[The women, the latest victims in a
wave of targeted attacks, were killed on their way home from their jobs at
Enikass Radio and TV in Jalalabad.]
By Zabihullah
Ghazi and Thomas
Gibbons-Neff
The women were on their way home
from work at Enikass Radio and TV, in the bustling city of Jalalabad, when they
were killed in two separate attacks, according to Shokorullah Pasoon, the
manager of publishing at the station, who offered scant details of how the
incident unfolded.
The victims were Mursal Hakimi, 25,
Sadia, 20, and Shanaz, 20 — many Afghans have a single name — who worked in a
department that records voice-overs for foreign programs, Mr. Pasoon said. A
fourth woman was wounded in one of the attacks and taken to the hospital,
according to a provincial hospital spokesman.
Malalai Maiwand, 26, a television
and radio presenter with Enikass was gunned down in much the same way in
December. The Islamic State affiliate in the country claimed responsibility for
that killing, but has not released a statement claiming Tuesday’s attack.
Maj. Gen. Juma Gul Hemat, the
police chief of Nangarhar Province, said law enforcement had captured the
Taliban “mastermind” of the attack at one of the scenes, who was carrying a
pistol with a noise suppressor.
The Taliban denied any involvement
in the attacks on Tuesday. They have been blamed for much of the wave of
assassinations that began in earnest following the February 2020 peace
agreement negotiated between the insurgent group and the United States, under
former President Donald J. Trump.
The women’s deaths come at a
perilous time for Afghanistan as security around the country continues to
decline, and President Biden weighs whether to stick to the May 1 date set by
his predecessor for withdrawing American troops. An emboldened Taliban are set
on either winning on the battlefield or forcing the Afghan government to
capitulate in their ongoing peace talks in Qatar.
Shaharzad Akbar, the chairwoman of
the Afghanistan Independent Human Rights Commission, called Tuesday’s attack
“horrific” on social media. “Afghan women have been targeted & killed too
often,” Ms. Akbar said in a tweet.
Following the 2001 U.S. invasion
that unseated the Taliban and its extremist form of Islamic law that banned
women from most jobs, Afghanistan’s media outlets and news stations emboldened
a new generation of Afghans and especially women, despite the unending war
around them.
But since 2018, more than 30 media
workers and journalists have been killed in Afghanistan, according to a recent
United Nations report. From September 2020 to January of this year, at
least six journalists and media workers were killed in such attacks, according
to the U.N. report.
Civilian casualties overall jumped
after peace negotiations between the government and the Taliban began in
September, particularly a wave of targeted killings of judges, prosecutors,
civil society activists and journalists.
The recent attacks have amounted to
an “intentional, premeditated, and deliberate targeting of human rights
defenders, journalists and media workers,” the U.N. report said. “With a clear objective of silencing specific
individuals by killing them, while sending a chilling message to the broader
community.”
The New York Times documented the
deaths of at least 136 civilians and 168 security force members in such
targeted killings and assassinations in 2020, more than nearly any other year
of the war.
The wanton deaths, often in
populated areas such as Kabul and other cities, have caused public outcry from
many Afghans for better security, especially for vulnerable people like
journalists and human rights workers. Government investigations and
accountability for the killings have been infrequent at best.
The Afghan Journalists Safety
Committee said in a statement that “practical and effective steps must be taken
to ensure the safety and security of journalists.”
Though the Taliban rarely claim
responsibility for such attacks, the insurgents use them for propaganda
purposes, especially to undermine the Afghan government.
But the Taliban are not the only
ones taking advantage of the chaos. Afghan and U.S. officials believe some of
the killings over the past year were carried out by people aligned with the
government or other political parties.
The Islamic State’s role in these
targeted attacks is also growing. Though seemingly contained militarily in
Afghanistan’s mountainous east, the terrorist group has shifted its strategy
from seizing territory on the battlefield to mass-casualty attacks in cities
such as Kabul and Jalalabad.
In November, the group claimed that
its fighters were responsible for killing more than 20 people at Kabul
University, before rocketing the city some weeks later, killing at least eight
people. And in December, the Islamic State claimed responsibility for the
murder of Ms. Maiwand, the journalist at Enikass who had worked there for seven
years.
According to her family, Ms.
Maiwand’s mother, an education activist, was killed by unknown gunmen roughly
10 years earlier.
Zabihullah Ghazi reported from
Jalalabad, and Thomas Gibbons-Neff from Kabul. Najim Rahim and Fatima Faizi
contributed reporting from Kabul.