This photograph was taken during the ongoing Afghanistan peace talks in Russia. A representative of the Taliban took on the role of imam, and the people they have been slaughtering after declaring them as the “enemy” lined up behind him. Among those lined up was former Prime Minister Karzai. In the photo, they are performing their Jamaat prayer in unison during talk breaks in Moscow. I assume they prayed in Jamaat to gain more sawab (reward)!

Yesterday morning, Mehmet Erkan Yavuz from the Doğru Haber newspaper called me and let me know about this photograph by asking what I think about the peace talks in Afghanistan in reference to it.

Together with this photo, the entire corpus about Afghanistan came to my mind. I was enraged.

The great cause started with Russia’s invasion of Afghanistan in 1979, the effects of which were also felt in Turkey. From the beginnings of the 1980s, delegations from Afghanistan would come to Turkey. They would tell people about the Afghan Jihad and collect money from them.

I was around 14-15 years old. Meral Maruf from Afghanistan and her siblings came to the Turkish province of Sakarya. We used to listen to the difficulties the Afghan jihad was facing and the problems they were struggling with. We all would break into tears.

We were poor. All the members of my family, men and women, had to work at the marketplace and at home to earn our bread. And this poor family, just like the other religious and poor families in Turkey, sold their earrings, wedding rings, bracelets and anything else valuable they had at that time and donated them to the Afghan jihad. We supported the Afghan mujahedeen against the Russian occupation.

I assume that the religious in Turkey were probably the people that made the biggest contributions to Afghanistan, that some of them actually went down there to join the jihad, and supported the struggle with their music, plays, and books across the entire world. As it has always been, our people were sided with the oppressed without giving it a second thought.

When Russia accepted defeat and withdrew from Afghanistan in 1988, we were extremely happy. The jihad was successful. However, after that day, some developments took place that shocked us to our core. The Afghan mujahedeen started to fight each other. At first, we didn’t believe the reports; we thought that they were “Russian propaganda”. Later, when we faced the bitter truth, we didn’t want to hear the news coming from there. The aid we sent had been wrongly used and Muslims had started to kill each other.

Names such as Ahmad Shah Mesud, Burhanuddin Rabbani, Hekmatyar, Sibgatullah Mujaddidi and many others, who were like heroes to us, started killing each other. That was when the bitter truth was revealed: the Afghan Jihad was actually lost when brothers began killing each other.

Later, the leaders of the mujahid groups came together in Makkah. They opened the door of Kaaba and went it. They swore in there that they were going to stop killing each other. However, they didn’t keep their promise.

With this civil war, Afghanistan turned into a “medieval” country where ignorance, poverty and terror reigns.

Later, the Taliban appeared. It attacked all the mujahedeen and came to power by killing tens of thousands of Muslims. Their government was transformed into a “tribal dictatorship” full of corruption, distortion, and ignorance. Day by day, the country has been dragged into chaos.

The civil war between the mujahedeen in Afghanistan caused more harm to the country and to the Afghan people than the Russians and the American invasion did.

In the madrasas of Afghanistan and Peshawar, many people were educated with the Taliban mindset and ignorance and they spread around the world and laid the foundation of the terrorist organizations we know today. Founders of terrorist organizations such as al-Qaeda, al-Shabab in Somalia, the other terrorist organizations in Mali, Mauritania, and Yemen, along with their leading cadres, were educated in these madrasas. Even though Daesh was founded by foreign powers, tens of thousands of young Muslims joined this organization as militants, and they killed Muslims the most.

The fact that the mujahedeen who were seen as heroes by everyone began killing each other constituted an example for other terrorist organizations in Syria, Iraq, Yemen, Somalia, Algeria, Mali, Niger and Mauritania.

Similar fatwas given to kill the other mujahedeen groups were also given today in other countries to kill the rest of the Muslims. They all abused Islam, distorted its messages and used it for their own interests.

Today, no one wants to talk about the situation in Afghanistan. Because, drugs, child abuse, homosexuality, murder, kidnapping, ransom, bribery, racketeering, terror, ignorance, poverty, in short chaos is so widespread in the country that one would feel ashamed even when describing the conditions.

When the country is in such a condition, the actors of this disgrace posed for the cameras while supposedly praying with a jamaat in the capital city of the country that once invaded their country, Russia.

This is the photo of shame.

They are covering the crimes they committed, the murders they carried out and all their disgrace by using salat. That’s all.