This is Taliban Country

Ten years ago, in November 2006, Al Jazeera English was launched. To mark that anniversary, we’ve created REWIND, which updates some of the channel’s most memorable and award-winning documentaries of the past decade. We find out what happened to some of the characters in those films and ask how the stories have developed in the years since our cameras left.

In 2014, Fault Lines reported from the Taliban stronghold of Charkh District, just an hour outside Kabul. Charkh had become a microcosm of Taliban rule in Afghanistan.

Armed Taliban were openly patrolling the streets and had built a parallel administration in Charkh, including Sharia courts and special girls’ schools.

Filmmaker Nagieb Khaja took us to a Taliban-controlled town for a rare glimpse of life under Taliban rule in the midst of a civil war.

REWIND spoke to Nagieb about what, if anything, has changed in the past three years and since the planned US drawdown was scrapped.

“The situation in Afghanistan has gotten worse, the Afghan security forces are bleeding. They lose a lot of people, and it is really difficult for the Afghan National Army at the moment,” Nagieb told REWIND.

“The US actually just decided that they would send 600 troops to Helmand again, and this is after they said that the war was over.”