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Magda Gad: Afghans prefer Taliban rule

Published 25 March 2024 at 16.16

Foreign. War correspondent Magda Gad has spent years in Afghanistan. Now she states that she has not spoken to a single Afghan who preferred the US-backed regime to the current Taliban regime.

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Magda Gad writes in a post on X that she came to Afghanistan in 2018 and that she thus had to “live through the rule of the previous government, the regime change and the rule of the Taliban”.

She is surprised by the situation in the country.

“With 2.5 years of Taliban rule, I had expected something completely different from this reality. After all, we were told for twenty years that the war was necessary and that it was worth all the billions of dollars and all the injured and killed,” she writes.

But in fact “no” Afghan shares this view, continues Magda Gad.

“In fact, I have not met a single Afghan who wants back the former US-backed the government. No one”, she writes and continues:

“They think it was corrupt and useless, they hated the war and that it was not possible to travel within the country and was not safe. The foreign presence divided Afghans and Afghans were even paid to kill other Afghans.”

< p>What some are unhappy with about the Taliban rule, after all, is that girls are no longer allowed to go to school after grade six – “but that doesn't mean they want regime change”.

“Many people's worst nightmare is that the former US-backed regime would return. As a human being, I wish we had all been better at telling this while it was still going on,” writes Magda Gad.

Death penalty for “bacha bazi”
The Taliban have seized on a series of abuses that ran rampant under the US-loyal so-called democracy in Afghanistan. Among other things, they have cracked down hard on opium cultivation and forcibly detoxified a large number of addicts.

The new Taliban regime has also reintroduced the death penalty for “bacha bazi” – the Afghan tradition of raping small boys that was very widespread during the US- loyal board. In 2015 it was revealed that US soldiers were instructed not to intervene in such rapes of boys.

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