Global Courant
Late one night two months ago, a team of Taliban security agents gathered on the outskirts of the Afghan capital to prepare for an attack on an Islamic State hideout.
As zero hour approached, the men played with their automatic rifles as their leader, Habib Rahman Inqayad, hurried to pinpoint the exact location of their target. He grabbed his colleagues’ phones and called their superiors, who insisted they sent him the target’s location pin to his WhatsApp.
There was only one problem: WhatsApp had blocked his account to comply with US sanctions.
“The only way we communicate is WhatsApp – and I didn’t have access,” says 25-year-old Inqayad, who has followed The New York Times since the Taliban came to power in August 2021.
He was not alone. In recent months, complaints from Taliban officials, police and soldiers that their WhatsApp accounts have been banned or temporarily deactivated have become widespread, disruptions that have shown how the messaging platform has become a backbone of the nascent Taliban government. . Those interruptions also underscore the far-reaching impact of international sanctions on a government that is among the most isolated in the world.
The United States has long criminalized any support for the Taliban. Consequently, WhatsApp, which is owned by Facebook, scans group names, descriptions and group profile photos on its messaging app to identify users under the Taliban and block their accounts, a company spokesman said.
The policy has been in effect since the US sanctions were enacted more than 20 years ago. Even when the Taliban were insurgency, the ban was a handicap for some fighters who relied on the app because it was aimed at people without literacy or technological skills; using WhatsApp’s voice message feature, they could send messages at the touch of a button and listen to their commanders’ verbal instructions.
But over the past two years, the Taliban’s reliance on WhatsApp has grown even greater as smartphone use has increased and 4G networks across Afghanistan have improved with the end of the US-led war. As the Taliban have consolidated control and established themselves in governance, the internal bureaucratic workings of their administration have also become more organized – with WhatsApp at the center of their official communications.
Government services use WhatsApp groups to distribute information to employees. Officials rely on other groups to distribute statements to journalists and pass official communiqués between ministries. Security forces plan and coordinate raids on Islamic State cells, criminal networks and resistance fighters from their phones in the app.
“WhatsApp is so important to us – all my work depends on it,” said Shir Ahmad Burhani, a police spokesman for the Taliban government in northern Afghanistan’s Baghlan province. “If there were no WhatsApp, all our administrative and non-administrative work would be paralyzed.”
The use of WhatsApp among the Taliban ranks began during the war, when the app gained worldwide popularity and cell phone towers started shooting up all over Afghanistan. Today, experts estimate that about 70 percent of the Afghan population has access to a cell phone. Like millions around the world, Afghans depend on the speed and flexibility of WhatsApp to communicate with each other and the outside world.
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During the war, Taliban fighters took photos as they attacked government outposts and shared them on WhatsApp with their superiors and the insurgency’s media arm, said Kunduzi, a commander in the Taliban army’s Second Regiment, who prefers to only gave his last name to use because he was not authorized to talk to the news media. “WhatsApp was a simple tool and sending videos and photos via email used to take a lot of work and time,” he added.
Since the takeover of power by the Taliban, the popularity and accessibility of WhatsApp has grown rapidly among the ranks of the group. Former Taliban fighters began using their smartphones around the clock, no longer worried that Western forces could use the signal to track or target them in drone strikes, they say.
As thousands of former combatants took up new posts as policemen and soldiers in major cities now under Taliban control, they also gained access to real mobile phone shops.
On a recent afternoon in a mobile phone shop in the center of Kabul, the capital, a dozen Talibs sat on wooden benches waiting for their service cards to be called. Since the new government began handing out salaries to Taliban fighters who became government employees, cell phone providers have been flooded with new customers. Many suppliers can no longer keep up with demand. Stores across Afghanistan have reported shortages of SIM cards and have had to turn away customers.
Sitting in the waiting room, 21-year-old Muhammad Arif Omid played with his paper ticket in one hand and his Samsung smartphone in the other. Originally from Helmand province in the south, Mr. Omid bought his first mobile phone and SIM card about four years ago – when it was a day or weeks of effort.
“We lived in the mountains – we couldn’t go to the shops in towns and buy a phone or SIM card,” he said. Instead, Talib fighters had to hunt down second-hand dealers in rural provinces under the movement’s control or give money to a family member to shop for them. These days, he says, it’s easier than ever to get a nice smartphone and a data plan.
But the cat-and-mouse game of account closures has become a headache for officials in the Taliban government — an almost daily reminder that the government they lead is all but shunned on the world stage.
No foreign government has formally recognized the Taliban government in Afghanistan. The US government’s freeze of billions of dollars in Afghanistan’s central bank assets has hampered the economy. Travel bans have prevented Taliban leaders from meeting some dignitaries abroad. Some social media platforms like Twitter and YouTube seem to have loosened up the sanctions and allowed Taliban members to use their platforms, but the country’s most popular messaging app is technically off limits.
“We have a group of 50 people who belong to the Islamic Emirate and 40 to 45 WhatsApp numbers in it have been blocked,” said Abdul Mobin Safi, a police spokesman in northern Afghanistan’s Takhar province, referring to the Taliban government. as the Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan.
Mr Safi is one of those excluded – a move that caused him to lose about 10 gigabytes of data, including old photos and videos from the war, and the numbers of many of his colleagues.
“It’s like I’ve lost half my memory,” he said. “I faced a lot of problems – I lost the number of reporters, everyone.”
Still, many whose accounts have been shut down have found solutions by buying new SIM cards and opening new accounts, turning the ban into more of a game of Whac-A-Mole.
About a month after Mr. Inqayad, the security officer, was unable to reach his commanders during the night operation, he reluctantly bought a new SIM card, opened a new WhatsApp account and began the process of recovering lost phone numbers and rejoining WhatsApp- groups.
Sitting at his police station, a refurbished shipping container with a portable radio, Mr Inqayad took out his phone and started scrolling through his new account. He pointed to all the groups he belongs to: one for the entire police force in his precinct, another for the former combatants loyal to a single commander, a third he uses to communicate with his superiors at headquarters. In total, he says, he is part of about 80 WhatsApp groups, more than a dozen of which are used for official government purposes.
He recently bought a new unlimited data plan that costs him 700 afghans a month — about $8. It’s expensive for his budget, he says, but it’s worth it for the app.
“My whole life is on my WhatsApp,” he said.
Najim Rahim contributed reporting from San Francisco and Yaqoob Akbary from Kabul, Afghanistan.
