It was because of Siddiqui that the Taliban attacked the mosque
New Delhi/Washington, July 29 (IANS)| Pulitzer Prize winning Indian photojournalist Danish Siddiqui was not killed in just a simple shootout but was brutally murdered by the Taliban. Michael Rubin made this claim in the Washington Examiner. Local Afghan officials say Siddiqui traveled with a team from Afghanistan’s National Army to the Spin Boldak area to cover the conflict between Afghan forces and the Taliban to control the border with Pakistan.
When they reached within a third of a mile of the customs post, the team was split by the Taliban attack, and the commander and some men were separated from Siddiqui, the report said. Siddiqui received shrapnel during the attack, after which he and his team went to a local mosque, where he was given first aid. According to the report, as soon as news spread that a journalist was in the mosque, the Taliban launched an attack. Local investigations suggest that the Taliban attacked the mosque because of Siddiqui’s presence.
According to the report, Siddiqui was alive and was captured by the Taliban. The Taliban confirmed Siddiqui’s identity and then killed him and his associates. The report said that the commander and the rest of his team were killed while trying to rescue them. Rubin, a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, wrote in the report that although a widely circulated public photo showed Siddiqui’s face as recognizable, I reviewed other photographs and a video of Siddiqui’s body, which I found in India. Provided by a government source, it is shown that the Taliban beat Siddiqui around the head and then left his body riddled with bullets.
Rubin said the Taliban’s decision to hunt down Siddiqui, kill him and then mutilate his body shows that they do not respect the rules of war or the conventions governing the behavior of the global community. Rubin said in the report, there are many similarities between the Khmer Rouge and the Taliban. Both have infused radical ideology with racist animosity. The Taliban have always been brutal, but perhaps they took their brutality to a whole new level this time, as Siddiqui was an Indian. They also want to give a signal that Western journalists are not welcome in any Afghanistan under their control and they expect Taliban propaganda to be accepted as truth.
In fact, the assassination of Siddiqui suggests that the Taliban concluded that their pre-9/11 fault was not that they were cruel and authoritarian, but that they were not violent or authoritarian, Rubin wrote in the report. . The real question for journalists is why is the State Department pretending to call Siddiqui’s death just a tragic accident.