Photos of Taliban Visiting ‘Slutz Cheese-Making Plant’ in Belarus Disappear

A group of officials from the Taliban junta in Afghanistan paid a visit to the Slutz Cheese-Making Plant in Belarus last week, receiving enthusiastic coverage from local media — but now all of that coverage is disappearing, as embarrassed Belarusian officials are systematically deleting photos and articles about the visit.

“The visit by Taliban officials to the Slutz Cheese-Making Plant in central Belarus was reported on by a local news outlet on August 21, but then deleted from its website and social media channels. Another post about the Taliban delegation’s visit appears to have been removed from a website linked to Belarus’ National Academy of Sciences,” Radio Free Europe (RFE) observed on Monday.

It was not difficult to see why the Belarusian government might have abruptly decided to memory-hole the Taliban visit. Dissidents and opposition leaders had a field day pointing out the incongruity of female Slutz Cheese-Making Plant employees explaining their craft to the all-male delegation from the Taliban, a brutish Islamist regime that has all but outlawed employment and education for women in Afghanistan.

“On the one hand, the regime declares Belarusian journalists, activists, and civil society groups ‘extremists’ and ‘terrorists.’ On the other, it quietly welcomes representatives of the Taliban and discusses business with them,” said exiled Belarusian opposition leader Svyatlana Tsikhanouskaya.

“Belarusians see who Lukashenka is choosing as Belarus’s friends. They did not choose isolation. They did not choose partnership with the Taliban, North Korea, or other dictatorships,” she said, referring to the longtime dictator of Belarus, Alexander Lukashenko.

Lukashenko is a devoted ally of Russian President Vladimir Putin and Russia is the only nation to have formally recognized the Taliban government since it seized power in 2021. Furthermore, Belarusian social media buzzed with angry comments about the thousands of their countrymen who fought and died in Afghanistan during the Soviet invasion of the 1980s. Some commentators sarcastically wondered if the Taliban would be given a tour of the monuments to those fallen soldiers.

Belarus’s effort to erase all evidence of the Taliban’s visit to the cheese factory is not going terribly well, since dissidents quickly made backups of all the photos and articles. For their part, the Taliban is still happily cranking out social media posts about their “high-level delegation” visiting Belarus to “explore modern production technologies.”

The Kabul Tribune reported the Taliban delegation to Belarus was led by Irrigation and Livestock Minister Ataullah Omari, accompanied by a dozen representatives from the Taliban’s agricultural, transportation, finance, and commerce ministries, plus officials from state-owned companies in Afghanistan.

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BOMBSHELL: Abdul El-Sayed’s Mother Worked for Terror-Linked Group That Funded Osama bin Laden, the Taliban, and Hamas

The mother of Democrat Michigan candidate for U.S. Senate, Abdul El-Sayed, worked for a terrorism linked group that funded Osama bin Laden, the Taliban, and Hamas, according to a new bombshell report.

Just yesterday, the Gateway Pundit reported that El-Sayed’s half sister is a radical leftist professor at the University of Chicago who allegedly assaulted a police officer at an anti-ICE protest and now this. What’s next?

This family clearly has some serious issues.

From the Midwesterner:

Docs: Abdul El-Sayed’s mother worked for designated terror group IARA that ‘provided direct financial support’ to Osama bin Laden, Taliban, Hamas

Jacqueline El-Sayed married El-Sayed’s father, Mohamed El-Sayed, not long after he immigrated to the U.S. in the early 1980s with Fatten Fathy Elkomy, the U.S. Senate candidate’s birth mother.

“They ended up getting divorced,” El-Sayed said of his birth parents during a 2017 speech before the Islamic Foundation. “And my mother, she remarried a gentleman who was working as a translator in the Middle East and moved back to the Middle East.”

From 1999 through at least 2004, Elkomy worked for the Islamic American Relief Agency, also known as the Islamic African Relief Agency, which operated over 40 offices throughout the world ostensibly focused on health care, orphans, and disadvantaged people in areas of conflict.

In October 2004, the U.S. Department of Treasury designated the worldwide network, along with five senior officials, as an organization supporting terrorism, including support for Osama Bin Laden, the mastermind behind the 9/11 terrorist attacks carried out by al-Qaeda that killed nearly 3,000 Americans.

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Moscow Signs Military Partnership With Taliban In Full Circle Since CIA’s Operation Cyclone

Russia and the Taliban-led government in Afghanistan have reached a military and technical cooperation agreement, Russian news outlet Interfaxreported this week. 

