The Taliban Reader: War, Islam and Politics by Alex Strick van Linschoten & Felix Kuehn

Author:Alex Strick van Linschoten & Felix Kuehn
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: OUP
Published: 2018-03-14T16:00:00+00:00

71

OPEN LETTER TO THE SHANGHAI SUMMIT

[This source was issued prior to a meeting of the Shanghai Summit in 2009. It is included here not so much for the uniqueness of its message, but rather because it was frequently cited (exclusively so) by Taliban interlocutors at the time as being the best expression of the Taliban’s policy towards Afghanistan and towards the international community.]

Al-Emera (website), 14 October 2009

Those with a free conscience in the world know that America and NATO member countries have been shedding the blood of innocent Afghans for the past eight years under the pretext of terrorism. Tens of thousand of miserable Afghans, including women, children and old men, have become victims of this fatuous pretext. Still more, this spree of killing, prosecution and torture at the hand of the invaders has been continuing unabated.

Our parents are not able to send their children to school with peace of mind, fearing they might be killed because the invaders have frequently shelled seminaries and schools under the excuse of them being training centres of terrorists. Our ordinary public passengers fear they may get stuck between military convoys of the invaders and lose their life.

Many a time, it has happened that the so-called international security forces have run over ordinary people’s vehicles. Afterwards, they claimed that the passengers had not paid attention to their signals. In other words, they considered passengers not heeding their signal a justification for killing them. Our businessmen are grappling with various problems in their daily commercial activities, being not able to perform their normal business routines. They fear their goods may be damaged by foreign troops while transporting them from one province to another. They also fear that some officials in uniform will loot their stock.

A few days ago, foreign forces set fire to 2,000 shops in Gandum Raiz bazaar, Zamindawar area, Kajaki district, Helmand province, burning them to ashes. Other bazaars of the district are under similar threat. Our farmers are not able to work peacefully in the fields because enemy helicopters and fighter planes are hovering over them. Sometimes they take peasants’ farm equipment to be weapons and the farmers to be armed militants busy erecting outposts, so they open fire on them. Our ordinary people cannot go to sleep without fear, because the foreign troops often raid people’s houses and kill the elders of the households or take them to Guantánamo, Bagram, Kandahar or other notorious jails. In fact, our nation is a hostage in the hands of the foreign forces in Afghanistan. They have been terrorising our people, ostensibly under the name of fighting terrorism.

Despite the atrocities that they have unleashed, still a great part of Afghanistan is under the control of the Islamic Emirate. The problem is that the American and NATO forces are in complete jitters and suffering from psychological diseases. They think every Afghan, child or a mature person, male or female, is going to attack them by blowing up him or herself. So they fear every rock and

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