Taliban leverages coronavirus crisis to burnish its image as violence in Afghanistan surges.
In another propaganda video reported by Radio Free Europe, a U.S. government-funded broadcaster, men living under Taliban control are shown washing their hands. In a clinic controlled by Taliban militants, health care workers in light green personal protective wear hand out rubber gloves and masks, while others test the temperature of a suspected patient with a digital thermometer.
“We didn’t know initially about this disease, and didn’t take it seriously,” one senior Taliban health official told NBC News, speaking on the condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to talk to the news media. Afghan cyclist Idrees Syawash, 27, talks to residents during his awareness campaign against the COVID-19 in the Surkh Rod district of Nangarhar province on Tuesday.A medical student visiting family in the northern province of Kunduz, Said Ekram, 28, told NBC News that ordinary life in Taliban-controlled areas had changed very little despite the coronavirus outbreak.
And according to Kate Clark, the co-director of the independent and not-for-profit research group, the Afghan Analysts Network, a lockdown designed to protect health care systems that are “poor to nonexistent” makes little sense in a hand-to-mouth subsistence economy,But in Helmand province, residents said Taliban officials oversee hospitals that are nominally government-run, and there were some benefits to this during a health crisis.
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