The deal was concluded during the International Security Forum held in Moscow. According to the report by Interfax’s correspondent, Taliban Defense Minister Mullah Mohammad Yaqoob held talks with Secretary of Russia’s Security Council Sergei Shoigu on the sidelines of the event.

During the meeting, Yaqoob said that engagement with Russia is important for the Taliban-led administration and that both sides have been expanding their bilateral relations. He added that Afghanistan and Russia share historic ties and that Kabul aims to maintain and strengthen those relations.

Shoigu urged western countries to release Afghanistan’s frozen assets and take responsibility for the country’s reconstruction during the event.

“We are convinced that western countries must unfreeze frozen Afghan assets, fully acknowledge their full responsibility for their 20-year presence in Afghanistan, and assume the entire burden of post-conflict reconstruction of the country,” Shoigu said.

One day later, on Thursday, Russia’s Deputy Defense Minister Vasily Osmakov met with Yaqoob in Moscow to discuss regional security and potential bilateral military cooperation.

According to the ministry, the two sides addressed security issues in Central and South Asia, as well as the outlook for cooperation between their armed forces, including areas of military collaboration.

Russia was the first to recognize the Taliban-led state that assumed control in Afghanistan in 2021. The recognition took place in July 2025. 

US troops launched a hasty and chaotic withdrawal from Afghanistan after the Taliban’s 2021 victory and subsequent takeover of the country. 

The US military left behind large amounts of equipment. An internal State Department review from 2023 attributed the chaotic evacuation to poor planning.

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The BBC wants to Make the Taliban Great Again

This week the British Broadcasting Corporation flew halfway around the world to find a sad story that it could blame on (1) America and (2) climate change.

Their drama opens in Afghanistan’s Ghor province, where fathers line up before dawn at a dusty square hoping to find a day’s work. One man weeps that he is preparing to sell his seven-year-old daughter to feed the rest of his children.

The reporter then explains how nearly five million Afghans are food deprived; she goes on to describe graveyards of dead infants, and then tells the story of another man who already sold his five-year-old daughter for about $3,200.

It is all genuinely terrible. But when the BBC starts explaining WHY any of this is happening— is where the journalism ends and the propaganda begins.

Famine, in almost every modern case, is not a weather event. It is a political outcome.

Afghanistan has fertile river valleys and enough arable land to feed several times its current population. Whenever a country is starving, it is due to bad policy— not bad soil.

It was the same issue when Venezuela ran out of food a few years ago. People were starving. Supermarkets were stripped bare. Zoo animals turned up on dinner plates.

Yet Venezuela has a tropical climate, a year-round growing season, abundant water, and some of the most productive farmland on the planet.

It really takes a special kind of incompetence to starve citizens in a place like that. And the same kind of incompetence is at work in Kabul at the hands of the Taliban overlords.

The BBC mentions none of this. Instead it points the finger at the legacy media’s two favorite villains: Donald Trump and climate change.

To make the case, the reporter sits down with a senior Taliban official, who insists that their regime “inherited poverty, hardship, unemployment and other problems”.

These “problems” were entirely due to the US presence, he explains, which had built “an artificial economy due to the influx of US dollars.”

In other words, the men who reconquered the country, kicked girls out of school, and locked half the workforce in their homes, are blaming their economic problems on the US investing too much money in Afghanistan.

Yet the BBC nods along enthusiastically.

Ironically, despite blaming America’s substantial investments in Afghanistan for the country’s problems, the Taliban’s solution is for America to give them more money.

“Humanitarian assistance should not be politicized,” said the Taliban spokesman, parroting the exact talking that point Western NGOs use to demand more no-strings cash for regimes that whip women in public.

The BBC nods along enthusiastically again.

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Democrat Senate Hopeful Graham Platner Admitted Taliban-Compromised Network Was Used for ‘Phone Sex’

Things keep getting more problematic for the Democrats, who have hitched their Senate hopes on Graham Platner, the candidate running to oust Susan Collins in Maine. Platner has a deeply troubling history of attacking police officers, dismissing rural Americans as racist, and blaming women for being victims of sexual assault, telling them to ‘grow up.’

Earlier, we learned that Platner had even more troubling Reddit posts, where he admitted to committing lewd acts in portable toilets. Here’s some of what Fox News Digital reported on that:

In one March 2017 post on Reddit’s r/Military forum, Platner responded to a discussion about nostalgic military smells by writing: “I still have to jerk off every time I sit in a portas—-er … that blue water smell conditioned me.” 

But Platner’s depravity goes far beyond the porta-potty. In fact, his sexual proclivities risked the safety of his fellow service members. 

In reporting exclusively to Townhall, additional unearthed Reddit posts reveal that Platner used a cell phone network infiltrated by the Taliban to have phone sex. 

