear for Zulfiqar Omid, a Hazara leader in the central part of the country.
In April, Omid began mobilizing armed men into militias to defend Hazara areas against the Taliban and the Islamic State affiliate in Afghanistan. He said he now commands 800 armed men at seven staging areas mustered into what he calls “self-protection groups.”
“Hazaras get killed in cities and on highways, but the government doesn’t protect them,” Omid said. “Enough is enough. We have to protect ourselves.”
As U.S. and NATO forces withdraw from Afghanistan, and talks falter between the Taliban and the American-backed government, ethnic groups across the country have formed militias or say they plan to arm themselves. The rush to raise fighters and weapons evokes the mujahedeen wars of the early 1990s, when rival militias killed thousands of civilians and left sections of Kabul in ruins.
A concerted and determined militia movement, even if nominally aligned with Afghan security forces, could fracture the unsteady government of President Ashraf Ghani and once again divide the country into fiefs ruled by warlords. Yet these makeshift armies may eventually serve as the last line of defense as security force bases and outposts steadily collapse in the face of a fierce onslaught of attacks by the Taliban.
Since the U.S. troop withdrawal was announced in April, regional strongmen have posted videos on social media showing armed men hoisting assault rifles and vowing to fight the Taliban. Some militia leaders fear the flagging peace talks in Doha, Qatar, will collapse after foreign troops depart and the Taliban will intensify an all-out assault to capture provincial capitals and lay siege to Kabul.
“For the first time in 20 years, power brokers are speaking publicly about mobilizing armed men,” the Afghanistan Analysts Network, a research group in Kabul, wrote in a June 4 report.
Hazaras have the most to fear from a return to power by the Taliban, which massacred thousands of the predominantly Shiite group when the Sunni Muslim militants governed most of Afghanistan from 1996 to 2001. The Taliban consider Hazaras heretics.
The most prominent Hazara militia commander is Abdul Ghani Alipur, whose militiamen in Wardak province, a mountainous area that borders Kabul, have clashed with government forces. Alipur had been implicated in the shooting down of a military helicopter in March. In an interview, he denied any involvement, although an aide said at the time that Alipur’s militiamen had shot at the aircraft.
“If we don’t stand up and defend ourselves, history will repeat itself and we will be massacred like during the time of Abdul Rahman Khan,” Alipur said, referring to the Pashtun “Iron Emir” who ruled in the late 19th century, massacring and enslaving Hazaras. Afghan folklore says he displayed towers built from severed Hazara heads.
“They forced us to pick up guns,” Alipur said of the government, which has failed to protect Hazaras. “We must carry guns to protect ourselves.”
Over the past two decades, Hazaras have built thriving communities in west Kabul and in Hazarajat, their mountainous homeland in central Afghanistan. But with no militias of their own, they have been vulnerable to attack.
Hazara demands for an army escalated after up to 69 schoolgirls were killed in a bombing in Kabul on May 8. Less than a month later, three public transport minivans were bombed in Kabul’s Hazara neighborhoods, killing 18 civilians, most of them Hazara. Among them was a journalist and her mother, the police said. Since 2016, at least 766 Hazara have been killed in the capital alone in 23 attacks, according to New York Times data.
“Tajik have weapons, Pashtuns are armed,” said Arif Rahmani, a Hazara member of parliament. “We Hazaras must also have a system to protect ourselves.”
Mahdi Raskih, another Hazara member of parliament, said he had counted 35 major attacks against Hazaras in recent years — a campaign of genocide, he said. He said he had lost patience with government promises of protection for Hazara schools, mosques and social centers.
“If they can’t provide security, be honest and admit it,” Raskih said. “People believe the government feels no responsibility for them, so our people must pick up guns and fight.”
Hazara soldiers, police and intelligence officers have quit or have been forced out of the security forces because of discrimination, Raskih said, providing militias with a valuable source of trained men. Many Hazara politicians, including Ghani’s second vice president, Sarwar Danesh, have called on the government to stop what they call a genocide of Hazaras. Hundreds of Hazaras have taken to Twitter, at #StopHazarasGenocide, to demand government protection.
