Now there are no infidels,” he told AFP, adding that he had been beaten by a local pro-government militia just before the takeover. “The men and women of this village are Taliban supporters, young and old,” he said, cross-legged in a neighbour’s home. In one of the well-tended plots lies the son of 82-year-old village elder Hajifat Khan, who celebrated the Islamists’ victory. “The war is over and we are happy with the Taliban.”ĭesperately poor, the villagers are preparing for winter by drying animal dung to use as fuel.Ī bitter breeze whips up dust in the central cemetery, where the graves of Taliban fighters are now decorated with colourful trinkets and flags. “Now there is no sound of shooting,” she told AFP. “I would give everything for the Taliban,” said 72-year-old Maky as she prepared cotton fibre in her hardened hands with a group of other women in Dashtan, a remote farming settlement in northern Balkh province.

The hardliners’ takeover of Kabul and the sudden collapse in August of the US-backed regime shocked the world and upended the freedoms of Afghans, which were particularly enjoyed by the urban middle class.īut away from major cities, where little of the international aid worth billions of dollars ever reached, many believe the Islamist movement’s rule could bring a stop to the fighting and the hope for an end to corruption. In the villages that once bore the brunt of Afghanistan’s frontline fighting, the Taliban victory has broken a cycle of air strikes, gun battles and funerals.

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