Platner made the comments under the username P-Hustle, and he confirmed in October of last year that the account belonged to him. In January 2020, Platner posted that he used Roshan, an Afghan cell phone network, to have ‘phone sex’ with his girlfriend:

In 2010-2011, I was in Afghanistan as a rifle squad leader with the Army and I was blown away that everyone had cell phones and the command didn’t seem to remotely care. Hell, the unit I replaced gave me a Roshan phone with some minutes on it, which I totally used to have phone sex with my girl.

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Rep. Burchett Reveals Gov’t Giving $40 Million per Week to the Taliban and Dems Oppose Ending It

Rep. Tim Burchett (R-TN) did not mince words when he pulled back the curtain on where some American tax dollars are going this past week.

In an interview with radio host Jesse Kelly, the Tennessee Republican described a system that sounds less like foreign aid and more like a revolving door of wasted cash and fraud.

Burchett said billions are flowing through so-called non-government organizations and international bodies with little to no transparency.

He pointed directly to the United Nations and a sprawling network of NGOs as conduits for that money.

According to Burchett, the total is staggering and still growing, and the spending has the total support of Democrats in the Senate.

He cited a State Department memo estimating that more than $5 billion has been sent out.

Burchett’s most striking claim should evoke concern if not anger.

He said roughly $40 million per week is effectively making its way into Taliban-controlled territory.

That is American money, collected from working taxpayers, ending up in the hands of people who openly despise them and want them dead.

The congressman tied this issue to his own bill, the No Tax Dollars For Terrorists Act, which has been sitting dormant in the Senate for about a year.

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“Open War” Breaks Out Between Afghanistan and Pakistan

Pakistan has declared it is in “open war” with Afghanistan’s Taliban government following a gradual escalation of tensions and cross-border clashes along the disputed Durand Line. Under Operation Ghazab lil-Haq (“Righteous Fury”), Pakistan launched airstrikes in response to what it called “unprovoked firing” from across the border.

Pakistani forces targeted at least 22 locations, including Kabul, Kandahar, Paktia, Nangarhar, Khost, and Paktika, saying they struck Taliban headquarters, ammunition depots, logistics bases, and other key military installations. Explosions were reported in Kabul.

Taliban spokesperson Zabihullah Mujahid said Afghan forces had launched “large-scale offensive operations” against Pakistani military positions in response to earlier Pakistani airstrikes. Afghan officials said they attacked Pakistani border troops in retaliation and claimed their drones successfully hit military targets inside Pakistan, though Islamabad said any drones were intercepted by anti-drone systems without damage.

Casualty figures are sharply disputed. Pakistan’s military spokesperson, Lt Gen Ahmed Sharif Chaudhry, said at least 274 Taliban fighters were killed and more than 400 injured since the operation began, while 12 Pakistani soldiers were killed and 27 wounded. Pakistan’s information minister gave a lower Taliban death toll of 133 and said two Pakistani soldiers were killed.

Afghanistan’s Taliban government claims 55 Pakistani soldiers were killed, eight Taliban fighters died, and 11 were injured. Kabul also said 13 civilians were wounded in a reported Pakistani strike on a refugee camp in Nangarhar and claimed to have captured Pakistani soldiers, which Islamabad denies.

Pakistan’s defense minister Khawaja Muhammad Asif said Islamabad had exhausted diplomatic options and would now take “decisive action,” blaming the Taliban for instability and terrorism. Asif accused the Taliban of turning Afghanistan into an Indian “colony,” exporting terrorism, and aligning with India, framing the conflict as a response to security threats and India’s growing ties with Kabul.

Mujahid said Afghanistan wants the fighting resolved through dialogue but warned it would respond to further Pakistani actions. Former Afghan President Hamid Karzai said Afghanistan would defend itself and urged Pakistan to change its policies and pursue good neighborly relations.

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For years the Taliban told women to cover up in public. Now they’re cracking down

In stop-start efforts since November, Taliban officials have cracked down on women and girls in the western city of Herat who have been ignoring the hardline group’s rules by showing their faces. Enforcement agents are preventing them from entering hospitals and seminaries and pulling them out of public transport.

Initially, women and girls were punished for not wearing a burka — the Afghan burka is typically blue, has a netted opening for the eyes and drapes down around the body, largely constraining the woman wearing it. Later, after what residents described as pushback, officials enforcing the rules relented and allowed women to wear the typical conservative dress in this part of Afghanistan, a voluminous cloak known as a chaddar, along with a face mask.

