Taliban stamp their presence at Embassy with flag, old Afghan staffers fear reprisals

Among those waiting for Muttaqi at the hall were a large number of women journalists from Indian and foreign media houses, a departure from Friday’s press conference from which women were barred.

Some came covered head to toe. One foreign journalist played it safe by wearing black and covering her hair. Many others dressed the way they usually would. The Taliban Foreign Minister answered questions from the journalists with a straight face.

While the decision to invite women journalists was seen as a way to course-correct, the second press conference offered the Taliban an opportunity to assert their presence at the embassy premises — still controlled by the lone Afghan diplomat and Afghan staffers aligned to and appointed by the erstwhile regime led by ousted President Ashraf Ghani.

Unlike Friday’s press conference, when the Taliban members just put up a table-top flag, this time they raised their flag in the backdrop as well.

The messaging at the 44-minute press conference was clear: the Taliban had ensured their presence and were asserting their legitimacy on Indian soil.

“We carried our struggle under this flag,” Muttaqi said, pointing to the Taliban flag at the backdrop, “and got success. Abhi aap aur hum yahan jo maujood hain, yeh 100 percent hamare control main hain (now that we are here, this is 100 percent under our control now)”

The old Afghan staffers, meanwhile, kept the Republic’s tricolour flying on the main flagpole, and kept one at the entrance lobby.

But the Taliban had already identified the Afghan staffers who had resisted the efforts to put up their flag. They are now scared of retribution. “We don’t know what will happen to us. My brother got a call about his whereabouts in Afghanistan. They are already tracking my family. I don’t know what I will do if the new diplomats from the Taliban regime throw me out, and the Indian government also sends me back to Afghanistan. I have nowhere else to go,” one of them told The Indian Express.

For the six Afghan staffers and diplomats, one of them a woman, the future is now uncertain.