The friends were told that their clothing was “in conflict with Afghan and Islamic values”, a Taliban spokesman told the BBC, adding the values in Peaky Blinders went against Afghan culture.

In videos posted online, the men, who have been released, can be seen posing in flat caps and three-piece suits similar to those worn in the series set in England soon after World War One.

Since the Taliban seized power in 2021, they have imposed a number of restrictions on daily life in accordance with their interpretation of Islamic Sharia law.

“Even jeans would have been acceptable, but the values in the Peaky Blinders series are against Afghan culture,” Saiful Islam Khyber, a spokesman for the Taliban government’s provincial department of Vice and Virtue in Herat city told the BBC.

The men, all in their early twenties, come from the town of Jibrail in Herat province. They were ordered to report to the Taliban’s “morality police” on Sunday, and presented themselves for questioning in Herat the following day.

“They were promoting foreign culture and imitating film actors in Herat,” Khyber wrote on social media, adding that they had undergone a “rehabilitation programme”.

They were not formally arrested, “only summoned and advised and released”, Khyber told the BBC’s US partner CBS News.

“We have our own religious and cultural values, and especially for clothing we have specific traditional styles,” he said.

“The clothing they wore has no Afghan identity at all and does not match our culture. Secondly, their actions were an imitation of actors from a British movie. Our society is Muslim; if we are to follow or imitate someone, we should follow our righteous religious predecessors in good and lawful matters.”

The men could be seen thanking officials for their advice and saying they were unaware they had violated any laws in a video released by the ministry after they were questioned – though it is unclear under what circumstances the interview was recorded.

“I have innocently been sharing content that was against Sharia which had many viewers,” one said in the recording.

He said he had been “summoned and advised”, and would no longer do “anything like this”.

In an interview with YouTube channel Herat-Mic uploaded at the end of November, before they were summoned, the friends said they admired the fashion displayed in the series, adding that they had received positive reactions from locals.

“At first we were hesitant, but once we went outside, people liked our style, stopped us in the streets, and wanted to take photos with us,” one of the men said, according to a translation by CBS News.

Women training as midwives and nurses in Afghanistan have told the BBC they were ordered not to return to classes in the morning – effectively closing off their last route to further education in the country.

Five separate institutions across Afghanistan have also confirmed to the BBC that the Taliban had instructed them to close until further notice, with videos shared online showing students crying at the news.

The BBC has yet to confirm the order officially with the Taliban government’s health ministry.

However, the closure appears to be in line with the group’s wider policy on female education, which has seen teenage girls unable to access secondary and higher education since August 2021.

Previously, the blue tick indicated “active, notable, and authentic accounts of public interest” verified by Twitter, and could not be purchased.

But now, users can buy them through the new Twitter Blue service.

At least two Taliban officials and four prominent supporters in Afghanistan are currently using the checkmarks.

Hedayatullah Hedayat, the head of the Taliban’s department for “access to information”, now has the tick.

His account has 187,000 followers and he regularly posts information related to the Taliban administration. He had his paid-for blue tick removed last month, according to local media, but it has now returned.

Abdul Haq Hammad, head of the media watchdog at the Afghan Ministry of Information and Culture, also has a blue tick on his account that has 170,000 followers.

The presence of the hard-line Islamists on Twitter has been a topic of controversy for some time.

In October 2021, former US President Donald Trump – who was suspended from the platform after his supporters stormed the US Capitol – said: “We live in a world where the Taliban has a huge presence on Twitter, yet your favorite American President has been silenced.

“This is unacceptable.”

The Twitter Blue service was introduced in December.

It costs $8 per month, and an increased fee of $11 is paid by those using the Twitter app on Apple devices.

Subscribers to Twitter Blue benefit from “priority ranking in search, mentions, and replies” to help fight spam and bots, according to the platform.

Before the introduction of Twitter Blue, none of the observed accounts for Taliban officials carried the blue tick mark – that was then used to indicate the identities of users verified by Twitter.

After their return to power in Kabul in August 2021, the group took over verified accounts run by the previous administration, including the Afghanistan Cricket Board. The sporting body’s account now carries a gold tick.

