Draped in a bandolier of shotgun cartridges, an Afghan cafe owner was forced to cobble together a militia of neighbourhood fruit vendors and vegetable hawkers when the Taliban threatened his city, demonstrating an alarming new push into urban areas.
Emboldened by their recent three-day occupation of Kunduz, the first Afghan city to fall to the Taliban since their ouster from power in 2001, insurgents have made brazen attempts to overrun several other provincial centres, from Ghazni in the south to Maimana in the north.
Seen previously as a rural militant movement capable only of hit-and-run attacks on cities, the Taliban’s aggressive campaign to capture major urban areas reveals a highly potent insurgency that poses a crucial test for Afghanistan’s overstretched North Atlantic Treaty Organisation (Nato)-backed forces.
On the night of October 4, less than a week after Kunduz fell, insurgents raided the capital of northern Faryab province bordering Turkmenistan.
Storming down the flanking shale-brown hills, they forced residents to snatch up meat cleavers and Kalashnikovs to defend the city alongside informal militias as security forces appeared to abandon their posts.
“Maimana city was like a house without doors that night,” said cafe owner Haji Mohammad Ashraf, a 62-year-old community leader with a salt-and-pepper beard and a shotgun in his lap.
“People had no choice but to stand up and fight.”
As insurgents breached the Maimana’s outer defences, coming within four kilometres of the city, close-range battles erupted — “bullets were striking against bullets”, a resident said.
Pandemonium broke out as people scrambled to flee, fearing an outcome much worse than in Kunduz, where Taliban death squads were accused of rape, summary executions and torching and plundering buildings.
Those who stayed burned their government ID’s, shredded polio vaccination documents and tore down pictures of unveiled women as residents hastened to erase anything that could invite the wrath of occupying Taliban cadres.
Ashraf mobilised his 12 sons and neighbouring shopkeepers, who traditionally keep small arms at home but have little or no combat experience.
“I told them: ‘Let’s defend our city, let’s fight till the last drop of blood in our veins’.”
Before he went to fight, Ashraf locked up his two wives, six daughters and other female relatives in a room, with a sobering warning that he would blow them up with grenade to protect their “honour” if the Taliban came. “I told them: ‘If we cannot protect you, we will kill you’.”