At the main hospital in the Western city of Herat, one health worker described female staff milling outside the entryway for hours, waiting for colleagues on the night shift to hand over their burkas so they could enter — like a token that allowed them “entry permission,” the worker said. In another incident, Human Rights Watch reported on a female surgeon, who was detained for several hours for not donning the burka.

Forcing women to don burkas, to cover their faces or even to wear a hijab, or head covering, “is part of the Taliban’s policy of controlling women’s bodies to make women invisible,” said Sahar Fetrat, a researcher in the women’s rights division of Human Rights Watch. She said in a statement: “Afghan women and United Nations human rights experts have called this “gender apartheid.”

In interviews conducted since November, more than a dozen Herat residents described different incidents to NPR. They all requested anonymity, or that we only use an initial of their first names, fearing reprisal from Taliban officials. The crackdown was run by officials of the Ministry for the Promotion of Virtue and Prevention of Vice, which is tasked with the implementation of the Taliban’s interpretation of Islamic law.

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Taliban to jail barbers who shave men’s beards for up to 15 months under radical Islamic law

Barbers who cut off men’s beards in Afghanistan are set to be jailed under the Taliban‘s increasingly radical regime.

Some young men are also reportedly being beaten up and ‘humiliated’ for defying strict cultural laws by daring to pick a Western-style haircut.

Offending hairdressers will be referred to the Taliban’s feared judicial authorities and could face up for 15 months in prison.

The totalitarian regime claims it is merely laying down Islamic law.

Beard removal was already illegal under its dystopian-sounding Law on the Promotion of Virtue and the Prevention of Vice, but did not carry a prison sentence.

Some accused of crafting non-traditional styles have already faced temporary detention, however, meaning their businesses have ground to a halt for days.

Esmatullah, from the Balkh province, told the Telegraph: ‘We are branded as agents of the former government if we trim our beards or keep what they call a Western hairstyle. 

‘The Taliban interrogate and beat people simply for how they look.’

He said a local college student was beaten up by Taliban members who also lopped off his hair with scissors, because he had decided to shave the sides of this head.

Another barber in Balkh said that many of his customers now ask him to visit them at their homes for haircut or grooming sessions, because it is too risky to do in public.

Many have also seen a steep decline in business since the Taliban reestablished in August 2021.

Last week, Taliban morality enforcers detained eight barbers in Afghanistan’s Parwan province for shaving or styling beards.

Their shops were shuttered, and their have been families told they will be detained for a month.

Taliban officials summoned male barbers in the Balkh province on Friday to the drum home the message that the crackdown is on.

Another Balkh barber told the newspaper: ‘If people are not allowed to shave their beards or cut their hair as per their choice, who will come to our shops?

‘We live hand to mouth, and these edicts will leave us without enough food on our plates.’

Since sweeping back to power in the wake of the Western withdrawal, the Taliban has steadily tightened its grip on the people of Afghanistan and stripped away their freedoms.

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SURPRISE! Watchdog Claims U.S. Weapons Left Behind by Biden in Afghanistan Now Make Up ‘Core’ of the Taliban Military

A watchdog has now confirmed that American weaponry left behind in the botched 2021 withdrawal from Afghanistan now makes up the ‘core’ of the Taliban military.

This means that if American soldiers are ever again put on the ground in an armed conflict in Afghanistan, there is a distinct possibility that they could be injured or killed by weapons paid for by the American taxpayer. Thanks, Joe Biden!

Joe Biden could have been impeached for a number of things, but he should have been impeached for this. All of this.

Just the News reported:

Afghan watchdog concludes billions in weapons U.S. left behind form ‘core’ of Taliban military

The inspector general responsible for scrutinizing U.S. reconstruction efforts in Afghanistan has detailed the billions of dollars wasted by the U.S. government during the 20-year war in the country and concluded that the arsenal of U.S.-provided military weaponry that was left behind now forms the “core” of the Taliban’s own military machine.

A massive number of U.S.-made and U.S.-supplied weapons and military facilities were left behind in Afghanistan as a result of President Joe Biden’s troop withdrawal announcement in April 2021, which resulted in the dissolution of the Afghan military, a chaotic U.S. evacuation, and a Taliban takeover in August 2021.

The Special Inspector General for Afghan Reconstruction (SIGAR) issued its “final forensic audit report” this week more than four years after the U.S. withdrawal and evacuation from the country, concluding that “these U.S. taxpayer-funded equipment, weapons, and facilities have formed the core of the Taliban security apparatus.” SIGAR said in its final report that it will close its doors at the end of January 2026 as a result of the National Defense Authorization Act for 2025.

It’s simply maddening.

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