Under Twitter’s new policies, gold checkmarks indicate businesses, while grey ones are for other users, such as governing authorities.

Taliban officials and supporters are prolific users of Twitter, using the platform to disseminate key messages.

Twitter did not respond to a request for comment

Prominent Taliban supporters have acquired the blue tick too.

Muhammad Jalal, who previously identified as a Taliban official, praised the new owner of Twitter on Monday, declaring that Elon Musk was “making Twitter great again”.

Mujib Rahman Ansari died alongside his brother, members of his security detail and civilians gathered for prayers in a suspected suicide blast, officials say.

It is not yet clear who is behind the attack, which the Taliban denounced as “sinister” and “cowardly”.

The killing is the latest in a string of assassinations of prominent pro-Taliban figures in the country.

According to police, Ansari was arriving at Gazargah mosque to lead Friday noon prayers when a suicide bomber kissed the cleric’s hand and detonated an explosive device.

Unverified images on social media appear to show a number of bloodied corpses lying amid a scene of devastation outside the mosque compound in the western Afghan city.

Local officials say at least 23 people were wounded in the attack, but local reports suggest the total casualty figure could be significantly higher.

“Unfortunately, the country’s popular religious scholar Mawlawi Mujib Rahman Ansari has been martyred in a cowardly attack during the Friday prayers in Herat,” a Taliban spokesman tweeted.

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• Newspaper Headlines: Wednesday, August 31, 2022

The cleric was well-known in Afghanistan for his support of the Taliban’s rule.

Speaking earlier this summer at a religious gathering in Kabul, he called for those who committed “the smallest act against our Islamic government” to be beheaded.

According to AFP news agency, he said “this [Taliban] flag has not been raised easily, and it will not be lowered easily.”

No-one has claimed responsibility for Friday’s attack, but the militant Islamic State (IS) group has previously issued videos threatening the pro-Taliban cleric.

The security situation in the country, which had improved after the end of fighting following the Taliban takeover, is seen to be deteriorating.

Ansari is the fourth Muslim cleric close to the Taliban to have been killed in less than two months.

Several of those attacks were claimed by IS, including a suicide bomb explosion last month in the capital Kabul which killed prominent pro-Taliban religious leader Sheikh Rahimullah Haqqani.

Days later 21 people were killed in an explosion at a Kabul mosque.

Despite both being Sunni Islamist groups, IS considers itself to be a bitter rival of the Taliban and regularly challenges its rule over Afghanistan using violence.

The Pakistani Taliban (TTP) said substantial progress had been made at the talks in Kabul, and the truce extended until further notice.

A Pakistani government official said the talks were moving in a positive direction, AFP news agency reports.

The TTP has been fighting Pakistan’s armed forces for years.

The TTP – Tehrik-i-Taliban Pakistan – wants to impose its own ultra hard-line interpretation of sharia law in Pakistani regions along the border with Afghanistan. The mountainous area has long been a hotbed of militant activity.

The group has enjoyed a close but ambiguous relationship with the Afghan Taliban, reports the BBC’s Secunder Kermani in Islamabad.

Since the Taliban took control of Afghanistan last year, the TTP has stepped up its attacks in Pakistan, killing dozens of government soldiers in 2021.

The ongoing talks in Kabul are between the militants and a jirga, an assembly of Pakistani politicians and tribal elders.

It is not clear what the terms of any settlement could be.

A truce previously agreed between the two sides for an Islamic festival expired on 30 May. In the past, similar agreements have quickly broken down.

The TTP was founded in 2007 in response to a Pakistani military operation clearing the Lal Masjid mosque in Islamabad where a radical preacher held sway. The group’s founder, Baitullah Mehsud, was once considered close to Pakistan’s intelligence agency, the ISI.

According to Amira Jadoon, an assistant professor at the US Military Academy at West Point, the links between the Afghan and Pakistani Taliban date back to the 11 September 2001 attacks in the US and the fall of the first Taliban government in Afghanistan later the same year.

After its formation, the TTP went on a rampage against the Pakistani state, targeting both civilians and security forces. The Pakistani army retaliated and expelled the TTP leadership to Afghanistan, where it has been based since 2015, conducting “low-intensity” warfare against Pakistan.

