How does the Taliban deal with leaders of the previous government detained in the movement’s prisons?

Mohamed Yosry

It was not easy for the Taliban to come to power in Afghanistan without bloodshed or practicing abuse and violence against those who belonged to the previous government and against its opponents. This matter appeared clearly since the first signs of its seizure of power, and the movement continues in that policy to this day.

History of violence

Afghans have not forgotten those bloody scenes that followed the Taliban’s seizure of power in the 1990s, especially the execution of former Afghan President Mohammad Najibullah by wire and hanging his body on a lamppost near the presidential palace after he was kidnapped from the UN headquarters in Kabul on September 26, 1996 and exposed to all kinds of torture in the streets.

This image remained fresh in the mind of former Afghan President Ashraf Ghani during the last days before the Taliban seized power again on August 15, 2021. Ghani fled outside the country hours before, leaving all his belongings, so that Afghan media published pictures as he escaped barefoot without being able to put on his shoes, fearing the same fate as Najibullah.

Abuse and enforced disappearance

After its second rise, the Taliban began to show a policy of appeasement on the surface in order to appear to the world that it is committed to the Doha Agreement, in which the movement pledged to establish security, peace and human rights in Afghanistan, and not to allow the use of its lands as a safe haven for armed groups.

However, what happened with a large number of members of the previous government and its senior employees did not point to the Taliban’s commitment to those pledges, which disturbed international organizations and human rights organizations. In December 2022, 20 countries issued a joint statement accusing the Taliban of carrying out executions against former members of the security forces.

The joint statement, which included the United States, Britain, Japan and the European Union, said that it had received reports of executions and enforced disappearances of former members of the Afghan government, including about 50 members of the Afghan National Security Forces and many military, police and intelligence men who were arrested by the Taliban after it seized power.

Problem persists

Despite calls by human rights organizations to stop these practices, they still continue today. Local reports revealed on Thursday, April 13, that the movement is practicing torture against detainees from the previous government inside its prisons.

The newspaper Hasht-e Subh Daily said that the commander of the General Protection Department battalion of the former government in the Wardago region is subjected to severe torture in prison.

According to the same newspaper, sources said that the commander was named Kamal Al-Din Jamal, and the Taliban arrested him in Panjshir province in January for allegedly collaborating with the National Resistance Front led by Afghan dissident Ahmed Shah Massoud.

Kamal al-Din’s family indicated that his health condition had become very bad due to the multiple types of torture he was subjected to at the hands of the Taliban, explaining that he had received threats from the Taliban intelligence warning them against seeking his release.

Regarding the continuation of these policies, researcher Mohamed Ebadi noted that nothing else was expected from the Taliban, and the discourse that it issued at the beginning can be described as a pre-empowerment discourse.

Ebadi added in exclusive statements to the Reference that the Taliban, like other Islamist groups and entities with exclusionary ideological orientations, rely on domination rather than participation, as they do not wish to have a competitor on the scene that impedes their goals and disrupts their interests.

Ebadi pointed out that the Taliban started this early, but its supporters turned a blind eye  n order to facilitate its access to power, and what is happening now is a natural extension of its unchanging approach.