On patrol: 12 days with a Taliban police unit in Kabul

A younger Taliban fighter with a pair of handcuffs dangling from his finger warily watched the stream of approaching vehicles as he stood in entrance of a set of metal barricades.

Friday prayers would start quickly on the Sakhi Shah-e Mardan shrine and mosque, a holy Shiite web site in central Kabul that he was guarding.

There had been two bombings of Shiite mosques in Afghanistan by the Islamic State group in current months, killing dozens, and this 18-year-old Taliban fighter, Mohammad Khalid Omer, wasn’t taking any probabilities.

He and his police unit of 5 different fighters, colloquially often called the Sakhi unit after the shrine they defend, symbolize the Taliban’s vanguard of their latest wrestle after the group’s gorgeous takeover of the nation in August: They received the conflict, however can they safe the peace in a multiethnic nation racked by greater than 40 years of violence?

Journalists from The New York Times spent 12 days with the small Taliban unit this fall, happening a number of patrols with them of their zone, Police District 3, and touring to their properties in Wardak province, a neighboring mountainous space.

So far, the brand new authorities’s strategy to policing has been advert hoc at finest: Local Taliban models have assumed the position at checkpoints throughout the nation, whereas in giant cities, equivalent to Kabul, Taliban fighters have been imported from surrounding provinces.

Taliban fighter Zahed, assigned to protect the Sakhi Shrine, a Shia mosque and shrine, on patrol within the Kart-e-Sakhi neighborhood of Kabul, Afghanistan, on Nov 3, 2021. (Victor J. Blue/The New York Times)

Even with solely half a dozen members, the Sakhi unit provides a telling snapshot of the Taliban, each when it comes to who their core fighters are and what the most important problem is for them as Afghanistan’s new rulers: Once a primarily rural insurgency, the motion is now being pressured to cope with governing and securing the unfamiliar city facilities it had been saved out of for many years.

No longer are fighters like Omer sleeping beneath the celebrities, avoiding airstrikes and planning ambushes in opposition to overseas troops or the Western-backed Afghan authorities.

Instead, they’re wrestling with the identical financial hardships gripping their countrymen, with the identical risk of Islamic State assaults and with the raucous, puzzling, winding streets and again alleys of Kabul, a metropolis of about 4.5 million people who they’re virtually strangers to .

Members of the Taliban police unit tasked with defending a Shiite shrine collect round their single electrical heater at their residing quarters in Kabul, Afghanistan, Nov 14, 2021. Their telephones are the main focus of a lot of their downtime. (Victor J. Blue/The New York Times)

The Sakhi unit lives full time subsequent to the shrine in a small concrete room painted vivid inexperienced with a single electrical heater. Steel bunk beds line the partitions. The solely ornament is a single poster of the sacred Kaaba in Mecca.

In Afghanistan, many Shiites belong to the Hazara ethnic minority. The Taliban, a Sunni Pashtun motion, severely persecuted Hazaras the final time they dominated the nation. But the seeming implausibility of a Talib unit really guarding such an emblematic Shiite web site is belied by how significantly the boys appeared to take their task.

“We do not care which ethnic group we serve, our goal is to serve and provide security for Afghans,” stated Habib Rahman Inqayad, 25, the unit chief and most skilled of them. “We never think that these people are Pashtun or Hazara.”

Habib Rahman Inqayad admires a Taliban patch he acquired on the primary army items mall in Kabul, which was once often called the Bush Bazaar, after the US president, and has since been renamed the Mujahideen Bazaar, on Nov 3, 2021. (Victor J. Blue/The New York Times)

But Inqayad’s sentiments distinction with the Taliban’s interim authorities, composed nearly fully of Pashtun hard-liners who’re emblematic of the motion’s harsh rule within the Nineties, and who’re perceived as anti-Hazara.

As he spoke within the unit’s cramped barracks, a small speaker usually performed “taranas,” the spoken prayer songs, with out musical accompaniment, in style with the Talibs.

One of the group’s favorites was a tune about dropping one’s comrades and the tragedy of youth misplaced. In a excessive skinny voice, the singer intones, “O death, you break and kill our hearts.”

On a fall day final yr because the Sakhi unit seemed on, households gathered on the tiled terraces across the shrine, ingesting tea and sharing meals.

Family photographs on the house of Habib Rahman Inqayad, a Taliban fighter assigned to a Kabul police unit, in Wardak Province, Afghanistan on Nov 19, 2021. Inqayad’s father, Mullah Gul-Wali, high proper, a Talib within the earlier regime, was killed preventing within the northern province of Balkh throughout the US invasion in 2001, when his son was simply 4. (Victor J. Blue/The New York Times)

Some cautiously eyed the Talibs patrolling the location and one group of younger males hastened to place out their cigarettes as they approached. The Taliban typically frown on smoking and the unit has at instances bodily punished people who smoke.

