The following report is now a complimentary offering from MEMRI's Jihad and Terrorism Threat Monitor (JTTM). For JTTM subscription information, click here.
Mawlawi Neda Mohammad Nadeem – the Taliban-ruled Afghanistan's higher education minister, who has made international headlines for completely banning women from colleges and universities – has commanded the Taliban soldiers to fight the members of the Islamic State's Khurasan Province (ISKP) and the anti-Taliban resistance groups in Afghanistan.
In a two-minute video tweeted by pro-Afghan Taliban Twitter user @WakeelMubariz on March 9, 2023, Mawlawi Neda Mohammad Nadeem, who is one of the trusted aides of the Afghan Taliban's supreme leader Mullah Hibbatullah Akhundzada, can be seen speaking in Pashto at a ceremony somewhere in Afghanistan.[1]
"You should think in such a way that 'those who stand against me are the people against whom fighting is mandatory and their killing is obligatory because they are rebels against the Islamic system,'" Mawlawi Neda Mohammad Nadeem says.
"If someone gives any name to himself, if he calls himself the resistance, calls himself Khilafah [caliphate], these are the two inauspicious groups... It is our duty to have the innocent Muslims of Afghanistan get rid of them. So, fight them with bravery and courage. Fight them like you fight the red Americans," the minister says. The expression "red Americans" denotes white Westerners, especially the Western soldiers against whom the Taliban fought for two decades.
Quoting a hadith (a saying of Prophet Muhammad), the Taliban education minister, who once said that to appoint a teacher, it is not their educational qualifications but the number of bombs the candidate planted and detonated in the war against U.S.-led forces in Afghanistan that matters, declared that the best martyr is he who is martyred by the hand of the foreigners and "the best ghazi [i.e., hero] is he who kills this foreigner."
Sheikh Ned Mohammad Nadeem says that it is his practical experience in many battles against the "Khawarij"[2] a phrase the Taliban and other groups use for members of Islamic State (ISIS), that the corpse of the Taliban fighter who dies while fighting does not decay even after the passage of one week while the corpses of ISIS members rot before the passage of 24 hours.
There is no senior or junior among the Taliban members and all of them are soldiers and people of sacrifice, the minister says, adding that it is the prerogative of the emir (leader) to appoint someone as director and declare the other as a minister. "This minister is the mujahid of bunker," he says.
Mawlawi Neda Mohammad Nadeem, who was a Taliban field commander and ran an Islamic seminary in Kandahar, which is the spiritual capital of the Taliban, was instrumental in banning girls' and women's education, and is famous for appointing the Taliban fighters as teachers in schools and universities of Afghanistan.
[1] Twitter, March 9, 2023.
[2] The Kharijites (literally, "those who come out"), were an early Islamic sect that advocated excommunicating Muslims for even minor sins and was proclaimed heretical by the mainstream Sunna.
The full text of this post is available to subscribers.
Please login or register to request subscription information from MEMRI
