Foreign Correspondent: Under Taliban Rule Series Return Thurs 10 Feb on ABC TV

Foreign Correspondent returns this Thursday with a BBC co-production, Under Taliban Rule, in which, for the first time since the Taliban gained power, reporter Yalda Hakim returns to Afghanistan.

Hakim travels around Afghanistan and witnesses the devastating impact on ordinary people of two decades of war and new economic sanctions.

She finds a war-ravaged country on the brink of starvation and economic collapse, and a new terror threat on the rise.

In a paediatric hospital, she meets malnourished children and desperate families, and learns it’s not only the patients and their families struggling to survive. Many of the health workers here haven’t been paid for months.

In the southern provinces of Kandahar and Helmand – the Taliban’s traditional power base – Hakim finds that the security promised by the Taliban remains elusive. Filming with the Taliban police, Hakim witnesses the emerging ISIS-K insurgency which is planting bombs in mosques and hospitals and infiltrating Taliban ranks.

One woman who lost her husband in an ISIS-K attack says the children are too afraid to go to school, afraid of being caught up in an attack.

Hakim discovers that the new government, desperate for cash, has broken its promise to stop opium production. At a poppy farm in Helmand, she speaks with farmers who explain how the high prices fetched by opium make it an irresistible cash crop.

In the capital, Hakim finds the Taliban have reneged on another promise – that they will allow all girls to continue to go to school. She speaks with a middle-class family who are lying low after protesting publicly for girls to have the right to attend school. The mother is now educating her young daughter at home.

Finally, Hakim scores an exclusive interview with a rising star in the new Taliban regime, Anas Haqqani. The Haqqani name is infamous. The group has been linked to Al Qaida and been responsible for some of the most devastating terrorist attacks inside Afghanistan.

Anas Haqqani says now the war is over. But what about reprisals against Afghans who helped foreign forces or supported the former government? Have the Haqqanis and the Taliban really changed? Or, after two decades of war, will Afghanistan become a pariah state once more and a hotbed for terrorism?

Airdate: Thursday 10 February at 8.00pm on ABC TV.