Another day, two teenage boys got here to the shrine, overtly strolling with their two girlfriends. They had been confronted by the Sakhi unit, who requested what they had been doing. Unsatisfied with their solutions, the Talibs dragged the boys into their bunk room to reply for the transition. In conservative Afghanistan, such public consorting is taboo, doubly so in a holy web site beneath Taliban guard.

Inside their room, there was an argument among the many Sakhi unit about find out how to deal with the 2 boys: good cop versus dangerous cop. Hekmatullah Sahel, one of many extra skilled members of the unit, disagreed together with his comrades. He pushed for a verbal lashing reasonably than a bodily one. He was overruled.

From left, the Taliban fighters Habib Rahman Inqayad, Hekmatullah Sahel and Mohammad Khalid Omer greet a younger customer on the Sakhi Shah-e Mardan shrine and mosque, which their unit is charged with defending, in Kabul, Afghanistan, Nov 6, 2021. ( Victor J. Blue/The New York Times)

When the youngsters had been lastly allowed to depart, shaken by the beating they’d simply acquired, Sahel referred to as out to the boys, telling them to return again once more — however with out their girlfriends.

The episode was a reminder to the shrine’s guests that the Taliban fighters, whereas typically pleasant, might nonetheless revert to the ways that outlined their non secular hard-line rule within the Nineties.

For the group of six fighters, contending with flirting youngsters was simply one other indicator that their days of preventing a guerrilla conflict had been over. Now they spend their time preoccupied by extra quotidian policing issues, like recognizing potential bootleggers (alcohol in Afghanistan is banned), discovering gasoline for his or her unit’s pickup and questioning whether or not their commander will grant them go away for the weekend.

Omer had joined the unit solely months earlier than. “I joined the Islamic Emirate because I had a great desire to serve my religion and country,” he stated.

Mohammad Khalid Omer, left, reaches out to his 1-year-old sister at his household house in Qurbani village within the Chak District of Wardak Province, Afghanistan, on Nov 19, 2022. (Victor J. Blue/The New York Times)

But to some Talibs, Omer is what’s derisively referred to as a “21-er” — a fighter who solely joined the motion in 2021, as victory loomed. This new era of Talibs convey new expectations with them, chief amongst them the need for a wage.

They and most different rank-and-file fighters have by no means acquired a wage from the motion. Despite seizing billions in US-supplied weapons and materials, the Taliban are nonetheless removed from being effectively geared up. Fighters are depending on their commanders for primary provides they usually must scrounge for something further.

Sahel, at 28, is older than most of his comrades, slower to excite and extra restrained. He spent 4 years finding out at a college, working the entire time as a clandestine operative for the motion.

“None of my classmates knew that I was in the Taliban,” he stated.

Inside the Sakhi shrine, a Shiite holy web site, in Kabul, Afghanistan, Nov 16, 2021. (Victor J. Blue/The New York Times)

He graduated with a level in physics and math schooling, however returned to the battle.

Relived the conflict is over, he and his comrades nonetheless miss the sense of goal it supplied.

“We are happy that our country was liberated and we are currently living in peace,” he stated, however added, “we are very sad for our friends who were martyred.”

Every few weeks, the boys are allowed to go to their households again in Wardak for 2 days. On a crisp morning in November, Inqayad sat in his house within the Masjid Gardena valley, a ravishing assortment of orchards and fields hemmed in by mountain peaks.

Hekmatullah Sahel, a Talib assigned to Kabul’s Police District 3, within the hills above the Sakhi Shah-e Mardan shrine and mosque, which his unit is charged with defending, on Nov 6, 2021. (Victor J. Blue/The New York Times) )

He defined that many households within the space had misplaced sons to the preventing, and estimated that 80% of the households within the space had been Taliban supporters.

Inqayad attended faculty till the seventh grade, however needed to drop out. Religious research crammed in some gaps. He joined the Taliban at 15.

Recently married, he faces new challenges now that the motion is in energy. The solely potential breadwinner in his household, he wants a wage to help his spouse, mom and sisters, however up to now he has not been drawing one.

Back in Kabul, the Sakhi unit loaded up for an evening patrol, bundling as much as fight the chilly wind that blows incessantly from the mountains ringing the town.

Omer rode within the mattress of the unit’s truck, a machine gun resting on his lap and bands of ammunition wrapped round his neck like celebration beads.

But there was little to warrant the heavy weaponry meant for suppressing enemy troops. Their space of ​​accountability was quiet and the boys appeared bored as they spun across the metropolis as packs of road canines chased and snapped on the tires of passing vehicles.