Kabul’s airport re-opens for domestic flights — with no radar — as Taliban battle resistance fighters in last holdout

Kabul’s airport reopened with flights taking off for the cities of Herat, Kandahar and Balkh, despite no working radar, an airport official said Sunday.

 

Three more flights were planned for Sunday, airport official Shershah Stor told the Associated Press. 

 

The news of the domestic flights comes as efforts continue to reopen the airport for international flights, a key step to enable humanitarian aid to enter the country and to allow refugees to leave. 

 

The resumption of domestic flights sees the Taliban cementing its civilian control of the country, as it faces myriad challenges, including international skepticism, a freeze on government reserves and its need to meet the expectations of fighters who fought two decades for victory. The Taliban has been expected to announce a government for several days. 

 

Taliban fighters took control of several strategic districts during intense fighting Saturday against resistance fighters in the northern Panjshir Valley, the last remaining province in Afghanistan holding out against the Islamist group. If the valley falls, the Taliban would control the country fully, which it never managed during its rule from 1996 to 2001.

Here’s what to know

• Several domestic flights took off from Kabul’s Hamid Karzai International Airport on Saturday for cities in the nation’s north, west and south. Three more flights were planned for Sunday, an airport official told the Associated Press.
• Taliban fighters took control of several strategic districts in the northern Panjshir Valley, amid heavy fighting from resistance fighters in their last holdout against group.
• The Taliban broke up a protest of women outside the presidential palace in Kabul on Saturday. The protest followed similar demonstrations in Herat and Kabul on Thursday and Friday.

 

As Taliban fighters moved deep into the valley, the resistance fighters led by Ahmad Massoud were under growing pressure, amid a blizzard of claims and counterclaims from each side. Taliban spokesman Bilal Karimi told The Post Saturday that Taliban fighters had seized several key districts, killing three senior resistance commanders, but stopped short of claiming to have taken control of the valley. 

 

An official with the National Resistance Front confirmed that several districts in the Panjshir Valley were under Taliban control, as fighting continued. He denied reports circulating on Taliban social media that resistance leaders had fled.

 

Resistance fighters set up base in the Panjshir Valley days after the Taliban seized control of Kabul last month, convinced they could hold out in a valley that was never conquered by the Taliban in the 1990s nor by the U.S.S.R. in its nearly decade-long occupation in the 1980s. 

 

One key difference between the current fighting and the battles against the Taliban in the 1990s was that the Northern Alliance — led then by Massoud’s father, Ahmad Shah Massoud — had supply lines to Tajikistan and was able to rearm. This time, the Taliban cut off the northern area bordering Tajikistan before taking Kabul, leaving resistance fighters in the valley isolated. 

 

The efforts to reopen the airport come with fears that a freeze on Afghanistan reserves and international aid could tip the country, already stressed by decades of war, into a major humanitarian catastrophe. 

 

A special Qatari envoy recently visited Kabul for talks on “an inclusive government and the resumption of operations at the airport,” according to a Qatari official with knowledge of the situation. 

 

U.N. Secretary General António Guterres plans to host a high-level meeting in Geneva on Sept. 13, aimed at preventing a “looming humanitarian catastrophe.” The conference is seeking a rapid scale-up of humanitarian funding and resumption of full assistance, with nearly half the country’s 38 million population in need of aid.

Members of the Taliban Badri 313 military unit stand guard at a check point as airport workers queue to enter to the Kabul International Airport in Kabul on September 4, 2021. (Photo by Aamir QURESHI / AFP) (Photo by AAMIR QURESHI/AFP via Getty Images)

 

Remittances from abroad have been a significant source of funds flowing into the country, but service disruptions and cash shortages have created difficulties in Afghanistan in recent days. On Saturday, a Taliban spokesman said that one of Afghanistan’s biggest foreign exchange markets had reopened. 

 

Secretary of State Antony Blinken was due to land in the Qatari capital of Doha on Sunday to thank the country’s leaders for their assistance with the Afghanistan evacuation efforts and to meet with Afghan evacuees and U.S. officials. 

 

The small Persian Gulf nation played an outsize role in extricating thousands of Western citizens and Afghan allies following the rapid Taliban advance. Qatar has also played a key role in acting as an intermediary between the Taliban and Western governments. 

 

Blinken plans to fly to Germany Wednesday to visit the United States’ Ramstein Air Base in Germany, where many Afghan evacuees are staying as they await flights to the U.S. The secretary of state said Friday he would meet with his German counterpart and hold a virtual ministerial meeting with more than 20 nations “that all have a stake in helping to relocate and resettle Afghans and in holding the Taliban to their commitments.” 

