Taliban militants violently disperse rare protest

KABUL (AP):

Taliban militants attacked protesters Wednesday in eastern Afghanistan who dared to take down their banner and replace it with the country’s flag, killing at least one person and fuelling fears about how the insurgents would govern this fractious nation.

While the Taliban have insisted they will respect human rights, unlike during their previously draconian rule, the attack in Jalalabad came as many Afghans were hiding at home or trying to flee the country, fearful of abuses by the loosely controlled militant organisation. Many have expressed dread that the two-decade Western experiment to remake Afghanistan will not survive the resurgent Taliban, who took control of the country in a blitz that took just days.

Taliban leaders talked Wednesday with senior Afghan officials about a future government. In a potential complication to any effort to stabilise the country, the central bank chief warned that American sanctions over the Taliban’s terror designations threatened Afghanistan’s economy, which already is dangerously low on hard foreign currency.

One figure who was not at the talks talking place in Kabul: Afghan President Ashraf Ghani, who fled as the Taliban closed in on the capital. The United Arab Emirates acknowledged Wednesday that they have taken him and his family in.

In an early sign of protest to the Taliban’s rule, dozens gathered in the eastern city of Jalalabad and a nearby market town to raise the tricolour national flag, a day before Afghanistan’s Independence Day, which commemorates the 1919 treaty that ended British rule. They lowered the Taliban flag – a white banner with an Islamic inscription – that the militants have raised in the areas they captured.