The violent Islamist Taliban group ambushed and killed the director of Afghanistan’s government media center on Friday in the capital city of Kabul. The assassination occurred just days after an attempt on the life of the country’s acting defense minister.
The slaying comes amid Taliban advances to claim more territory. U.S. and NATO forces are in the final stages of pulling out of Afghanistan by the end of the month. The Taliban has waged fierce battles for months across the country, laying siege to cities in the south and west. The group has captured district after district and seized several key border crossings.
Also Friday, in southern Nimroz province, the regional capital of Zaranj fell to the Taliban. The government claimed there was still fierce fighting around key infrastructure in the city. But the Taliban posted images on social media showing insurgents inside the local airport and at the entrance to the city.
Nimroz is a small city of only about 50,000 residents. It is set in a sparsely populated desert region. Its fall to the Taliban, if confirmed, was a mostly symbolic rather than strategic victory for the rebels.
Taliban spokesman Zabihullah Mujahid told The Associated Press that the insurgents claim responsibility for the death of media director Dawa Khan Menapal. Mujahid said in a statement that the killing was carried out by the Taliban’s “holy warriors.”
Menapal was the chief of the Afghan government’s press operations. Previously, he had been a deputy spokesman for the Afghan president. Silencing government media is key to keeping Afghanistan’s citizens from access to valuable information about the militant group’s progress and plans.
Meanwhile, Afghan and U.S. aircraft pounded Taliban positions in southern Afghanistan’s Helmand province on Friday. Taliban insurgents there had closed a major border crossing with neighboring Pakistan.
Residents in Helmand’s provincial capital, Lashkar Gah, said airstrikes destroyed a market in the center of the city—an area controlled by the Taliban. Afghan officials say the Taliban now control nine out of the 10 city districts. The shuttered office of the humanitarian organization Action Against Hunger was hit in an air strike there on Thursday. Fighting had forced the group to close its office last week.
The turmoil in Afghanistan has displaced hundreds of thousands of citizens. The homeless now live in miserable conditions in improvised shelters and camps in the desert-like environment. Whole families wait out brutally hot days and cold nights. Inside the cities where fighting is underway, thousands are trapped. They are unable to move from their homes despite ongoing danger. In Kandahar, the capital of the province with the same name, hundreds shelter in makeshift camps, wondering where they will get food for their children.
More than half of Afghanistan’s 421 districts and district centers are now in Taliban hands.
Afghanistan’s elite commandos have deployed to Lashkar Gah, backed up by airstrikes by Afghan and U.S. air forces. But as the United States prepares to leave the area, much doubt remains about whether the long-devastated nation will be able to stop the Taliban’s steady sweep.
(Afghan security personnel arrive at the scene where the director of Afghanistan’s Government Information Media Center Dawa Khan Menapal was shot dead by the Taliban in Kabul, Afghanistan, on Friday, August 6, 2021. AP/Rahmat Gul)
