Taliban Pose for Victory Selfies in Afghan City

http://www.nytimes.com/2015/09/29/world/asia/talibanpose-for-victory-selfies-in-afghan-city.html

Version 0 of 1.

As some veteran foreign correspondents pointed out, watching Taliban insurgents storm into the northern Afghan city of Kunduz on Monday and declare their intention to govern according to Islamic law seemed to echo the way the city was taken by Western-backed, Islamist mujahedeen in 1988, just days after the withdrawal of Soviet troops.

Then, as now, Afghan government forces vowed to retake the city swiftly, as a superpower that controlled the skies above the country seemed unable to impose its will on the ground.

There is, however, one obvious difference between the Islamists of the two eras. The Taliban of the 21st century, armed with mobile phones and Internet connections, moved quickly to declare victory on social networks before an expected counteroffensive from government troops massed at an air base on the outskirts of the provincial capital.

One image posted on Twitter by Zabihulla Mujahid, a Taliban spokesman, showed fighters waving the white flag of their movement in the town’s center.

Within hours of the entering of Kunduz, photographs and video of Taliban fighters roaming at apparent ease, and posing beside their flag with residents, spread on Facebook and Twitter.

One observer in the city even had to persuade a Taliban fighter to look up from his own phone to pose with him for a brief video selfie, posted on the Facebook page of Tolo TV, a popular Afghan satellite channel.

In the clip, as the fighter posed with a man who seemed to be a fan of the group — or thought it best to act like one — he calmly explained that the militants planned to impose Islamic law, or Shariah. “We want to say that we want to serve here and people should cooperate with us,” he said, according to a translation by Ahmad Shuja of Human Rights Watch in Kabul. “We want to implement Shariah. It is our wish to build madrasas, schools, pavements and roads.”

Within four hours, copies of the clip posted on Facebook by Tolo TV had been viewed more than 200,000 times.

Although some residents told reporters by telephone that they had remained in their homes, and some families fled the city, the militants seemed eager to convey the impression that they had been welcomed.

Bethany Matta, a freelance journalist who reported from Kunduz for Al Jazeera recently, suggested that the propaganda value of Taliban fighters pictured in the center of a major Afghan city they were forced to surrender 14 years ago might even have been one of the goals of the operation.