Armed gunmen affiliated with the Islamic State opened fire on a group of tourists in a bazaar in Afghanistan’s Bamyan province on May 17. Six victims were killed, including three Spanish tourists and three Afghan nationals. Four tourists from Australia, Lithuania, Norway, and Spain were also wounded in the attack. It is the second time Islamic State operatives in Afghanistan have targeted foreigners following a December 2022 bombing and shooting at a hotel frequented by Chinese businessmen.
Suhail Shaheen, head of the Taliban’s political office in Qatar, did not respond to the Washington Examiner’s request for additional details about the attack.
While official recognition of the Taliban government has not materialized, a lack of persistent, vocal condemnation of the Taliban’s repressive rule seems to have lulled travelers into a false sense of security. Sky News reported that about 7,000 tourists visited Afghanistan in 2023, a significant increase from 691 tourists in 2021.
The Bamyan attack demonstrates the Taliban’s difficulty with providing security for foreigners from Islamic State entities. But tourists in Afghanistan also face danger from the Taliban themselves.
A State Department spokesperson told the Washington Examiner that it “continue[s] to urge U.S. citizens not to travel to Afghanistan,” given the level four “do not travel” advisory associated with the country. “Travel to all areas of Afghanistan is unsafe,” the spokesperson added, explaining that Americans face “risk of wrongful detention, kidnapping and crime” in Afghanistan.
One of two Americans currently detained by the Taliban, Ryan Corbett, is the founder of microfinance and consulting company Bloom Afghanistan, a business he started seven years after moving to Afghanistan with his wife and three children in 2010 to work in the humanitarian aid sector.
After returning to the U.S. with his family following the withdrawal from Afghanistan in August 2021, Corbett made his first trip back to Afghanistan in July 2022 to check on his employees. He returned again in August 2022 because Taliban authorities “had specifically urged him to continue” his business, according to Corbett’s wife Anna, who spoke of her husband at a House Foreign Affairs Committee roundtable on April 30.
During his second visit to Afghanistan, Corbett was detained. Though allegedly “accused of proselytizing Christianity,” Corbett’s family says he has not been charged with any crime.
House Resolution 965 and Senate Resolution 638 call for Corbett’s release. They state that the imprisoned American lives in a basement cell nine feet wide by nine feet long and only experiences sunshine once a month. He has been allowed rare visits from representatives of the U.S. and gets limited phone contact with his family. As a result of his captivity, Corbett is said to suffer from fainting, seizures, and “discolored extremities,” and his physical and mental health are reportedly “rapidly declining.”
Anna Corbett told the House Foreign Affairs Committee that she and her three children fear that her husband will be “unrecognizable to us and unable to ever fully recover” if he makes it out of Afghanistan alive. After waiting 14 months for the State Department “to designate Ryan as wrongfully detained,” and eight months to meet with National Security Council representatives about his case, Corbett said that as of April, she had “no idea what steps are being taken to rescue [her] husband.”
While an American undergoes abuse by the Taliban, the Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction reported in May that the U.S. has provided $2.8 billion in “humanitarian and development assistance” to Afghanistan since August 2021. SIGAR noted that the Taliban have siphoned off around $10.9 million through taxes, fees, and duties and described how agencies distributing U.S. support were subject to “direct pressure” from the Taliban to divert additional aid. SIGAR says the U.S. government lacks “comprehensive information … to accurately weight the humanitarian benefits of Afghan aid programs against the risks of providing financial benefits to the Taliban.”
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U.S. leaders straddle a widening chasm of oppositional policy choices, seemingly normalizing the Taliban regime through large aid distributions while condemning Taliban actions through official government publications.
To decrease the discord of these contrary efforts, U.S. leaders should immediately identify means to monitor the impact of taxpayer dollars and discontinue payments that enrich the Taliban. In addition, President Joe Biden, who has said precious little about Afghanistan since the catastrophic withdrawal, should publicly condemn the Taliban for causing harm to U.S. citizens, killing our abandoned Afghan allies, and effectively locking Afghan women away in an open-air prison through a spate of misogynistic edicts.
Beth Bailey (@BWBailey85) is a freelance contributor to Fox News Digital and the co-host of The Afghanistan Project, which takes a deep dive into nearly two decades of war and the tragedy wrought in the wake of the U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan.