Amid heightened tensions in the Middle East, the Taliban's supreme leader, Hibatullah Akhundzada, has been notably quiet on the war between Israel and Hamas in Gaza — in sharp contrast to the fervent, daily anti-Israel comments from neighboring Iran.
While Akhundzada has no public-facing digital accounts, his edicts and statements often reverberate across the Taliban's online platforms via other channels.
Akhundzada’s second in command, Mullah Mohammad Hassan, and his trio of deputies have also been reticent. The only senior Taliban official who has broken the silence so far is Sirajuddin Haqqani, the acting interior minister, who remains on the United States’ most-wanted list with a $10 million reward offered for information leading to his arrest.
“We do not interfere in others’ internal affairs,” Haqqani said in terse remarks at an event last week, “but we have faith-based sympathy with Muslims.”
'Comparable' messaging
Last week, Zabihullah Mujahid, the Taliban’s chief spokesperson, issued a statement in condemnation of Israel’s besieging of Gaza while calling on the international community to address the crisis.
“Official messaging from the Taliban has been comparable to what we've seen from other Muslim countries, with expressions of solidarity and support for the Palestinians,” Michael Kugelman, an expert at the Wilson Center, told VOA.
According to Javid Ahmad, a former Afghan ambassador and a fellow at the Atlantic Council, the Taliban’s public comments, while sparse, are calculated to show support for the Palestinians alone, as the group has no formal diplomatic ties with Hamas.
“Senior Taliban figures evidently expect neighboring Arab countries to step up and find a solution to end the violence, rather than relying on non-Arab states to intervene,” Ahmad told VOA.
This measured approach from a regime that boasts divine support in defeating a superpower and its NATO allies may be surprising for some.
A day after Hamas attacked Israel, Michael McCaul, chairman of the U.S. House Foreign Affairs Committee, said he had seen “indications that the Taliban want to come to ‘liberate Jerusalem,’ in their words, to "fight the Zionists.”
The Taliban rejected the allegations.
Some Afghans have criticized the Taliban’s largely muted response. Ata Mohammad Noor, a former Afghan governor and a known anti-Taliban militia leader, posted an audio file Tuesday on X, formerly Twitter, calling on the Taliban to speak out in defense of Gaza.
Titled “Message of a sister from Palestine to the people of Afghanistan,” the audio clip runs Dari texts over the voice of a female speaking in Arabic begging for Afghans to help the Palestinians.
Mariam Solaimankhil, a former female member of the Afghan parliament, posted a statement on X calling the Taliban response “hollow.” “Where is your action?” she commented under the post of a Taliban spokesperson.
Doha deal
The Taliban have committed to forbid any security threats to the United States and its allies from emerging in Afghanistan, according to a U.S.-Taliban agreement signed in Doha, Qatar, in February 2020.
But experts say any Taliban rhetoric supporting Hamas, a U.S.-designated terrorist organization, doesn’t violate that agreement.
“The Doha agreement focuses on a very specific, narrowly defined stipulation: The Taliban cannot let its territory be used by terrorist groups that threaten the U.S. and its allies. Pro-Hamas protests, or any type of anti-Israel activism in Afghanistan, do not come close to violating that stipulation,” said Kugelman.
Nearly a dozen other terrorist groups allegedly have sanctuaries in Afghanistan that could, if not prevented, pose regional and even global security threats.
So far, the response from such groups within Afghanistan to the war in Gaza remains “curiously muted and unusually restrained,” according to Ahmad of the Atlantic Council.
Despite keeping a firm control over all Afghanistan for more than two years, the Taliban have seen the Islamic State Khorasan or IS-K, challenging their writ with terrorist attacks all over the country.
IS-K has not supported Hamas because of its ties to Iran, a majority-Shiite country the terrorist group considers to have deviated from Islam.
“There is the risk that IS-K, or any active terror group in Afghanistan, could react by trying to stage its own attacks in Afghanistan, either as a gesture of solidarity with Hamas or as a competitive tactic to one-up what Hamas did in Israel,” said Kugelman.
