Kabul, Afghanistan (AP) —When the United States and the world celebrated the 20th anniversary of the September 11 attack, the Taliban raised their iconic white flag over the Afghan presidential palace on Saturday, a spokesman said.

Ahmadura Muttaki, director of the multimedia branch of the Taliban’s Cultural Commission, said the flag in Koran’s poetry was hung at a modest ceremony by the Taliban’s interim government prime minister, Mura Mohammad Hassan Akund. Stated.

He said raising the flag marked the official beginning of the new government’s work. The composition of all men and all Taliban governments was announced earlier this week and faced disappointment by the international community, who wanted the Taliban to succeed with the previous promise of a comprehensive lineup.

Twenty years ago, the Taliban dominated Afghanistan with heavy hands. Television was banned, and on September 11, 2001, the day of the horrific attacks on the United States, news spread from crackling radio across the dark streets of Kabul, the capital of Afghanistan.

At that time, the city had little electricity and only one million people lived in Kabul. It took only two months for the U.S.-led coalition to drive the Taliban out of the capital, and by December 7, 2001, they had been kicked out of their last holdout in the spiritual center of southern Kandahar and defeated. bottom.

Twenty years later, the Taliban returned to Kabul. The United States departed and ended the “eternal war” two weeks before the 20th anniversary of 9/11 and two weeks after the Taliban returned to the capital of Afghanistan on August 15.

Some things have changed since the first period of Taliban rule in the 1990s.

This time, a fighter with a gun will not be able to pick up and run through the streets of the city. Instead, they pass through the chaotic and clogged traffic of more than 5 million cities. Hairdressers were banned in Kabul, which was dominated by the Taliban in the 1990s. Today, Taliban fighters are getting the latest haircuts, even if their beards remain untouched in line with their religious beliefs.

However, the Taliban have begun to publish harsh edits that have hit women the most, including banning women’s sports. They also used violence to prevent women demanding equal rights from protesting.

On Saturday, Taekwondo competitor Marzia Hamidi, who had the ambition to become a national champion in a luxury women’s store in the city’s Cartese district, said the Taliban’s return shattered her dreams.

She was one of the women attacked by the Taliban and was called the “Western Agent” in one of the recent protests. She said she wasn’t surprised by the withdrawal of America.

“They had to finally leave this year or next,” she said. “They came for their own benefit and they left for their own benefit.”

Hamidi wants the Taliban to forgive and relax their restrictions, but at a glance at the shopkeeper Faisal Najiri, “Most men in Afghanistan agree that the Taliban say about women and their rules for them. I will do it. ”

Najiri nodded that protecting women’s rights was not the cause of taking Afghan men to the streets.

On Saturday, the Taliban even organized a march of their own women. This involved dozens of women, hidden from head to toe, hidden behind a layer of black veil. They filled the auditorium of the Kabul University Education Center with snabs well-chopped in the last two decades of Western efforts to empower women.

The speaker they read from the script speech celebrating the Taliban’s victory over the West they charged was anti-Islamic. Women referred to thousands of people who fled for fear of the Taliban’s crackdown on women’s rights, waving placards saying, “Women who left do not represent us,” on the center grounds. Easily marched outside. Read another banner, “We don’t want co-education.”

Outside the hall, Taliban Higher Education Director Mawlawi Mohammad Daud Haqqani said 9/11 about the attack in the United States: “The world calls us terrorists and advertises them for blaming us. I started. “

At Attazakiri, a dusty bookstore in Kabul’s Cartesangi district, self-proclaimed civil society activists said it was wrong for the United States to attack Afghanistan after 9/11.

He condemned the invasion following the 9/11 attack by creating another generation of tough Taliban fighters.

“The Taliban should have been allowed to stay. Why didn’t they work with them? Instead, they went to battle,” he said. And now we are back in place 20 years ago. “