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HOUSTON, Texas (KTRK) — Afghan Americans in the Houston area are stepping up to speak out against Pakistan’s support of the Taliban.
An Awareness and Unity protest will be held Sunday afternoon at 4 p.m. in the 2800 block of Post Oak Boulevard, near the Water Wall.
Their demands are clear. These protestors want Pakistan to stop funding and supporting the Taliban and terrorism, according to a press release.
“Terrorism plus the Taliban equals Pakistan,” said Afghan American Houston resident Haji Abdul Haq.
“I’m 90% sure that I am not going to see them again,” he said.
Other protests organized by Afghan Americans are scheduled for California, Utah, Arizona and Washington D.C.
Since the Taliban overran Kabul on Aug. 15 and seized control of the country, Afghans and the world have been watching to see whether they will re-create their harsh rule of the late 1990s, which included public stonings and limb amputations of alleged criminals, some of which took place in front of large crowds at a stadium.
After one of the Taliban’s founders said in an interview with The Associated Press this past week that the hard-line movement would once again carry out executions and amputations of hands, the U.S. State Department said such acts “would constitute clear gross abuses of human rights.”
Spokesman Ned Price told reporters Friday at his briefing that the United States would “stand firm with the international community to hold perpetrators of these – of any such abuses – accountable.”\
The Taliban’s leaders remain entrenched in a deeply conservative, hard-line worldview, even if they are embracing technological changes, such as video and mobile phones.
“Everyone criticized us for the punishments in the stadium, but we have never said anything about their laws and their punishments,” Mullah Nooruddin Turabi said in the AP interview. “No one will tell us what our laws should be. We will follow Islam and we will make our laws on the Quran.”
Also Saturday, a roadside bomb hit a Taliban car in the capital of eastern Nangarhar province, wounding at least one person, a Taliban official said. No one immediately claimed responsibility for the bombing. The Islamic State group affiliate, which is headquartered in eastern Afghanistan, has said it was behind similar attacks in Jalalabad last week that killed 12 people.
The person wounded in the attack is a municipal worker, Taliban spokesperson Mohammad Hanif said.