Media outlets were told of the decree on Wednesday, a religious police spokesman told BBC Pashto.

The ruling comes two weeks after all women were ordered to wear a face veil in public, or face punishment.

Restrictions on women are being tightened – they are banned from travelling without male relatives and secondary schools are shut for girls.

The new decree is being widely criticised on Twitter, with many calling it another step by the Taliban to promote extremism.

“The world deploys masks to protect people from Covid. The Taliban deploys masks to protect people from seeing the faces of women journalists. For the Taliban, women are a disease,” one activist tweeted.

After taking power last August, the Taliban had held off issuing new laws on what women should wear – until this month.

But in early May the Ministry for the Prevention of Vice and Promotion of Virtue announced that all women would have to cover their face in public. Anyone refusing to comply now risks an escalating series of punishments.

The latest decree makes clear the hardline rulers’ order on face coverings also applies to women on screen.

“Based on information received by Tolo news, the order has been issued to all media outlets in Afghanistan,” the news channel reported.

The private Shamshad news channel posted a photo of its news presenter wearing a mask, and other similar images are being shared on social media.

#AFG A powerful message from an Afghan woman (TOlo TV Host) that needs reflection: This is me, Yalda Ali, a woman -on verge of being eliminated by the Prevention of Vice and Promotion of Virtue. We are required to appear like this, hereafter. @bsarwary pic.twitter.com/Gjjhgm0wJf

— Wali Arian (@waliarian) May 19, 2022

Lt Gen Sami Sadat said that eight months of Taliban rule has convinced many Afghans that military action is the only way forward.

He said operations could begin next month after the Islamic Eid festival, when he plans to return to Afghanistan.

The Taliban took control of the country in a rapid offensive last August.

The hard-line Islamists swept across the country in just 10 days, as the last US-led Nato forces left following a 20-year military campaign.

Speaking for the first time about the plans, Lt Gen Sadat told the BBC he and others would “do anything and everything in our powers to make sure Afghanistan is freed from the Taliban and a democratic system is re-established”.

“Until we get our freedom, until we get our free will, we will continue to fight,” he said, while refusing to be drawn on a specific timeline.

The general underscored how the Taliban had been reintroducing increasingly harsh rule – including severe restrictions on the rights of women and girls – and it was time to stop their authoritarian order and start a new chapter.

“What we see in Afghanistan in eight months of Taliban rule has been nothing but more religious restrictions, misquotation, misinterpretation and misuse of the scripts from the Holy Koran for political purposes.”

He initially planned to give the Taliban 12 months to see if they would change, he said. “Unfortunately, every day you wake up the Taliban have had something new to do – torturing people, killing, disappearances, food shortages, child malnutrition.”

He said he received hundreds of messages daily from Afghans asking him what he was going to do about it.

But in a country shredded by more than 40 years of conflict, many Afghans are weary of war, desperate to leave, or struggling to survive in the midst of a deepening economic crisis. The UN speaks of a country marked by “combat fatigue” with millions on the brink of starvation.

Many in rural areas which bore the brunt of Nato’s war against the Taliban have welcomed the relative calm now that US and Afghan warplanes have left the skies and Taliban attacks have ended.

Lt Gen Sadat, who commanded Afghan government forces in the southern province of Helmand in the last months of the Taliban offensive, is also accused of ordering attacks which killed civilians. When questioned about the charges he denied them.

In August last year he was appointed to head the Afghan special forces and arrived in Kabul the day the Taliban swept in and his commander-in-chief President Ashraf Ghani fled the country.

Asked whether there was any alternative to another war, Lt Gen Sadat said he hoped that moderate Taliban, known to be uncomfortable with a growing raft of restrictions reminiscent of draconian Taliban rule in 1990’s, could be part of a new government.

“We are not against the Taliban,” he said, just against their current “textbook,” describing an Afghanistan where “everyone fits in, not a country only for Taliban.”

In recent weeks, an audio message in which the general speaks about an armed fight against the Taliban with the aim of “re-liberating” Afghanistan was leaked to the media.

