Talking to the Taliban - Part 1 - Negotiations

Face to face with the foot soldiers


KANDAHAR, AFGHANISTAN
March 22, 2008

He looks like an ordinary Afghan in ragged clothes. He says he's young, 24 or 25 years old, but his eyes seem older. Somebody he knows, or loves, was killed by a bomb dropped from the sky, he says. The government tried to destroy his farm. His tribe has feuded with the government in recent years, and he feels pushed to the edge of a society that ranks among the poorest in the world.

So he lives by the gun. He cradles the weapon in his arms, saying he will follow the tradition of his ancestors who battled foreign armies. He is not only a Taliban foot soldier, he says. He belongs to the mujahedeen, the holy warriors, who fight any infidel who tries to invade Afghanistan.

He does not care where the foreigners come from. Maybe he knows the word Canada, but he cannot point to the country on a map. When he squints down his rifle at Canadian soldiers, he cannot imagine the faraway land that gave birth to those helmeted figures. He only wants to drive them away. He fervently believes that expelling the foreigners will set things right in his troubled country.

This portrait of an average Taliban fighter emerges from groundbreaking research by The Globe and Mail in Kandahar. The newspaper's staff, working with a freelance researcher, gained unprecedented access to insurgent groups in five districts of Kandahar province, and finished the dangerous assignment with 42 video recordings of fighters answering a standardized list of questions.

Category:

News & Politics

Tags:

• Interview
• Taliban
• Afghanistan
• Terrorist
• Canada
• Muslim
• Mujahideen
• Suicide
• Bombings
• Kandahar

[ankaloin]

Foreign armies swarming Afghanistan. Foreign companies in Afghanistan stealing Afghan resources protected by foreign private military companies. Foreign governments implement self-destructing secularism into peaceful Afghan Islamic society.

Afghans born and bred on Afghan soil. Foreigners bring death and destruction to Afghan soil. Afghans fight back. Now whats wrong with that

[ankaloin]

my friend, 1b74, peace be upon you. The suicide bombings only started after the occupation began. The images of Afghans being executed in public are purely tribal, strict sharia law and isolated. Even most of the executioners are family members of the rape/murder victim themselves. The western media propagated the whole thing like its some kind of genocide to demonize the Afghan society, rallying support from the public to 'comfortably' wage this war.

[17Saima]

@bengacris when they sid women and wine, they ment prostitutes and alcohol

[chuck9788]

"Many of them (taliban) couldn't find Canada on the map"

This speaks volumes on how muslims oppress Afghans by not allowing education. This is why muslim scholars are pretty much non existent. This is why the taliban does not allow woman to be educated.

C'mon, have you ever heard ANY muslim speak out against this? No, because the cult "religion" is all about submission.

[junkrat1]

that first video at 2:08 he amped up to be something no1 new and it was the most obvious fucking answer a taliban member could give....

the next thing you need to know is the taliban blow things out of proportion, they lie ALOT for propaganda purposes. They hate everyone that doesn't believe in extemisist Islamic views.

[talleyho12]

so give them the fuckin muslim government. jesus!

[CatIcarus]

okay, that's it, they want us to leave then they won't attack us anymore. FINE BY ME, and if they do, then we fight with both hands ( something we haven't been doing these past 10 years) and yeah................

[bohemianwriter1]

@ankaloin

Sharia laws and the implementations of this is not necessarily tribal. Though in Afghanistan they operate with three or four different laws I hear...

Islam is still an ilk to society like Christianity once was. If only Afghanistan went back to its Buddhist roots a thousand years ago....

[suevushka]

"They had never heard this world 'Canada'' ha ha ha ha (Sorry Canadians, at least they aren't going to hit Ottawa.)

[mustafa32453]

ta k tukhm sag pashtoon ghulam pakistan ast dar afghanistan watan aram namesha

[vukvuk5]

my friends sisters boyfriend filmed this...

[lollol986]

@ankaloin suicides bombings only started after the occupation??? what a fundamentalist biased comment they always had suicide attacks in afghanistan how do you expliain the all the dead under taliban ?listen you can't sit there and always use the media as an excuse that they said this they exaggerated that , i know ppl whom ran from afghanistan cause of this shit and if they heard u speak like that u d get ur balls cut off. .. what shocks me is the ongoing support for these "freedom fighters"