[Breitbart] Humanitarian activists and U.N. officials are calling for sanctions against the Taliban to be eased so aid can be rendered to the sick, starving, and soon-to-be freezing Afghan people — but Radio Free Europe (RFE) on Tuesday documented how the Taliban is looting aid programs to pay its officials, and even withholding food to force Afghan civilians into slavery.RFE interviewed a Kabul day laborer named Omaruddin who explained the Taliban set up a "food-for-work" program in October that "requires recipients to do manual labor on public-works projects to receive humanitarian aid." Even that atrocious bargain is only available to people who have good connections to the Taliban.
"Nobody hires us. The Taliban only take people that they know. You cannot find a job unless you know someone. They will not give you anything even if you work hard. There is no way that they are going to give out something for free," said Omaruddin, who lacks such connections himself, so his twenty appeals to enter the "food-for-work" program have been ignored.
Several other laborers told similar stories of being denied humanitarian aid by the Taliban, even when they offered to work for it.
"There is no business at all. The aid is only given to those who have links or relationships with the Taliban. It does not go to the poor," agreed another day laborer named Ghazni Gul.
"Now, in what the Taliban claims is an expansion of its ’food for work’ program, the cash-strapped regime has begun to use foreign wheat aid to pay the salaries of public sector workers," RFE added, explaining how the Taliban has weaponized shipments of grain donated by first India, and then Pakistan, China, Uzbekistan, and Kazakhstan.
These arrangements are unsurprisingly harsh on Afghan women, especially widows lacking a man to provide for them, since the Taliban does not even allow women to work as indentured servants in its foreign-aid-fueled slavery program.