Taliban Fans Hold Mock Funeral for U.S. and NATO with Flag-Draped Coffins

Members of the Taliban Badri 313 military unit take up positions at the airport in the Afg
AFP
John Hayward

Taliban supporters in the southeastern Afghanistan city of Khost held a “mock funeral” for the United States and NATO on Tuesday, complete with flag-draped coffins.

The coffins were covered with American, British, French, and NATO flags, plus Taliban flags declaring victory over those foreign armies. Members of the crowd fired guns into the air in celebration.

“August 31 is our formal Freedom Day. On this day, American occupying forces and NATO forces fled the country,” a Taliban official declared during televised coverage of the event.

“Other images shared online on Tuesday showed Taliban members walking through Kabul airport in U.S.-supplied fatigues, some brandishing gleaming rifles and others trying out state-of-the-art night vision goggles or sizing up U.S. helicopters,” Reuters reported.

Some Afghans were less enthused with the situation, according to another Reuters report:

While crowds lined the streets of the eastern city of Khost for a fake funeral with coffins draped with Western flags, long lines formed in Kabul outside banks shuttered since the fall of the capital.

“I had to go to the bank with my mother but when I went, the Taliban (were) beating women with sticks,” said a 22-year-old woman who spoke on condition of anonymity because she feared for her safety.

She said the attack occurred among a crowd outside a branch of the Azizi Bank next to the Kabul Star Hotel in the center of the capital. “It’s the first time I’ve seen something like that and it really frightened me.”

Al-Qaeda released a statement on Tuesday hailing the Taliban conquest of Afghanistan as a “great victory against the Crusader alliance” and a “symbol of resilience and resistance against invading imperialist powers.”

Al-Qaeda praised Allah for “humiliating and defeating America, the head of disbelief” and “breaking America’s back.” The terrorist organization said Afghanistan would become “an impregnable fortress of Islam” under Taliban rule, and urged Muslim extremists in Somalia, Yemen, Kashmir, and other regions to follow the Taliban’s example.

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