Last month, the family of Mawlavi Ezzatullah, a member of Afghanistan’s Hizb-e Islami party, received a WhatsApp message from his phone: “We have slaughtered your Mawlavi Ezzat, come and collect his body.”
Ezzatullah’s killing, in the eastern province of Nangarhar, was one of a steady stream of assassinations and bombings that have undermined Taliban claims that they have brought greater security to Afghanistan after 40 years of war.
Victims have ranged from former security officials from the ousted government to journalists, civil society activists, mullahs, Taliban fighters and apparently random targets like Ezzatullah, whose family said he had no enemies they knew of.
The Taliban have said their victory has brought stability to Afghanistan, where thousands of people were killed in fighting between the group and Western-backed forces between 2001 and 2021 before the hardline Islamists emerged victorious.
But on just one day last week, pictures from Jalalabad – the provincial capital of Nangarhar – appeared online showing two bodies swinging from a rope. Residents also reported a mullah’s murder and video footage was circulated of a group of gunmen firing into a car, apparently killing its occupants, one of whom was identified by local journalists as a Taliban official.
Reuters was unable to verify the images and footage independently.
On Sunday, according to locals, three bodies were brought into a hospital in Jalalabad after a roadside bomb explosion that apparently targeted Taliban fighters in a pickup truck.
Later that day, gunmen shot a former Afghan army soldier in front of his house, killing him and two friends standing nearby.
The Taliban have downplayed such incidents, saying that after decades of war, it will take time for the country to be completely pacified.
“There are 34 provinces in the country and in a week, 20 cases will be prevented for every one that takes place,” said spokesman Bilal Karimi. “We have had 20 years of revolution and invasion and the level of these incidents will go down.”
Some former soldiers and intelligence officers from the ousted government blame members of the Taliban for targeting them since taking over. The group has promised there would be no reprisals, but accepts rogue fighters may have acted alone.
Many targeted killings remain unclaimed and some may be the result of local vendettas.
But others look the result of increasingly open conflict between the Taliban and a local affiliate of ISIS, a development which the new U.S. Special Representative for Afghanistan, Tom West, said on Monday was causing concern in Washington.
The militant jihadi group has claimed some of the deadliest attacks in Afghanistan in recent months in which hundreds of people have been killed, mainly in big cities.
“They are trying to undermine and discredit the Taliban Emirate. The Emirate promised security and they’re trying to show they can’t deliver it,” said Antonio Giustozzi, a specialist in jihadi groups from the Royal United Services Institute in London.
He said ISIS, which he estimated to have around 4,000 fighters, had been carrying out a campaign of targeted killings since around the summer of 2020 and had continued since the Taliban victory in August on a “roughly comparable scale”.