 

The United States intends to send Afghan evacuees who fail to clear initial screenings to the nation of Kosovo, which has agreed to house them for up to a year, a U.S. official told AP Saturday. 

 

The official said the transit center would enable U.S. officials to conduct security screenings of refugees, after they completed their paperwork.

Afghan resistance movement and anti-Taliban uprising forces take part in a military training at Malimah area of Dara district in Panjshir province on September 2, 2021 as the valley remains the last major holdout of anti-Taliban forces. (Photo by Ahmad SAHEL ARMAN / AFP) (Photo by AHMAD SAHEL ARMAN/AFP via Getty Images)

As the Taliban advanced into the Panjshir Valley, its leaders had not yet announced a government, although an announcement has been expected for several days. Abdul Ghani Baradar, the Taliban’s top political leader, is expected to be named president. The group’s commander of the faithful, Haibatullah Akhundzada, is expected to be named the supreme leader of Afghanistan. 

 

The organization has been under pressure from neighbors and Western countries to name a government made up of different political groups and ethnic leaders. A key European Union condition for the bloc to engage with the Taliban is the formation of an inclusive, representative transitional government. 

 

Other conditions set out by the EU’s foreign policy chief, Josep Borrell, include the Taliban not allowing the country to become a base for the export of terrorism to other countries, respect for human rights, the rights of women and the media, free access for humanitarian aid and that the Taliban allow foreigners and Afghans at risk to leave the country. 

 

Russia, China and neighboring Central Asian nations have also called for an inclusive government, but have placed more emphasis on the Taliban stabilizing the country and preventing a spillage of terrorist groups into the region. 

 

Tehreek-e-Taliban Pakistan, a Pashtun militant group that has vowed to carve out an Islamic nation from Pakistani territory along the Afghan border, claimed responsibility for a suicide bombing in Quetta’s Mastung district in Balochistan Sunday, after Pakistan’s main intelligence agency head, Faiz Hameed, visited Kabul Saturday. 

 

The attack killed at least three frontier police at a checkpoint, according to local media, citing the Balochistan Counter-Terrorism Department. 

 

Pakistani officials with knowledge of Hameed’s visit said he was carrying a message that Pakistan “has helped Afghanistan in the past and will do so in the future.” 

 

Pakistan has long sought to exert its influence over Afghanistan, which is seen as a battleground in Pakistan and India’s competition for regional influence. Pakistan’s Inter-Services Intelligence, or ISI, is widely seen as having been instrumental to the Taliban’s survival and battlefield success, although Pakistan has long denied covert ties with the group. 

 

Pakistani officials are seeking to pressure the Taliban to break ties with militants such as Tehrik-e-Taliban Pakistan that carry out attacks in Pakistan. 

 

As the international community watches the Taliban closely, the group’s harsh crackdown on a group of women protesters Saturday triggered alarm that its promises to respect women’s rights are unlikely to be met. Already, women in Afghanistan working in key media roles or in government positions have said they have been told by Taliban officials not to come to work. Some have fled the country. 

 

The Taliban has publicly vowed to allow broader roles for women than it did in the past, but many Afghans remain skeptical. Saturday’s protest by female activists at the presidential palace in Kabul over the Taliban’s policies on women was swiftly quashed by the Taliban, using tear gas and pepper spray. It followed other protests by women in Kabul and Herat.

 

One of the women who helped organize the protest, 31-year-old Finance Ministry employee Monisa Mubarez, said she was told by the Taliban that she cannot return to work. 

 

“Staying home was a slow-motion death,” she said. “For over three weeks now, we are home. We are not allowed to be part of the formal structure of the government.” 

 

Angered by the restrictions, she and her friends marched in Kabul, carrying placards and banners and playing a pro-women song on a loudspeaker. Then, Mubarez said, “Taliban fighters encircled us.” 

 

“They were as many as twice of our group,” she said. “For each of us, there was one Taliban fighter.” 

 

A dozen members of the Taliban special forces in camouflage ran into the crowd of women and fired their weapons in the air, the Associated Press reported. 

 

Video footage circulating on social media showed Taliban fighters beating the women. Mubarez said that the Taliban banned them and their accompanying reporters from taking videos and photos, and that one woman had injuries on her head. She said the Taliban also used tear gas to disrupt the protest. 

 

“They do not accept us as human beings,” Mubarez said. “These efforts either will cost my life, or we all will have a dignified life.” 

 

A Taliban spokesman said he was gathering details about the reports of violence but did not have an immediate response.