Even as some Hazaras mobilize, some Tajik and Uzbek groups never completely disbanded the militias that helped U.S. forces topple the Taliban in 2001. Other ethnic commanders have recently begun forming militias as the Taliban continue to overrun government bases and outposts.
Many of these power brokers are locked in an enduring struggle with the Ghani administration, vying for control, while trying to gain the upper hand in a post-withdrawal Afghanistan.
Nationally, one prominent leader to maintain a militia is Ahmad Massoud, 32, son of Ahmad Shah Massoud, a charismatic commander of the Northern Alliance that helped U.S. forces rout the Taliban in late 2001.
Ahmad Massoud has assembled a coalition of militias in northern Afghanistan. Calling his armed uprising the Second Resistance, Massoud is purportedly backed by a few thousand fighters and about a dozen aging militia commanders who fought the Taliban and the Soviets.
Some Afghan leaders say Massoud is too inexperienced to effectively lead an armed movement. But some Western leaders view him as a valuable source of intelligence on al-Qaida and Islamic State groups inside Afghanistan.
Elsewhere, the roll call of regional leaders who appear to be mobilizing reads like a who’s who of the country’s civil war in the 1990s. But their forces are nowhere near as commanding now.
Gen. Abdul Rashid Dostum, a brutal Uzbek strongman, has long maintained a private army of thousands from his base in Jowzjan province. Dostum, who has been accused of war crimes and sodomizing an Uzbek rival with an assault rifle, would nonetheless be a central figure in any armed uprising against the Taliban.
Another power broker whose actions are being watched closely, Atta Muhammad Noor, is a former warlord and commanding figure in Balkh province, which includes Afghanistan’s commercial hub, Mazar-i-Sharif. He said Tuesday that he would mobilize his militia forces alongside government troops to try to retake territory that had fallen to the Taliban in recent days after the insurgents’ rapid offensive in the north.
In Herat province in the west, former Tajik warlord Mohammed Ismail Khan, another Northern Alliance commander who helped defeat the Taliban, recently broadcast a raucous gathering of armed men on his Facebook page.
Khan told supporters that a half-million people in Herat were poised to take up arms to “defend you and keep your city safe” — a clear signal that he intended to mobilize his militia if peace talks between the Afghan government and the Taliban collapsed.
Also in Herat, Kamran Alizai, a Pashtun who leads the provincial council, said he commanded a large number of armed men ready to mobilize at a moment’s notice.
If government forces were unable to hold Herat, Alizai said, “We will stand by them and fight the Taliban.”
The Afghanistan Analysts Network reported that Abdul Basir Salangi, a former militia commander and an ex-police chief in Kabul, said in a speech in January that militias were forming in the Salang district in north-central Afghanistan in case talks collapsed. “Such talk has become more blatant since the U.S. troop withdrawal announcement,” the report said.
For Hazara militias, a wild card are thousands of Hazara former fighters of the Fatemiyoun Division, trained by Iran and deployed to Syria in 2014 through 2017, ostensibly to protect Shiite Muslim religious sites from the Sunni Muslim-dominated Islamic State. Others were sent to Yemen to fight alongside Houthi rebels against the Saudi-backed government.
Many Fatemiyoun fighters have returned to Afghanistan, raising fears they will be incorporated into Hazara militias, providing Iran a proxy force inside the country. But analysts and Hazara leaders say former Fatemiyoun have been turned away because of their Iranian ties and potential prosecution by the Afghan government.
In Kabul, many Hazaras say they are ready to take up guns. Mohammad, a shopkeeper who like many Afghans goes by one name, said he crossed a ditch flowing with blood when he ran from his shop to help after explosions rocked the neighboring Sayed Ul-Shuhada high school on May 8, killing the dozens of schoolgirls as they left for home.
“I’m 24, and there have been 24 attacks in my lifetime” against Hazaras, he said.
Mohammad said several of his friends have recently joined militias led by Alipur and Omid.
“If this situation continues,” he said, “I’ll pick up a gun and kill whoever kills us.”
This article originally appeared in The New York Times.
© 2021 The New York Times Company
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