Google Removes Afghan Taliban Smartphone App from its Online Store

The U.S. Internet giant revealed on Monday that Google has removed a Taliban smartphone app from its online store, refuting the tech-savvy Afghan radical group’s amassed efforts to lift worldwide prominence.

Google Removes Afghan Taliban Smartphone App from its Online Store

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The Taliban introduced their incursion into smartphone apps on Friday with a Pashto language app named Alemarah, offering access to publicity statements and videos. The digital campaign, first stated by the U.S.-based SITE Intelligence Group, added to the Taliban’s already vigorous social media existence and a website in five languages consisting English.

The app was no longer available for download on Google Play Store hardly a day after the takeoff, the tech giant revealed in a statement.

Zabihullah Mujahid, Taliban spokesman was not reachable on the moment. On Sunday, he told AFP that the militant group’s “technology department” was also working on a Farsi form of the app.

Once witnessed as illiterate brutes, the Taliban have created a media-savvy PR group who use digital technology to reach out to viewers globally. When the Taliban reigned Afghanistan amid 1996 and 2001, nearly all electronic products were proscribed as un-Islamic.

Now the Taliban have eagerly incorporated electronic communication and social media in current years as an enlistment instrument and to endorse their propaganda.

“In this era of I.S. and its disturbingly tech-savvy ways, many of the older guard militant groups like the Afghan Taliban may feel they’re losing out.”

Michael Kugelman, Afghanistan expert at the Washington-based think tank the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars, informed AFP.

“By tapping into these kinds of new technologies, the Taliban can demonstrate to potential recruits that it’s just as technologically hip as its younger competitors.”

He said.