The Taliban* celebrated the one-year anniversary of the US-led coalition’s withdrawal from Afghanistan on Wednesday after declaring August 31 a national holiday.
Colorful fireworks lit up the streets of Kabul and other major cities on Tuesday night in anticipation of the celebrations.
On Wednesday morning, the Taliban held a massive military parade at the Bagram Airbase, a strategic hub 40 km north of Kabul which was used extensively by US and allied troops during their 20-year occupation of the country. The parade featured somber Suicide Bombers Battalion troopers, a unit of Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan flag-totting men on motorbikes, and vast quantities of advanced military hardware, including rocket artillery, captured US-made MRAP armored vehicles, and Mi-8 and Hind helicopters.
Speaking at the Bagram event, the Taliban’s de facto Prime Minister Mullah Mohammad Hassan Akhund said that when the pro-Western puppet government fell last August, the unenviable task of putting the country back together, ensuring security, and putting an end to killings and bombings fell on the Taliban.
When the US and its allies left, Akhund said, they took everything with them and slapped sanctions on Afghanistan, worsening its economic difficulties. “The path of understanding, harmony, and brotherhood gets results, whereas pressures and sanctions do not,” he said, as cited by the Bakhtar News Agency.
Celebrations also rang out across other provinces, including Helmand, Jawzjan, Farah, Kunduz, and Logar, with regional officials giving speeches at rallies to commemorate the occasion.
In Paktika province, athletes built a human pyramid and raised the Islamic Emirate flag, and set up a burning hoop which they jumped through to display their physical prowess and agility to a crowd of onlookers.
In Balkh province, dozens of motorists drove through the streets of the regional capital of Mazar-i-Shariff with giant Islamic Emirate flags.
The Taliban declared August 31 an official holiday to mark the one-year anniversary of the formal end to the 20-year US and NATO occupation of Afghanistan. Earlier this month, the group also declared August 15 a holiday – with those festivities marking the one-year anniversary of the collapse of Afghanistan’s Western puppet government and its Western-trained army and security forces.
The US and the Taliban reached a landmark peace deal in Doha in February 2020, with the Trump administration committing to withdrawing US forces from the country by the spring of 2021, and the militants promising to halt attacks on American troops and to negotiate with the US-backed government.
After coming into office in January 2021, the Biden administration temporarily paused the Afghan withdrawal, eventually pushing back the deadline for exit from May to September 11 and the 20th anniversary of the 9/11 terror attacks in New York and Washington, DC. The Taliban agreed to the provision, but warned that hostilities would resume if Washington didn’t make good on its commitments to leave. Biden later amended the deadline to August 31. US allies followed suit, saying that it would be impossible for them to continue the Afghan mission without American support.
In early August 2021, the Taliban launched their first major offensive on an urban area, targeting Zaranj, capital of the southern province of Nimruz. Government defenses quickly crumbled and city administrators fled. Over the next 10 days, the Taliban would launch attacks on all 34 of the country’s provincial capitals, with Kabul falling on August 15 and President Ashraf Ghani fleeing the country.
Over the two weeks that followed, US and coalition forces which remained in the country faced an awkward situation as the Taliban militants which they had spent two decades fighting became their defenders. The Taliban agreed to ensure security at Kabul’s international airport as over 122,000 foreign troops, spies, mercenaries, and Afghan government workers and their families left the country.
* An organization under United Nations sanctions for terrorist activities.