RASC News Agency: Reliable sources within Afghanistan’s private telecommunications sector have disclosed that Taliban leader Hibatullah Akhundzada has given telecom companies a one-month ultimatum to suspend all mobile internet services across the country. The move, which analysts describe as a desperate attempt to tighten control over information, risks pushing Afghanistan into deeper isolation and economic paralysis.
According to an insider at Roshan, one of Afghanistan’s largest telecom networks, the Taliban’s Ministry of Communications and Information Technology sent a written directive earlier this week, summoning executives to a meeting scheduled for Wednesday, September 17, at the ministry’s headquarters. The agenda is clear: to force companies to end internet services on mobile devices cutting off millions of Afghanistani citizens from one of the last remaining avenues of free expression and access to the outside world.
In addition, Taliban intelligence services have ordered all telecom operators to provide full access to user data, including call records, browsing histories, and digital communications. The regime has demanded signed guarantees from private companies, ensuring that such data will be handed over directly to the Taliban’s intelligence apparatus.
Perhaps most troubling, insiders report that Taliban officials have instructed telecom providers to create “special codes or trigger words” that would, once used in a conversation or online post, automatically alert intelligence operatives and forward the complete communications history of the targeted individual. Experts warn that this system represents not just surveillance but the foundation of a digital police state designed to monitor and suppress dissent.
Analysts believe the plan reflects both paranoia and incompetence within the Taliban leadership. Unable to fully control Afghanistan’s fiber-optic infrastructure, the group fears that sensitive documents detailing corruption, mismanagement, and internal divisions could be leaked abroad. A Kabul-based observer told RASC: “This is not about morality, as the Taliban claim. It is about silencing critics and concealing their own failures. By shutting down the internet, they are attempting to blind the nation.”
Even within Taliban ranks, resistance is beginning to surface. Just days ago, a delegation from the regime’s Ministry of Finance, Ministry of Economy, and the Central Bank traveled to Kandahar to warn of the catastrophic consequences of an internet shutdown. They argued that disabling fiber-optic services would cripple online banking, disrupt customs revenues, and paralyze financial systems that even under Taliban rule remain dependent on international connectivity.
Independent technology and economic experts echo these concerns. They warn that cutting internet services would plunge Afghanistan into an unprecedented level of isolation, severing trade links, halting remittance flows, and destroying fragile start-up businesses that have been struggling to survive. Online education programs would collapse, and millions of Afghanistani families would lose their only means of communication with relatives abroad.
For ordinary citizens, the Taliban’s ultimatum is yet another assault on daily life an extension of their broader campaign of repression, which has already silenced women, strangled the media, and suffocated artistic and cultural expression. By seeking to eliminate internet access, the Taliban are not merely restricting technology they are deliberately cutting Afghanistan off from the modern world, enforcing ignorance as a tool of control.
In the eyes of civil society advocates, this latest decision exposes the regime’s true character: a movement incapable of governance, terrified of transparency, and willing to sacrifice an entire nation’s progress for the preservation of its own absolute authority.
