KABUL, Aug 12 (AFP): A senior Taliban cleric known for his fiery speeches against the Islamic State (IS) was killed Thursday at his madrassa in the Afghan capital in a suicide attack claimed by the jihadist group.
Rahimullah Haqqani, who had recently spoken publicly in favour of girls being allowed to attend school, had survived at least two previous assassination attempts-including one in Pakistan in October 2020.
"The madrassa of Sheikh Rahimullah was targeted today and as a result he and one of his brothers were martyred," Kabul police spokesman Khalid Zadran told AFP, adding that three others were wounded in the blast.
Zadran had earlier said that only Haqqani was killed and four others wounded.
Government spokesman Bilal Karimi confirmed his death "in an attack carried out by a cowardly enemy", but did not offer further details.
Another report from Nikhil Kumar, deputy global editor, and Fatima Faizi, freelance reporter adds: Inside the country, millions are going hungry. Outside, those who fled a year ago are navigating a different set of challenges.
“It was like a nightmare.”
That is how Tareq Qassemi, a 32-year-old bookseller from Kabul, describes the aftermath of the Taliban’s return to the Afghan capital on Aug. 15, 2021, as U.S. troops departed his country. The United States’ longest war was over, as the last of its soldiers left the country at the end of the month — so was the rule of the U.S.-backed government in Afghanistan. Qassemi and millions of other Afghans found their lives — as he put it — “flipped upside down.”
Soon after, Qassemi started an underground book club for girls in Kabul; the Taliban came after him, and he was forced to flee the country. One year later, Qassemi lives a hand-to-mouth existence in Pakistan. “The nightmare isn’t over,” he told Grid.
To mark the anniversary of the fall of Kabul, Grid spoke to Qassemi and several of his compatriots — from a former public prosecutor now in hiding in Afghanistan to a prominent Afghan artist now living as a refugee in France — as their country struggles through an ever-worsening humanitarian storm.
What emerged is a portrait of a people who, after enduring decades of conflict, are fighting for scraps of dignity and basic goods — or navigating new lives in other countries.
In Afghanistan itself, more than 90 percent of the country’s nearly 40 million people don’t have enough to eat, according to the U.N. In one province — Ghor, in central Afghanistan — around 20,000 people faced famine-like conditions between March and May.
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