Zia Sharir
๐ค SpeakerAppearances Over Time
Podcast Appearances
The Taliban are a very secretive government, one of the most secretive with a leader who is not showing his face and do not come out.
Pictures are not taken from him.
So what we tried to do was to look at into their daily operations and how they are governing Afghanistan.
But also last year, there was a leaked audio that we obtained in the BBC and it
In that audio, the leader of the Taliban expresses concern about internal division inside the Taliban.
His concern talks about the differences inside the Taliban that could eventually topple down their government.
So our one year investigation was focused on to finding out what are these differences and who are opposing each other inside the Taliban government.
And we found out that, in fact, there are two groups.
One is based in Kandahar, led by Hebatullah Khanzada himself.
The Kandahar group is loyalist to the leader who are pushing and supporting the radical and extremist policies that Hebatullah Khunzada is pushing across the country, particularly on women education and women's work, but also in relation to their relationship with the world.
They are more
into isolationist policies, and also the strict implementation of the Sharia law or the morality law, which is a major source of difference between the two groups, and also the concentration of power.
So they're concentrating a lot of power in Kandahar.
The leader is in charge of pretty much everything in the government.
But then we have the Kabul group,
consisting of the defense minister, interior minister, and the deputy prime minister.
The most famous of them are Saroj Deen Haqqani, who was once the leader of the Haqqani network, a very feared militant group.
But now he's sort of showing, and also a group around him,
showing more interest into moderate policies, particularly, again, into female education.
And also they are not happy about the concentration of power in Kandahar.