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  • The Christian Science Monitor

    What one death threat says about Taliban's campaign of fear

    Dec 07, 2018 4 minutes
    Afghan boys stand beside a car decorated for newlyweds in the parking lot outside the Paris Castle wedding hall in Kabul, Afghanistan, in November 2015. A brief visit by an American reporter at the wedding, for a bride and groom of Afghanistan’s majority ethnic Pashtuns – who form the backbone of support for the Taliban – prompted a series of Taliban death threats to the Afghans who escorted the reporter. Taliban agents photographed the reporter’s car and Afghans with him, resulting in charges of working with American 'spies' and 'leaving their religion,' and finally orders within the Taliban to 'behead' the escorts if found.

    The young Afghan man never thought a 15-minute visit with an American reporter to a glittering wedding celebration in Kabul could have such long-standing and potentially lethal consequences – or yield a Taliban plan to kill him.

    Abdullah did not even leave the parking lot that fateful night, three years ago. But he had driven the American in his car, and, at the ethnic Pashtun wedding, Taliban insurgents were among the hundreds in attendance.

    The result has been an abject lesson in the Taliban intelligence’s depth of penetration in the Afghan capital, and in the long memories and scale of antipathy these Islamist militants hold against Western-leaning Afghans and those they consider spies and traitors.

    Abdullah felt that fear this June when

    After the wedding, threatsSaved by prayerDisplay of intelligence prowess

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