Written by Victor J. Blue, Thomas Gibbons-Neff and Safiullah Padshah
A younger Taliban fighter with a pair of handcuffs dangling from his finger warily watched the stream of approaching automobiles as he stood in entrance of a set of metal barricades.
Friday prayers would start quickly on the Sakhi Shah-e Mardan shrine and mosque, a holy Shiite web site in central Kabul that he was guarding.
There had been two bombings of Shiite mosques in Afghanistan by the Islamic State group in latest months, killing dozens, and this 18-year-old Taliban fighter, Mohammad Khalid Omer, wasn’t taking any probabilities.
He and his police unit of 5 different fighters, colloquially often called the Sakhi unit after the shrine they defend, symbolize the Taliban’s vanguard of their latest battle after the group’s gorgeous takeover of the nation in August: They received the warfare, however can they safe the peace in a multiethnic nation racked by greater than 40 years of violence?
Journalists from The New York Times spent 12 days with the small Taliban unit this fall, occurring a number of patrols with them of their zone, Police District 3, and travelling to their properties in Wardak province, a neighbouring mountainous space.
So far, the brand new authorities’s method to policing has been advert hoc at greatest: Local Taliban items have assumed the position at checkpoints throughout the nation, whereas in giant cities, comparable to Kabul, Taliban fighters have been imported from surrounding provinces.
Taliban fighter Zahed, assigned to protect the Sakhi Shrine, a Shia mosque and shrine, on patrol within the Kart-e-Sakhi neighborhood of Kabul, Afghanistan, on Nov 3, 2021. (Victor J. Blue/The New York Times)
Even with solely half a dozen members, the Sakhi unit gives a telling snapshot of the Taliban, each when it comes to who their core fighters are and what the largest problem is for them as Afghanistan’s new rulers: Once a primarily rural insurgency, the motion is now being compelled to take care of governing and securing the unfamiliar city facilities it had been saved out of for many years.
No longer are fighters like Omer sleeping underneath the celebrities, avoiding airstrikes and planning ambushes towards overseas troops or the Western-backed Afghan authorities.
Instead, they’re wrestling with the identical financial hardships gripping their countrymen, with the identical risk of Islamic State assaults and with the raucous, puzzling, winding streets and again alleys of Kabul, a metropolis of about 4.5 million those who they’re virtually strangers to.
Members of the Taliban police unit tasked with defending a Shiite shrine collect round their single electrical heater at their residing quarters in Kabul, Afghanistan, Nov 14, 2021. Their telephones are the main target of a lot of their downtime. (Victor J. Blue/The New York Times)
The Sakhi unit lives full time subsequent to the shrine in a small concrete room painted vibrant inexperienced with a single electrical heater. Steel bunk beds line the partitions. The solely ornament is a single poster of the sacred Kaaba in Mecca.
In Afghanistan, many Shiites belong to the Hazara ethnic minority. The Taliban, a Sunni Pashtun motion, severely persecuted Hazaras the final time they dominated the nation. But the seeming implausibility of a Talib unit truly guarding such an emblematic Shiite web site is belied by how critically the lads appeared to take their project.
“We do not care which ethnic group we serve, our goal is to serve and provide security for Afghans,” stated Habib Rahman Inqayad, 25, the unit chief and most skilled of them. “We never think that these people are Pashtun or Hazara.”
Habib Rahman Inqayad admires a Taliban patch he acquired on the foremost navy items mall in Kabul, which was once often called the Bush Bazaar, after the US president, and has since been renamed the Mujahideen Bazaar, on Nov 3, 2021. (Victor J. Blue/The New York Times)
But Inqayad’s sentiments distinction with the Taliban’s interim authorities, composed nearly completely of Pashtun hard-liners who’re emblematic of the motion’s harsh rule within the Nineteen Nineties, and who’re perceived as anti-Hazara.
As he spoke within the unit’s cramped barracks, a small speaker usually performed “taranas,” the spoken prayer songs, with out musical accompaniment, widespread with the Talibs.
One of the group’s favourites was a music about shedding one’s comrades and the tragedy of youth misplaced. In a excessive skinny voice, the singer intones, “O death, you break and kill our hearts.”
On a fall day final yr because the Sakhi unit appeared on, households gathered on the tiled terraces across the shrine, consuming tea and sharing meals.
Family pictures on the house of Habib Rahman Inqayad, a Taliban fighter assigned to a Kabul police unit, in Wardak Province, Afghanistan on Nov 19, 2021. Inqayad’s father, Mullah Gul-Wali, high proper, a Talib within the earlier regime, was killed preventing within the northern province of Balkh through the US invasion in 2001, when his son was simply 4. (Victor J. Blue/The New York Times)
Some cautiously eyed the Talibs patrolling the positioning and one group of younger males rushed to place out their cigarettes as they approached. The Taliban typically frown on smoking and the unit has at occasions bodily punished people who smoke.
