Afghan conflict: Taliban control all key cities except Kabul (2024)

FAQs

What countries does the Taliban occupy? ›

The Taliban are a predominantly Pashtun, Islamic fundamentalist group that returned to power in Afghanistan in 2021 after waging a twenty-year insurgency.

The Taliban's ideology and model of governance is based on gender-based persecution. Since August 2021, the Taliban has issued more than one hundred and fifty decrees and more than eighty of them are directed toward banning and limiting women's access to their most fundamental rights.

The Taliban is a Sunni Islamist nationalist and pro-Pashtun movement founded in the early 1990s that ruled most of Afghanistan from 1996 until October 2001.

Since the Fall of Kabul in 2021 until the Chinese recognition in 2024, no country has recognized the Taliban as the legitimate government of Afghanistan.

The United States does not recognize the Taliban or any other entity as the government of Afghanistan and reports there are no U.S. diplomatic or military personnel in the country. The Taliban government is dominated by officials from the Taliban's prior rule or longtime loyalists.

Upon seizing power, the Taliban regime instituted a system of gender apartheid effectively thrusting the women of Afghanistan into a state of virtual house arrest. Under Taliban rule women were stripped of all human rights – their work, visibility, opportunity for education, voice, healthcare, and mobility.

Political situation

The Taliban de facto authorities have been in control of Afghanistan following the fall of Kabul on 15 August 2021. The Taliban regime is led by Mawlawi Hibatullah Akhundzada from the city of Kandahar with the ministries continuing to be based in Kabul, the capital.

Christians have historically comprised a small community in Afghanistan. The total number of Christians in Afghanistan is currently estimated to be between 15,000 and 20,000 according to International Christian Concern. Almost all Afghan Christians are converts from Islam.

What Is the Goal of the Taliban? Speaking to Newsweek, Dr. Thomas Barfield, the author of Afghanistan: A Cultural and Political History, said: "They [the Taliban] want to rule an Islamic State in Afghanistan using conservative rules, I do not believe that [they] have an ultimate goal beyond that."

What does "taliban" mean in Arabic? ›

The word Taliban comes from tālib, "student" in Arabic, as the group was started by Pakistani religious school students in the mid-1990s.

During the conflict, the Taliban typically recruited unemployed Pashtun males from rural communities who were educated and trained in Afghans and Pakistanis madrassas, mosques and camps. It was reported that they had no shortage of volunteers and recruits.

During the medieval period, the northwestern area of Afghanistan was referred to by the regional name Khorasan, which was commonly used up to the 19th century among natives to describe their country.

The graveyard of empires is a sobriquet often associated with Afghanistan.

Though the Sikhs captured and plundered Lahore, the Afghans recaptured Lahore in 1761, but just within a couple of months, in May 1761, the Sikh army defeated the Afghan army, led by Ahmad Shah's governor of the Chahar Mahal, followed with defeat and surrender of relief party sent from Kandahar.

Local groups are usually inevitably used to serve grand strategies. From this particular point of view, the Taliban, ISIS and others are identical. But upon closer examination, there is a clear difference between the Taliban and ISIS. ISIS is not formally sponsored by any regional or international power.

Dead: 52,893+ killed (estimate, no official data). The insurgency had spread to some degree over the border to neighboring Pakistan, in particular Khyber Pakhtunkhwa. The Taliban conducted warfare against Afghan National Security Forces and their NATO allies, as well as against civilian targets.

Symbolism of the flag of the Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan

The white stands for "the (Islamic Movement of Taliban's) purity of faith and government"; the flag incorporated the shahada, the Islamic declaration of faith, after 1997.

The Taliban disagreed with past Afghan statutes that allowed the employment of Afghan women in a mixed sex workplace. The claim was that this was a breach of purdah and Sharia law. On 30 September 1996, the Taliban decreed that all women should be banned from employment.