they held sway. This was well illustrated in a comment made about
Ismail Khan by Taliban Information Minister Qudratullah Jamal fol-
lowing Ismail’s sensational escape from Taliban custody on 26
March: Jamal said that ‘Khan was a criminal because he fought
against the Taliban’ (Agence France Presse, 30 March 2000). Media
of communication were equally subject to control. Television broad-
casts were discontinued, and television sets banned. Radio broadcasts
were limited to prayers and propaganda. Reporters sans Frontières
accurately described Afghanistan under the Taliban as ‘a country with
no news or pictures’ (Reporters sans Frontières, 2000). The Taliban’s
early promises to withdraw from public life had long been forgotten.
Massacres: Mazar-e Sharif and Yakaolang
The Taliban did not hesitate to massacre those whom they defined as
enemies, although it should be noted that the worst massacres
occurred when significant numbers of radicals from other countries
were in their frontlines, especially Sipah-i Sahaba activists.
Pakistanis rather than Afghans were responsible for some of the
more notorious murders that occurred under the Taliban, such as the
murders in August 1998 of Iranian consular staff in Mazar-e Sharif,
and of a Military Adviser to the UN Special Mission to Afghanistan,
Lieutenant-Colonel Carmine Calo (Maley, 2000a: 24).
When the Taliban occupied Mazar-e Sharif on 8 August 1998, they
embarked on a three-day massacre which Ahmed Rashid described as
‘genocidal in its ferocity’ (Rashid, 2000: 73). The most conservative
estimate of the number killed was 2000 and others went much high-
er (see Cooperation Centre for Afghanistan, 1998; Human Rights
Watch, 1998; Winchester, 1998; Cooper, 1998). In an article pro-
testing how little attention it received at the time, Rupert Colville of
UNHCR, writing in his personal capacity, described some of the
things that happened to the Hazara victims:
Some were shot on the streets. Many were executed in their own
homes, after areas of the town known to be inhabited by their
ethnic group had been systematically sealed off and searched.
Some were boiled or asphyxiated to death after being leftThe Rise and Rule of the Taliban, 1994-2001 239