Taliban Celebrates Third Anniversary Of Kabul Takeover Amid Humanitarian Crisis

The Taliban celebrated the third anniversary of its return to power in Afghanistan with a military parade on August 14 amid what international aid groups say is one of the world's largest and most complex humanitarian crises.

Taliban forces seized Afghanistan's capital, Kabul, on August 15, 2021, after the U.S.-backed government collapsed and its leaders fled into exile.

Their government remains unrecognized by any other state, with restrictions on women, who bear the brunt of the radical group's policies that the United Nations has branded "gender apartheid," remaining a key sticking point.

The Taliban takeover is marked both in mid-August around the date Kabul fell and at the end of the month, when the last U.S.-led international troops left Afghanistan amid a chaotic withdrawal.

The withdrawal, agreed by the United States and the Taliban on February 29, 2020, allowed the radical Islamist movement's return to power 20 years after being ousted by U.S. forces following the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks on the United States.

The August 14 military parade was held at the Bagram airfield, some 40 kilometers north of Kabul, which was once the largest U.S. military base in Afghanistan. The audience of some 10,000 men included senior Taliban officials. Women were barred.

Uniformed soldiers marched carrying light and heavy machine guns, with a motorcycle formation bearing the Taliban flag. The parade was also an opportunity to showcase some of the military hardware abandoned by U.S. and NATO-led forces after decades of war: helicopters, Humvees, and tanks.

Taliban Prime Minister Mohammad Hassan Akhund, who had been scheduled to appear at Bagram, praised the Taliban authorities' victory over "Western occupiers" in a statement read by his chief of staff.

The Taliban government has "the responsibility to maintain Islamic rule, protect property, people's lives, and the respect of our nation," the statement said.

But international aid organizations have warned that millions of Afghans struggle in "one of the world's largest and most complex humanitarian crises, three years after the change in power."

"Heavily dependent on humanitarian aid, Afghans are trapped in cycles of poverty, displacement, and despair. Afghanistan is at risk of becoming a forgotten crisis without sustained support and engagement from the international community," a statement by 10 organizations said on August 13.

The aid groups -- including Save the Children, World Vision, Islamic Relief Worldwide, and the International Rescue Committee -- said an estimated 23.7 million people are currently in need of assistance in Afghanistan, out of a population of around 40 million.

More than 6.3 million people are internally displaced in Afghanistan, the statement said, while unemployment has doubled over the past year.

Women and girls are among the most seriously affected by this humanitarian crisis, Human Rights Watch has said.

The Taliban has created "the world's most serious women's rights crisis," the organization said in a press release on August 11.

Since the Taliban's return to power, women have been squeezed from public life -- banned from many jobs as well as parks and gyms -- and barred from secondary and higher education.

"The issues of education -- women's education and work -- and their participation at national and international level have been completely nullified and pushed to the sidelines," a female resident of Kabul, who preferred not to be named due to security concerns, told RFE/RL’s Radio Azadi.

Afghan women's rights activists have been campaigning to declare the Taliban's treatment of Afghan women and girls as gender apartheid.

With reporting by AFP, AP and dpa