In the past, armed groups including the Taliban won Afghan wars with the support of neighbouring countries, a foothold in the country, and foreign funding.

The sources said representatives from the Ministry for the Propagation of Virtue and Prevention of Vice were patrolling the entrances to government offices on Monday to check that employees were in compliance with the new rules.

Employees were being instructed not to shave their beards and to wear local clothing consisting of a long, loose top and trousers, and a hat or turban. They were also told to ensure they prayed at the correct times, two of the sources said.

Workers were told they would from now on be unable to enter offices and would eventually be fired if they did not meet the dress codes, the sources said.

A spokesman for the Public Morality Ministry did not respond to a request for comment.

Last week, the Taliban banned women from taking flights without a male chaperone and failed to open girls’ schools as promised.

On Sunday it ordered parks to be segregated by sex, with women allowed to enter three days a week, and men the other four days, including the weekend, meaning even married couples and families cannot visit together.

The Taliban administration has drawn criticism at home and from Western governments for forcing its hardline interpretation of Islamic law onto all Afghans.

The Taliban say they will respect everyone’s rights in line with Islamic law and Afghan customs and that they have changed since their 1996-2001 rule, when they barred women from leaving the house without a male relative and forced men to grow beards.

Wednesday’s u-turn on girls’ schools led to protests from the international community, including the United States, which pulled out of planned meetings with Taliban officials in Qatar to discuss key economic issues.

The Taliban needs Western countries to lift sanctions that are crippling the Afghan economy.

The new regulations mark the latest in series of restrictions placed on the people of Afghanistan based on the Taliban’s strict interpretation of Islamic Sharia law.

“You are urgently informed that from today, shaving beards and playing music in barbershops and public baths are strictly prohibited,” the local authority said Sunday in a statement.

“If any barbershop or public bath is found to have shaved anyone’s beard or played music, they will be dealt with according to the Sharia principles and they will not have the right to complain,” the statement added.

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While the Taliban has said their rule would be milder than it was during their previous time in government, there have been numerous reports of harsh crackdowns since they seized power of the nation in August, including the detention and assault of journalists, the use of whips against women taking part in protests, and the public hanging of alleged criminals.

The group also has not allowed Afghan girls and women to resume secondary education, despite promising that female students would be allowed to study.

Afghan boys have already been called to return to school.

When last in power between 1996 and 2001, the Taliban banned women and girls from education and work and severely restricted their rights.

Today, women have been completely excluded from the country’s new, hardline government and in some instances been ordered to leave their workplaces.

A UN committee will rule on the request but it is unlikely to happen during the current session of the body.

The Taliban also nominated their Doha-based spokesperson, Suhail Shaheen, as Afghanistan’s UN ambassador.

The group, which seized control of Afghanistan last month, said the envoy for the ousted government no longer represented the country.

The request to participate in the high-level debate is being considered by a credentials committee, whose nine members include the US, China and Russia, according to a UN spokesperson.

But they are unlikely to meet before the end of the General Assembly session next Monday. Until then, under UN rules, Ghulam Isaczai will remain Afghanistan’s ambassador to the global body.

He is expected to make a speech on the final day. However the Taliban said his mission “no longer represents Afghanistan”.

No government has formally recognised the Taliban as Afghanistan’s new government and for the UN to agree to its nominee for ambassador would be an important step towards international acceptance.

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The Taliban also said that several countries no longer recognised former President Ashraf Ghani as leader.

Mr Ghani abruptly left Afghanistan as Taliban militants advanced on the capital, Kabul, on 15 August. He has since taken refuge in the United Arab Emirates.

In Afghanistan itself, the last minister from the deposed government, Wahid Majrooh, has left office as public health minister after hearing that he had been replaced.

When the Taliban last controlled Afghanistan, between 1996 and 2001, the ambassador of the government they overthrew stayed on as a UN representative, after the credentials committee deferred its decision on competing claims for the position.

At the UN meeting on Tuesday, Qatar urged world leaders to stay engaged with the Taliban.

“Boycotting them would only lead to polarisation and reactions, whereas dialogue could be fruitful,” said Qatar’s ruler, Sheikh Tamim bin Hamad Al Thani.

