Deportation or extortion? The Taliban extort money from Afghan job seekers.
In the shadow of the widespread unemployment crisis, the Taliban group has turned the process of sending workers to Qatar into a new source of illegal income.
Local sources in Kabul say that the Taliban are charging 200 Afghanis per applicant to register, which is actually the cost of selling a simple paper form.
At one registration center in Kabul alone, about 2,000 people a day apply for registration, while the actual capacity is announced to be only 700.
The process, which began on Tuesday, has drawn thousands of young job seekers to the centers introduced by the Taliban.
Sources confirm that the Taliban pocket millions of Afghanis a day by selling registration forms, without any transparency in the recruitment and deployment process.
Witnesses say that many of these registration centers give priority to individuals affiliated with the Taliban. In some cases, applicants affiliated with the group are screened in a separate queue and accepted earlier, while other citizens wait in long, fruitless queues.
While most of the jobs on offer in Qatar are not specialized, a university degree is listed as one of the main requirements, a strange contrast to the type of job opportunities and added to the confusion of the public.
With the economic pressure on the Afghan people increasing, the Taliban have exploited the youth’s need for income and turned the labor dispatch scheme into a source of daily income.
Observers say this trend is another sign of the Taliban’s commercialization of people’s suffering and the weakening of the principle of justice and meritocracy in a completely rentier and corrupt environment.
