Photojournalist Danish Siddiqui Was Executed By Taliban After Verifying His Identity: Report
Days after Pulitzer Prize-winning Indian photojournalist Danish Siddiqui was killed in Afghanistan, a heart-wrenching report about his execution has been doing the rounds on social media across the world.
Died covering clashes in Afghanistan?
The report published in a US-based magazine on Thursday says that Siddique?was not simply killed in a crossfire in Afghanistan, nor was he simply collateral damage, but was "brutally murdered" by the Taliban after verifying his identity.
Siddiqui, 38, was on assignment in Afghanistan when he died on July 16. The award-winning journalist was killed while covering clashes between Afghan troops and the Taliban in Spin Boldak district of Kandahar city.
Findings of US report
According to the Washington Examiner report, Siddiqui travelled with an Afghan National Army team to the Spin Boldak region to cover fighting between Afghan forces and the Taliban to control the lucrative border crossing with Pakistan.
When they got to within one-third of a mile of the customs post, a Taliban attack split the team, with the commander and a few men separated from Siddiqui, who remained with three other Afghan troops, the report said.
During this assault, Siddiqui was hit with shrapnel, following which he and his team went to a local mosque for first aid. As the word spread, however, that a journalist was in the mosque, the Taliban attacked only because of his presence at the site, as per the report.
"Was alive when Taliban captured him"
“Siddiqui was alive when the Taliban captured him. The Taliban verified Siddiqui’s identity and then executed him, as well as those with him. The commander and the remainder of his team died as they tried to rescue him,” it said.
“While a widely circulated public photograph shows Siddiqui’s face recognizable, I reviewed other photographs and a video of Siddiqui’s body provided to me by a source in the Indian government that show the Taliban beat Siddiqui around the head and then riddled his body with bullets,” wrote the writer Micheal Rubin, who is a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute.
The Taliban’s decision to hunt down, execute Siddiqui, and then mutilate his corpse shows that they do not respect the rules of war or conventions that govern the behaviour of the global community, the report said.
In the report, Rubin also compared the Khmer Rouge and the Taliban, saying that both 'infused radical ideology with racist animus'. He also added that the Taliban, while always brutal, likely took their cruelty to a new level because Siddiqui was an Indian.
"Were not violent enough"
"In effect, Siddiqui's murder appears to show that the Taliban have concluded that their pre-9/11 mistake was not that they were cruel and autocratic, but rather that they were not violent or totalitarian enough," Rubin wrote in the report.
Siddiqui won the Pulitzer Prize in 2018 as part of the Reuters team for their coverage of the Rohingya crisis. He had extensively covered the Afghanistan conflict, the Hong Kong protests and other major events in Asia, Middle East, and Europe.
Siddiqui was laid to rest at the Jamia Millia Islamia graveyard where a sea of mourners gathered to pay their last respects.His body arrived at the Delhi airport in the evening of July 18 and was later brought to his residence in Jamia Nagar where a huge crowd, including his family and friends, had gathered.
