Nemat, a videographer for Etilaat-e Roz, a local newspaper, said that he and his colleagues had just arrived in the street where several dozen women were gathered with placards and a loudspeaker when Taliban militants from the police station seized his camera and arrested him. “I told them I was a journalist and showed them my ID card, but they accused me of organizing the protests,” Nemat said. “They took me into a room, tied my hands with a scarf and started beating me with a cable.”Already facing international isolation, the Taliban are also struggling to deal with longstanding tensions on the Afghan-Pakistani border, where the Pakistani Army has continued to shell suspected militant hide-outs in recent days, according to Taliban and Pakistan officials. Sporadic mortar strikes in the rugged reaches of Kunar Province in northeastern Afghanistan the past week have left at least four people injured, including a child, according to senior Taliban officials. As complicated as the border tensions are — over the years, Pakistan has both supported the Taliban in Afghanistan and accused the Afghan government of giving safe haven to a Pakistani branch of the Taliban that they view as a direct threat — they are just one of the problems on the Taliban’s plate now that the group is in charge.

Source: International New York Times September 08, 2021 18:56 UTC