Taliban in Afghanistan News: Live Updates

Protesters took to the streets to protest Taliban rule for the second day on Thursday, this time marching in Kabul, including near the presidential palace, according to video shot by local journalists and other witnesses. At one demonstration in Kabul, about 200 people had gathered before the Taliban broke it up violently.

Coming just one day after violence broke out at protests in two other cities, with Taliban members shooting into crowds and beating demonstrators, it was a remarkable display of defiance in the nation’s capital.

It was also further evidence that while tens of thousands are now seeking escape, there were many more left behind and determined to have a voice in the kind of state where they live.

Over the course of more than two decades, the Taliban proved that they knew how to wage an insurgency. Over the last five days, ominous signs have emerged that they have yet to learn how to run a country.

In less than a week after their sweeping into power, the reality of governing a nation is proving as difficult for the Taliban as their military blitz across the nation’s provinces was fast.

Many critical workers are hiding in their homes, fearful of retribution by the new leaders despite promises of amnesty. And critical services like electricity, sanitation and clean water could soon be affected, aid agencies say.

While the Taliban, for now, have a monopoly on the use of force, there is no functioning police service in any traditional sense. Instead, former fighters are patrolling checkpoints and — in many cases, according to witness accounts — administering the law as they see fit.

The Taliban leadership’s suggestion this week that the brutality that defined their rule two decades ago was a thing of the past has not always been matched by actions taken by foot soldiers on the street.

Taliban members are intensifying a search for people who they believe worked with U.S. and NATO forces, including among the crowds of Afghans at Kabul’s airport, and have threatened to kill or arrest their family members if they cannot find them, according to a confidential United Nations document.

The new regime is already finding itself being frozen out financially. The International Monetary Fund said on Wednesday that it would block Afghanistan’s access to about $460 million in emergency reserves, a decision that followed pressure from the Biden administration to ensure that the reserves did not reach the Taliban.

Money from an agreement reached in November among more than 60 countries to send Afghanistan $12 billion over the next four years is also in doubt.

The international assistance is critical in a country where the United Nations World Food Program estimates that many are going hungry.

“That’s 14 million people, including 2 million children who are malnourished,” the organization said in a statement.

While tens of thousands of Afghans are still frantically trying to escape — risking what is essentially a gauntlet of Taliban checkpoints to try to make it to the civilian side of the airport, even if unsure that they will be able to secure a flight out of the country — pockets of resistance among those who remain have started to emerge.

They are being encouraged by an array of forces — with varying intentions, but a common goal of seeing the Taliban fail or, at the very least, forcing them to moderate their positions.

The day after several people were killed and more injured when a protest turned violent in Jalalabad, Afghanistan’s first vice president took to Twitter to express “respect, support and appreciation” for Afghans who have protested over the new government.

“Salute those who carry the national flag and thus stand for dignity of the nation and the country,” wrote the official, Amrullah Saleh.

In the 20th century, there have been at least 19 iterations of the flag, most of them tricolors featuring black, red and green. And Afghanistan has had more than two dozen flags since the Hotak dynasty was established in 1709.

Afghanistan — a nation with a troubled and brutal history, but also home to beautiful natural wonders and a quilt of cultures defined by their resilience — is now the Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan.

The Taliban reasserted that declaration in a Tweet on Thursday commemorating the anniversary of independence from British rule more than a century ago.

Crowds continued to camp out near Kabul’s airport on Thursday, while U.S. troops tried to quell the chaos and accelerate the evacuation flights.

The mammoth evacuation effort was gathering pace, with Afghan refugees and international repatriates landing in Europe, Qatar, the United Arab Emirates and elsewhere.

A Spanish military plane landed before dawn at Torrejon air base outside Madrid, one of three aircraft that the Spanish defense ministry has sent to evacuate citizens and Afghans who worked with the Spanish government, along with their families.

Afghan refugees who arrived in Germany, some cradling children, described harrowing scenes outside the airport in Kabul, the Afghan capital, where Taliban soldiers have blocked the entrances and beat back crowds by firing rifles and occasionally hitting people with sticks and hoses.

Australia has evacuated dozens of its citizens and Afghans to a military base in the United Arab Emirates, where they were awaiting flights to Australia, Prime Minister Scott Morrison said on Thursday. Amid criticism that military flights were departing Kabul mostly empty — the first Australian plane carried just 26 passengers on Wednesday — Mr. Morrison insisted that the government was moving “as quickly as we can.”

The evacuation effort represents a test of the U.S. withdrawal plans, which call for the country’s troops to stay in Afghanistan only as long as is needed to bring Americans and some Afghan allies home, likely stranding many who want to leave because they fear Taliban attacks.

The road to the airport has been particularly dangerous, with Taliban patrolling checkpoints. Just after 7 a.m., a Taliban fighter stood on a concrete barricade, holding a radio and a handgun in the same hand and shouting. Taxis inched forward along a road lined with abandoned cars.

An Afghan British family waited in the crowd, a mother and daughter wearing black chadors and head scarves, and two sons standing next to suitcases. The young woman said that the Taliban were calling people by country, but that each call prompted a rush of would-be refugees to the front.

Some families waited in taxis. Others got out to walk. Parents carried small children, and a man pounded on the back of a van to keep it from backing into his mother, whom he pushed in a wheelchair.

The Pentagon, which has deployed 5,000 U.S. troops to secure the airport, said that it had asked the Taliban to allow safe passage for American citizens, but that it did not have the ability to go out and fetch people from Kabul or other cities.

Officials said that the U.S. military had evacuated approximately 5,000 people, and that those numbers would increase as U.S. personnel processed about 500 people per hour at the airport gates.

“The Taliban are in and around Kabul right now, but they are not interfering with our operations,” Gen. Mark Milley, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, told a news conference at the Pentagon.

On Wednesday, The New York Times said that 128 current and former Afghan employees and family members had reached safety. Michael Slackman, an assistant managing editor, said that the group had “kept their heads during some very scary moments” and asked employees to “help all of these families make the transition to new lives abroad.”

But many Afghans who have managed to flee the country have left loved ones behind, unable to secure visas for those who are not immediate family members or to get them to the airport in time for departing flights.

WASHINGTON — President Biden said on Wednesday that the United…