Qatar has become a key broker in Afghanistan. It hosted talks between the Taliban and US which culminated in a 2020 agreement to withdraw US-led Nato forces.

The country has helped Afghans and foreign nationals to evacuate the country since the Taliban takeover, and has facilitated recent intra-Afghan peace talks.

The photos were taken in Khost, Afghanistan just a day after the last U.S. troops left the country after spending nearly 20-years in the country.

Taliban leaders took over control of the Kabul airport Tuesday August 31, and marked the departure of the last U.S. plane from the country by taking a symbolic walk across the airport’s sole runway, according to a report. 

“The world should have learned its lesson and this is the enjoyable moment of victory,” Zabihullah Mujahid, the Taliban spokesman, said in a livestream video. He spoke to reporters at the Hamid Karzai International Airport and said Americans “could not achieve their goal through military operations,” according to Al Jazeera.

Mariam Ghani, 42, stepped out with a female friend in Brooklyn on Wednesday afternoon just days after her father abandoned his country and his citizens amid the Taliban takeover.

The visual artist and filmmaker, who lives in a luxury co-op building in Clinton Hill, strolled along the sidewalk clutching her mask as she chats with her friend.

Her sighting came as her 72-year-old father resurfaced in the United Arab Emirates, where he has been granted asylum.

The UAE’s Foreign Ministry acknowledged it had welcomed the Afghan leader on “humanitarian grounds.”

Ghani run out of the presidential palace Sunday with his inner circle of confidantes, and, according to the Russian embassy in Kabul, fled with four vehicles and a helicopter full of cash.

Some reports had earlier suggested that he bolted to a neighboring country like Uzbekistan, Tajikistan or Oman.

His daughter refused to answer questions outside her apartment a day earlier when The Post caught up to her.

It’s unclear whether Ghani, who was born in Brooklyn and raised in suburban Maryland, has heard from her father since he fled.

In an Instagram post Monday — a day after the Taliban seized control — Mariam said she was “angry and grieving and terribly afraid for family, friends & colleagues left behind in Afghanistan,” adding that she was “working feverishly to do anything I can on their behalf.”

As many as 80,000 Americans and Afghans who once worked for the US still need to be evacuated from Kabul amid the botched withdrawal that has been marred by violence and chaos.

The US has evacuated 7,000 from Kabul since the Taliban seized control of Afghanistan five days ago, but there are still between 60,000 and 80,000 who need to get out.

While her father was working in the Afghan government dating back to 2002, Ghani was launching her art and teaching career here in the US after attending New York University and the School of Visual Arts.

Her work has since appeared in some of the most renowned museums in the world, including the Guggenheim and MOMA in New York and the Tate Modern in London. In 2018, she joined the faculty at Bennington College in Vermont.

Her first feature documentary, “What We Left Unfinished,” about five films that were started and left abandoned during the Communist era in Afghanistan, is currently playing in select theaters.

Clarissa reported that Taliban militants were prepared to “pistol whip” a field producer for the network before a fellow fighter intervened and prevented an attack.

Narrating the ordeal people pass through while trying to go to the Kabul airport to leave the country, Ward said the Taliban was ready to pistol whip her producer with one telling her to cover her face before she talks to him.

“Two Taliban fighters just came up with their pistols, and they were ready to pistol-whip him, and we had to intervene and scream, and it was actually another Taliban fighter who came in said, ‘No, no, no, don’t do that. They’re journalists,” Ms Ward reported from Kabul on Wednesday.

Describing the “most frightening moment” for the CNN crew, Ms Ward said Field Producer Brent Swails was filming with his iPhone when two Taliban fighters approached, ready to assault Mr Swails.

The rest of the CNN crew intervened along with another Taliban fighter who told the others not to attack the reporters.“I’ve covered all sorts of crazy situations – this was mayhem,” Ms Ward said.

Describing the scene outside the Kabul airport, she said: “This was nuts. This is impossible for an ordinary civilian, even if they have their paperwork – no way they’re running that gauntlet, no way they’re going to be able to navigate that. It’s very dicey, it’s very dangerous and it’s completely unpredictable, there’s no order, there’s no coherent system for processing people, separating those with papers from those who don’t have papers.

