At the weekend it looked as if the rebels were trying to counter the defeat with reports of success.

More than a thousand Taliban fighters have been captured and many more killed, said the Afghanistan National Resistance Front from the Punjir Valley.

After the takeover of power, numerous opponents of the Islamists had holed up there under the leadership of the former Vice President Amrullah Saleh and Ahmad Massoud, the son of the legendary Mujahideen leader Ahmad Shah Massoud.

The Taliban had long since celebrated the capture of Pandjir with rifle volleys in Kabul.

It is the last of 34 Afghan provinces to oppose their rule.

Alexander Haneke

Editor in politics.

  • Follow I follow

On Monday, Taliban spokesman Zabihullah Mujahid announced in Kabul that the war was over. In a video that is said to have been recorded in front of the governor's palace in the provincial capital of Bazarak, fighters can be seen hoisting the Taliban flag next to the building. An Italian aid organization that runs a hospital near Bazarak has also confirmed the Taliban's capture of the area. The resistance front announced on Twitter that its spokesman, the well-known Afghan journalist Fahim Dashti, had died during the fighting. Dashti had already fought alongside Massoud's father in the 1990s against the Taliban. Massoud himself was initially said to have left the inaccessible valley. But then he reported on Twitter with the message that he was in Punjir,the resistance continues.

In this situation, in which reports from both sides can hardly be verified, Massoud's resistance front published pictures and videos on Twitter, which are supposed to show Pakistani fighter planes in the Punjir Valley. In addition, there were unconfirmed reports about the use of drones. It was only at the weekend that the visit of the head of the Pakistani secret service ISI, Faiz Hameed, to Kabul fueled speculation that Pakistan continues to exert very direct influence on the Taliban. The Pakistani ISI has always been said to have extremely close relationships with the Islamists in the neighboring country, which it has been supposed to promote since they were founded. There have been repeated reports in the past that the ISI was even behind the founding of the Taliban, although this was never confirmed.In the first few years in particular, the Islamists recruited a large number of their fighters from the Afghan refugee camps in the Pashtun areas on the other side of the border with the neighboring country. For a long time, many ranks of the Islamist leaders operated from Pakistani soil. After its expulsion from Kabul in 2001, the Taliban's supreme body was even commonly referred to as the Quetta-Shura, as it was suspected to be in the Pakistani city of the same name. The Haqqani network in particular, a powerful group within the Taliban, is said to have close ties to the ISI. So there were repeated attempts in Washington to increase the pressure on Pakistan.

For the new rulers in Kabul, who celebrated their victory over the old government primarily as the liberation of Afghanistan from foreign rule by foreign powers, the reports of military support from neighboring Pakistan are therefore spicy. Ahmadullah Wasiq, the deputy chairman of the Taliban's cultural commission, emphasized after a meeting between ISI chief Hameed and Taliban leader Mullah Abdul Ghani Baradar at the weekend that the talks were mainly about bilateral relations and questions of border traffic at the crossings went between the two countries. Taliban spokesman Mujahid was even quoted by Indian news sites as saying that no country would be allowed to interfere in Afghanistan's affairs, including Pakistan.