Taliban flag rises over seat of power as US marks 9/11 anniversary

The Taliban has raised its flag over the Afghan presidential palace, a spokesman said, as the US marked the 20th anniversary of the September 11 attacks.

The white banner, emblazoned with a Quranic verse, was hoisted by Mullah Mohammad Hassan Akhund, the prime minister of the Taliban interim government, in a low-key ceremony on Saturday, said Ahmadullah Muttaqi, multimedia branch chief of the Taliban's cultural commission.

The flag-raising marked the official start of the work of the new government, he said. 

The composition of the all-male, all-Taliban government was announced earlier this week and was met with disappointment by the international community which had hoped the Taliban would make good on an earlier promise of an inclusive lineup.

In a tweet, Afghanistan's first president to follow the 2001 collapse of the Taliban, Hamid Karzai, called for "peace and stability" and expressed the hope that the new caretaker Cabinet that included no women and no non-Taliban would become an "inclusive government that can be the real face of the whole Afghanistan."

He marked the 20th anniversary of the 9/11 attacks on America with a meeting of tribal elders on his high-walled compound in the Afghan capital where he has remained with his family since the August return of the Taliban to Kabul.

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End of US invasion 

Two decades ago, the Taliban ruled Afghanistan with a heavy hand. Television was banned, and on September 11, 2001, the day of the horrific attacks on America, the news spread from crackling radios across the darkened streets of the Afghan capital of Kabul.

The city rarely had electricity and barely a million people lived in Kabul at the time. It took the US-led coalition just two months to drive the Taliban from the capital and by December 7, 2001, they were defeated, driven from their last holdout in southern Kandahar, their spiritual heartland.

Twenty years later, the Taliban are back in Kabul. America has departed, ending its "forever war" two weeks before the 20th anniversary of 9/11 and two weeks after the Taliban returned to the Afghan capital on August 15.

Some things have changed since the first period of Taliban rule in the 1990s.

This time, the gun-toting fighters don't race through the city streets in their pickups. Instead, they inch through chaotic, clogged traffic in the city of more than 5 million. 

In Taliban-controlled Kabul in the 1990s, barber shops were banned. Now Taliban fighters get the latest haircuts, even if their beards remain untouched in line with their religious beliefs.

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Ban on women's sports

But the Taliban have begun issuing harsh edicts that have hit women hardest, such as banning women's sports. They have also used violence to stop women demanding equal rights from protesting.

Inside a high-end women's store in the city's Karte Se neighbourhood on Saturday, Marzia Hamidi, a Taekwondo competitor with ambitions of being a national champion, said the return of the Taliban has crushed her dreams.

She was among the women attacked by the Taliban and called "agents of the West" during one of the recent protests. She said she's not surprised about America's withdrawal.

"This year or next year, they had to leave eventually," she said. "They came for their own interest and they left for their interest."

Hamidi is hoping the Taliban will relent and ease their restrictions, but with a glance toward the store owner, Faisal Naziri, she said "most men in Afghanistan agree with what the Taliban say about women and their rules against them."

Naziri nodded, saying preserving the rights of women is not a cause that will bring Afghan men on the streets.

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Women march to show support for Taliban

On Saturday, Afghan women wearing full-face veils sat in rows at a Kabul university lecture theatre, pledging commitment to the Taliban's policies on gender segregation.

About 300 women –– covered head-to-toe in accordance with strict new dress policies for education –– waved Taliban flags as speakers railed against the West and expressed support for Taliban's policies.

A handful wore blue burqas, which have only a small mesh window to see from, but most wore black niqabs covering most of the face apart from the eyes.

Many also wore black gloves.

"We are against those women who are protesting on the streets, claiming they are representative of women," said the first speaker, covered head to toe.

"Is it the freedom to like the last government? No, it is not freedom. The last government was misusing women. They were recruiting women just by their beauty," she claimed.

Some in the audience held babies, who occasionally cried during the speeches, while others were young girls clearly too young for university.

After the speeches in the meeting hall, the women walked in organised lines a short distance on the street outside, holding printed banners and flanked by Taliban soldiers carrying rifles and machine guns.

The women marched briefly outside the centre grounds, waving placards saying "the women who left don't represent us," referring to the many thousands who fled in fear of a Taliban crackdown on women’s rights. 

"We don’t want co-education," read another banner.

Back to 'where we were 20 years ago'

Outside the hall, the Taliban director of higher education, Maulvi Mohammad Daoud Haqqani, said 9/11 was the day "the world started their propaganda against us calling us terrorists and blaming us" for the attacks in the United States.

At a dusty book store in Kabul's Karte Sangi neighbourhood, Atta Zakiri, a civil society activist said America was wrong to attack Afghanistan after 9/11.

He blamed the invasion that followed the 9/11 attacks for creating another generation of hardline Taliban fighters.

"The Taliban should have been allowed to stay. Why didn’t we work with them? Instead, they went to fight," he said.

"And now we are back to where we were 20 years ago."

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