Taliban revenge killings heighten fears; ‘no clear way out’ alarms UN

Taliban fighters tortured and killed members of an ethnic minority in Afghanistan after recently overrunning their village, Amnesty International said. (AP)

• Militants screen people on way to Kabul airport
• Biden vows to bring home all Americans

JEDDAH: Most Afghans are unable to leave their homeland and those who may be in danger “have no clear way out,” the UN refugee agency said on Friday.
Shabia Mantoo, spokesperson of the UN High Commissioner for Refugees, reiterated its call to neighboring countries to keep their borders open to allow people to seek asylum in light of what she called the “evolving crisis.”
“The vast majority of Afghans are not able to leave the country through regular channels,” she told a Geneva news briefing. “As of today, those who may be in danger have no clear way out.”
There have only been “small-scale movements” of Afghans crossing into Pakistan and Iran, Mantoo said.
Taliban fighters tortured and killed members of an ethnic minority in Afghanistan after recently overrunning their village, Amnesty International said, fueling fears that they will again impose a brutal rule, even as they urged imams to push a message of unity at the first gathering for Friday prayers since the capital was seized.
The rights group said that its researchers spoke to eyewitnesses in Ghazni province who recounted how the Taliban killed nine Hazara men in the village of Mundarakht on July 4-6. It said six of the men were shot, and three were tortured to death.
A Norway-based private intelligence group that provides information to the UN said it obtained evidence that the Taliban have rounded up Afghans on a blacklist of people they believe worked in key roles with the previous Afghan administration or with US-led forces.
In an email, the executive director of the RHIPTO Norwegian Center for Global Analyzes said the organization knew about several threat letters sent to Afghans.
The German public broadcaster Deutsche Welle said the Taliban had shot dead the relative of one of its journalists while searching for the editor.
“The killing of a close relative of one of our editors by the Taliban yesterday is inconceivably tragic, and testifies to the acute danger in which all our employees and their families in Afghanistan find themselves,” DW director general Peter Limbourg said.
According to a confidential document by the UN’s threat assessment consultants, militants were also screening people on the way to Kabul airport.
“They are targeting the families of those who refuse to give themselves up, and prosecuting and punishing their families ‘according to Shariah law’,” Christian Nellemann, the group’s executive director, said.
Mohammad Naim, who said he used to be an interpreter for US forces, has been in the airport crowd for four days trying to escape. He said put his children on the roof of a car on the first day to save them from being crushed by the mass of people. He saw other children killed who were unable to get out of the way.
President Joe Biden sought to reassure the US on the dramatic evacuation from Afghanistan, promising no Americans would be abandoned in one of the “most difficult” airlifts in history. Biden warned that the frantic effort to fly Americans, other foreigners and Afghan allies out of Taliban-occupied Kabul was dangerous.
The UAE has agreed to host 5,000 Afghan nationals to be evacuated from their country on their way to third countries, the UAE’s embassy in the US said.