More than 18,000 people have been evacuated from Kabul airport since the Taliban took over the Afghanistan capital, a NATO official told Reuters on Friday.
However, crowds continued to throng outside the airport, desperate to flee, said the official, who declined to be identified. The Taliban took over Kabul on Sunday.
In the meantime, the Taliban have begun rounding up Afghans on a blacklist of people they believe have worked in key roles with the previous Afghan administration or with U.S.-led forces that supported it, according to a report by a Norwegian intelligence group.
The report, compiled by the RHIPTO Norwegian Center for Global Analyses said the Taliban were hunting individuals linked to the previous administration.
“Taliban are intensifying the hunt-down of all individuals and collaborators with the former regime, and if unsuccessful, target and arrest the families and punish them according to their own interpretation of Sharia law,” said the report, dated Wednesday.
“Particularly at risk are individuals in central positions in military, police and investigative units.”
The non-profit RHIPTO Norwegian Center for Global Analyses, which makes independent intelligence assessments, said the Afghanistan report was shared with agencies and individuals working within the United Nations.
“This is not a report produced by the United Nations, but rather by the Norwegian Center for Global Analyses,” said a U.N. official, when asked for comment.
A Taliban spokesman did not immediately respond to a request for comment on the report. Since seizing Kabul, the Taliban have sought to present a more moderate face to the world, saying they wanted peace https://www.reuters.com/world/asia-pacific/taliban-show-conciliatory-face-first-kabul-news-conference-2021-08-17 and would not take revenge against old enemies.
The four-page report reproduced a letter it said had been written to one alleged collaborator who was taken from his Kabul apartment this week and detained for questioning over his role as a counter-terrorism official in the previous government.
