Taliban fighters, photo: NY Times

7 Months, 10 Days in Captivity and Inside the Islamic Emirate

NY Times has started a gripping series by David Rohde a journalist who was held captive by the Taliban for seven months. This is reporting for which the NYT  is famous. The first two of the five part series are gripping.

Not a Twitter minute, the articles are well worth reading for the insight into the Taliban who are more sophisticated than previously thought.

“The tribal areas were more developed and the Taliban more sophisticated than I expected. They browsed the Internet and listened to hourly news updates on Azadi Radio, a station run by the American government. But then they dismissed whatever information did not meet their preconceptions.

Some of their comments were factual. They said large numbers of civilians had been killed in Afghanistan, Iraq and the Palestinian territories in aerial bombings. Muslim prisoners had been physically abused and sexually humiliated in Iraq. Scores of men had been detained in Cuba and Afghanistan for up to seven years without charges.

Other accusations were paranoid and delusional. Seven years after 9/11, they continued to insist that the attacks were hatched by American and Israeli intelligence agencies to create a pretext for the United States to enslave the Muslim world. They said the United States was forcibly converting vast numbers of Muslims to Christianity. American and NATO soldiers, they believed, were making Afghan women work as prostitutes on military bases.

Their hatred for the United States seemed boundless.”

The series started on October 18th and runs for five days. It’s a must read if you care about the war.