Weeks transformed to Islam throughout greater than three years in Taliban captivity and adjusted his title to Baar Muad Jibra’il after returning house. Throughout his many months as a prisoner he “noticed these individuals in a light-weight that no one else has been capable of do,” he stated, including that he has lengthy “stood behind” the Taliban and continues to take action.

He not too long ago introduced to Australian press his plan to return for the anniversary of Taliban rule, saying he now considers himself “an Afghan and a Pashtun,” the ethnic group of the Taliban, and that he needs to assist the Afghan individuals by way of a brand new charity in Australia. The nation is going through a extreme humanitarian disaster, with many Afghans unable to search out sufficient meals, based on worldwide help teams.

“I ask the world to know the Taliban and provides them time,” Weeks stated in a latest interview with Turkish media.

However Weeks’ go to and supportive feedback towards the Taliban drew rapid criticism from worldwide human rights teams, a lot of which have not too long ago denounced the regime for suppressing girls’s rights and refusing to let teenaged women attend faculty.

Zaki Haidari, a refugee rights advocate at Amnesty Worldwide in Australia, instructed broadcaster SBS that Weeks’ go to to Kabul was “outrageous” and “brings quite a lot of anger and frustration” to the big neighborhood of Afghan refugees and exiles.

“What’s there to have fun?” Haidari stated Saturday. “The very fact they’re violating girls’s rights, that they aren’t permitting women to go to high school, and leaving tens of millions of individuals to poverty and starvation, together with kids?”

Weeks has described himself as spiritually reworked by his experiences in captivity. Regardless of being overwhelmed, disadvantaged of meals, saved in solitary confinement and turning into severely in poor health, he has stated in press interviews that he got here to “adore” the Afghan individuals, and in addition instructed an interviewer that he admired the Taliban fighters for his or her tenacity.

Weeks was considered one of two college members kidnapped in August 2016 from a van close to the American College in Afghanistan, a big personal establishment in Kabul the place he had been educating English for a number of months. The opposite was an American, Kevin King, 13 years older than Weeks, who had taught English there for 2 years.

Quickly after they have been kidnapped, U.S. Navy SEALs unsuccessfully tried to rescue the captives in a secret raid in rural jap Afghanistan. In early 2017, each males appeared in an emotional 13-minute video filmed by their captors, trying weak and haggard. Each pleaded for the U.S. authorities to barter their launch in change for Taliban prisoners being held in U.S. navy custody.

Nevertheless it was not till two years later that the boys have been launched in an change for 3 senior Taliban members. One in all them was Anas Haqqani, now a high member of the present Taliban management in Kabul. In 2020, Weeks met Haqqani in Qatar, the place they exchanged notes and located one thing in frequent: that they had each written poetry in captivity.

In distinction to Weeks, King has saved a low profile since his launch and has been reported to undergo ongoing well being issues. He’s now nearing 70.

Weeks’ public reward for the Taliban, simply days earlier than the primary anniversary of its takeover of the nation, stands in sharp distinction to the considerations many worldwide teams and Western governments have expressed not too long ago in regards to the Kabul regime’s tightening repression of girls, in addition to different critical issues.

“The final 12 months, for the reason that Taliban takeover on August 15, 2021, has been an absolute catastrophe for human rights in Afghanistan,” Heather Barr, an affiliate director at Human Rights Watch in New York, wrote in a latest report.

She stated Afghans have been going through “two completely different extraordinarily extreme crises on the identical time” – a humanitarian disaster pushed by the cutoff of overseas help and funds, and an “assault on human rights, with extrajudicial killings, assaults on media freedom and really notably a rollback of many of the rights of girls and women.”

Taliban officers have struggled to arrange a authorities and supply providers to 39 million individuals after years of preventing a guerrilla conflict.

They’ve additionally confronted inside tensions between reasonable officers who wish to modernize the nation whereas observing Islamic legal guidelines, and extra doctrinaire, senior spiritual leaders who reject Western society and search to revive the cruel Islamist lifestyle that characterised their first interval in energy, between 1996 and 2001.