Another day, two teenage boys got here to the shrine, openly strolling with their two girlfriends. They have been confronted by the Sakhi unit, who requested what they have been doing. Unsatisfied with their solutions, the Talibs dragged the boys into their bunk room to reply for the transgression. In conservative Afghanistan, such public consorting is taboo, doubly so in a holy web site underneath Taliban guard.
Inside their room, there was an argument among the many Sakhi unit about how one can deal with the 2 boys: good cop versus unhealthy cop. Hekmatullah Sahel, one of many extra skilled members of the unit, disagreed together with his comrades. He pushed for a verbal lashing fairly than a bodily one. He was overruled.
From left, the Taliban fighters Habib Rahman Inqayad, Hekmatullah Sahel and Mohammad Khalid Omer greet a younger customer on the Sakhi Shah-e Mardan shrine and mosque, which their unit is charged with defending, in Kabul, Afghanistan, Nov 6, 2021. (Victor J. Blue/The New York Times)
When the youngsters have been lastly allowed to depart, shaken by the beating they’d simply obtained, Sahel known as out to the boys, telling them to return again once more — however with out their girlfriends.
The episode was a reminder to the shrine’s guests that the Taliban fighters, whereas typically pleasant, might nonetheless revert to the techniques that outlined their spiritual hard-line rule within the Nineteen Nineties.
For the group of six fighters, contending with flirting youngsters was simply one other indicator that their days of preventing a guerrilla warfare have been over. Now they spend their time preoccupied by extra quotidian policing concerns, like recognizing attainable bootleggers (alcohol in Afghanistan is banned), discovering gas for his or her unit’s pickup and questioning whether or not their commander will grant them go away for the weekend.
Omer had joined the unit solely months earlier than. “I joined the Islamic Emirate because I had a great desire to serve my religion and country,” he stated.
Mohammad Khalid Omer, left, reaches out to his 1-year-old sister at his household house in Qurbani village within the Chak District of Wardak Province, Afghanistan, on Nov 19, 2022. (Victor J. Blue/The New York Times)
But to some Talibs, Omer is what’s derisively known as a “21-er” — a fighter who solely joined the motion in 2021, as victory loomed. This new era of Talibs convey new expectations with them, chief amongst them the will for a wage.
They and most different rank-and-file fighters have by no means obtained a wage from the motion. Despite seizing billions in US-supplied weapons and matériel, the Taliban are nonetheless removed from being effectively geared up. Fighters are depending on their commanders for fundamental provides and so they need to scrounge for something further.
Sahel, at 28, is older than most of his comrades, slower to excite and extra restrained. He spent 4 years finding out at a college, working the entire time as a clandestine operative for the motion.
“None of my classmates knew that I was in the Taliban,” he stated.
Inside the Sakhi shrine, a Shiite holy web site, in Kabul, Afghanistan, Nov 16, 2021. (Victor J. Blue/The New York Times)
He graduated with a level in physics and math schooling, however returned to the battle.
Relieved the warfare is over, he and his comrades nonetheless miss the sense of goal it offered.
“We are happy that our country was liberated and we are currently living in peace,” he stated, however added, “we are very sad for our friends who were martyred.”
Every few weeks, the lads are allowed to go to their households again in Wardak for 2 days. On a crisp morning in November, Inqayad sat in his house within the Masjid Gardena valley, a phenomenal assortment of orchards and fields hemmed in by mountain peaks.
Hekmatullah Sahel, a Talib assigned to Kabul’s Police District 3, within the hills above the Sakhi Shah-e Mardan shrine and mosque, which his unit is charged with defending, on Nov 6, 2021. (Victor J. Blue/The New York Times)
He defined that many households within the space had misplaced sons to the preventing, and estimated that 80% of the households within the space have been Taliban supporters.
Inqayad attended college till the seventh grade, however needed to drop out. Religious research crammed in some gaps. He joined the Taliban at 15.
Recently married, he faces new challenges now that the motion is in energy. The solely potential breadwinner in his household, he wants a wage to help his spouse, mom and sisters, however to date he has not been drawing one.
Back in Kabul, the Sakhi unit loaded up for an evening patrol, bundling as much as fight the chilly wind that blows incessantly from the mountains ringing the town.
Omer rode within the mattress of the unit’s truck, a machine gun resting on his lap and bands of ammunition wrapped round his neck like occasion beads.
But there was little to warrant the heavy weaponry meant for suppressing enemy troops. Their space of duty was quiet and the lads appeared bored as they spun across the metropolis as packs of road canines chased and snapped on the tires of passing automobiles.
