Taliban spokesman Zabihullah Mujahid told reporters that the updated Afghan military under the jihadists’ rule will have a place for women as well as a battalion of suicide bombers, the Afghan outlet Khaama Press reported on Tuesday.
The Taliban has spent much of its effort since taking over Afghanistan in August – the result of President Joe Biden violating an agreement with both the prior Afghan government and the Taliban in place prior to his inauguration – attempting to reconstruct its military. Much of that effort has been acquiring abandoned American weapons, which the jihadists have readily paraded through the streets of multiple Afghan cities. Well-armed and with little resistance to their control of the country nationwide, the Taliban’s “Defense Ministry” has moved on to organizing the armed forces and integrating its jihadists into its ranks. The Taliban had previously announced that it was working to organizing a force of 100,000 fighters as the official armed forces of Afghanistan.
The Afghan National Defense and Security Forces (ANDSF), the official military of the legitimate government of Afghanistan, collapsed in August days after Biden withdrew the final U.S. forces in the country.
According to Khaama, Mujahid told reporters that the armed forces of the “Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan,” the formal name for the Taliban leadership, would include “a special battalion of suicide attackers.”
“Zabiullah Mujahid said that the battalion will be used during special operations,” Khaama relayed.
Khaama noted that, during the same remarks – which the outlet did not date – Mujahid also said that the Taliban military will have room for women “based on need.”
The Taliban is reportedly struggling to turn its terrorist ranks into a legitimate security force. Among the greater problems for the group is the informal nature of being a Taliban terrorist, which has resulted in widespread reports of Taliban members committing abuses against civilians – mostly public beatings against people accused of “un-Islamic” behavior – that the Taliban denies involvement with arguing that no evidence exists the guilty parties are official members of the Taliban.
The Taliban “Ministry of the Interior” announced on Tuesday that it will soon grant its forces uniforms, an often-repeated request by Afghan citizens harassed and often assaulted by undetermined parties believed to be Taliban terrorists.
“The Ministry of Interior has started making uniforms for police, besides training them. This plan will continue until all police forces are given uniforms,” Mohammad Aqel Ozam, a deputy spokesman at the ministry, said, according to the Afghan network Tolo News.
Militarily, Taliban propagandists on social media began the year by publishing videos intended to show the might of the “Islamic Special Forces” as it organizes out of the ashes of the 20-year Afghan War.
The Taliban took over Afghanistan on August 15, entering Kabul that day after former President Ashraf Ghani abruptly fled the country. The Taliban terrorist organization had been the government of Afghanistan prior to September 2001, when the American military invaded the country in response to the terrorist attacks on New York and Washington, DC, that year. The main reason the administration of then-President George W. Bush gave to the American people for invading Afghanistan was deposing the Taliban for its ties to al-Qaeda, the group responsible for the attacks, and its leader Osama bin Laden.
During its prior rule, Taliban jihadists had brutally repressed the Afghan people, forcing women to hide under burqas and violently implementing its severe interpretation of sharia, or Islamic law. Since returning to power last year, however, spokesmen like Mujahid have insisted that the group seeks to establish a more “inclusive” government. Taliban representatives repeatedly used the world to describe the administration they were hoping to establish in Kabul throughout the first weeks of their return to power.
“Our countrymen and women who have been waiting, I would like to assure that after consultations that are going to be completed very soon, we will be witnessing the formation of a strong Islamic and inclusive government, Inshallah,” Mujahid told reporters in August. “We will do our most to make sure that everybody is included in the country, even those people against us in the past, so we are going to wait until those announcements are made.”
Since then, Taliban leaders have appointed only trusted Taliban veterans and members of the deadly Haqqani jihadist network to ministerial positions in the Afghan government, excluding women, ethnic minorities, and non-Muslims. Terrorists have also taken the streets to intimidate women into never leaving their homes and to berate men into complying with their “morality” demands. Among the most recent Taliban public announcements were a video showing jihadists dumping illegal alcohol into a canal and a warning that the jihadists would establish citywide checkpoints in Kabul to pester people about “beards, music, women, and going to mosques during service hours.”