Who is the Taliban? The Islamist militant group’s rise to power in Afghanistan?
Nearly a year and a half before the Taliban swept through Afghanistan, seizing control of the country for the first time since 2001, it reached a peace deal with the United States in Doha, Qatar.
That process gave the ideologically strident Islamist militant group a public venue to appear as “very well-dressed people, with smartphones, speaking very diplomatically in front of the international media,” said Sher Jan Ahmadzai, director of the Center for Afghanistan Studies at the University of Nebraska Omaha. For the Taliban, it offered a glimpse of international legitimacy, something that it lacked when the group took over Afghanistan in the late 1990s.
But in recent weeks, the Taliban completed a rout through Afghanistan, taking districts without so much as a bullet fired and entering the capital of Kabul Sunday, culminating with the group declaring the Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan. As the Taliban advanced, reports began
