Mullah Mohammad Hassan Akhund will assume the role of acting prime minister. A close aide to Mullah Omar, the Taliban’s founder, he was the foreign minister and then deputy prime minister during the group’s last stint in power. Abdul Ghani Baradar, a co-founder of the group and its chief negotiator on the deal to withdraw American troops, will be his deputy.
Hamdullah Nomani, the new acting mayor of Kabul, sits in the same building doing the same job he did 20 years ago, before his administration was chased out of town by American troops. Yet the city is nearly unrecognisable from when he last held the post. He is responsible for some 12,000 municipal workers, and oversees everything from keeping the streets clean to ensuring that the zoo’s lions are fed. “Before, Kabul was like a village.
The arrival of thousands of Taliban scholars, clerics and fighters, many from the rural south, has seen strange bedfellows thrown together across the capital. At one court complex a newly appointed Taliban judge explained that his experience included several years running shadow courts. These secret tribunals were key to the insurgency’s grassroots success as they delivered swift and binding rulings free of the delays and bribes that plagued government courts.