“Honestly, to me, it’s a miracle that more people haven’t been very, very, seriously hurt,” Ms Ward added.

“There was a consistent stream of gunfire,” Ms Ward said earlier describing the situation in the Afghan capital.

She added that her team was “accosted” by people asking for help to get out of the country.

“It’s so heartbreaking – everybody coming up to us with their papers, their passports, saying ‘please, I worked at Camp Pheonix, I worked at this camp, I was a translator, help me get in, help me get to America, help me get my SIV – my visa, to get out of the country’. And then the Taliban would just come through, at one stage, this fighter just lifted his gun up into the air as if he was about to start firing so we had to run and take cover,” Ms Ward recounted.

The Biden administration faces the daunting task of getting out tens of thousands of Americans and vulnerable Afghans still in the country before the official US withdrawal date of 31 August.

The Taliban on Sunday, August 15, declared the Islamic Emirates of Afghanistan after conquering the capital of Kabul.

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Ghani ran for his life as Taliban forces enter Kabul on Sunday, August 15.

Speaking from exile, Ghani said he had left Kabul to prevent bloodshed and denied reports he took large sums of money with him as he departed the presidential palace.

“What had happened 25 years ago in Afghanistan was going to take place again. That was something that needed to be avoided, a shameful development like that,” Ghani said in a video streamed on Facebook on Wednesday, his first public comments since it was confirmed he was in the UAE.

“The dignity of Afghanistan was important for me, and that was to be ensured, so I had to leave Afghanistan in order to prevent bloodshed, in order to make sure that a huge disaster (was) prevented.

“When it comes to the political leadership of the Taliban, it was a failure on their part and a failure on our part that the negotiations did not lead to anything, the peace process should lead to the end of war.

“I left on the advice of government officials,” he added.

“Kabul should not be turned into another Yemen or Syria overpower struggles so I was forced to leave,” Ghani said.

Earlier reports had suggested that Ghani fled with $169 million in his cash-stuffed helicopter and has been given asylum in Dubai on ‘humanitarian grounds’.

But he said there was no truth to allegations that he escaped with ‘suitcases of cash’, saying it was all part of a ‘personality assassination’.

“I left with just a waistcoat and some clothes. The personality assassination against me has been ongoing, saying that I have taken money with me,” Ghani said in the video.

“The accusations are baseless lies. You can even ask customs officials – they are baseless.”

Ghani also said in his livestream address that he supports talks between the Taliban and top former government officials, and that he was “in talks to return” home after seeking refuge in the UAE.

“I support the government’s initiative of ongoing negotiations with Abdullah Abdullah and former president Hamid Karzai. I want the success of this process,” he said.

“I am in consultation for my return to Afghanistan so that I can continue efforts for justice, true Islamic and national values,” he said.

The UAE is one of three nations, including Saudi Arabia and Pakistan, which recognised the previous Taliban regime, which ran Afghanistan from 1996 to 2001.

On Monday, there were scenes of panic and chaos at the Kabul airport as desperate residents tried to flee the war-torn country. Deaths were reported as some clung to planes flying out of the capital.

Earlier this year, the war between the Taliban and Afghan forces intensified as foreign troops announced their withdrawal from the country by September 11, the 20th anniversary of the attacks that led to the US invasion.

With the collapse of the Afghan government, attention is turning to ensure the safety of civilians and evacuees and an orderly transfer of power.

The Taliban has declared that the war in Afghanistan is over and said efforts to form an inclusive government are under way.

It comes as the terror group unleashes a reign of terror after seizing control of a third of the country since US troops deserted in June.

The clip begins with one man playing around with two ropes and shows him swinging from side to side.

The cameraman can be heard laughing while recording his comrades play around on the gym equipment.

Then the camera moves to a punching bag where the cameraman briefly tries his hand at boxing the bag before letting his associate take over.

The group takes it in turns to try and tackle the punchbag, flailing and kicking at it to little avail.

Meanwhile, terrified Afghanis have begun fleeing the Taliban as the militants sweep across the country.

Below is the video: