Former Taliban fighters display their weapons after they joined Afghan government forces during a ceremony in Herat on November 3, 2012.
The Taliban may be hiring a new spokesperson. One, perhaps, who knows how to correctly send an e-mail.
ABC News reported that a Taliban spokesperson accidentally CC’d the names of his entire mailing list while sending out a press release last week.
Over 400 e-mail addresses were revealed in an e-mail sent by Qari Yousuf Ahmadi, an official Taliban spokesperson. Ahmadi had forwarded a press release initially sent to him by another spokesperson, Zabihullah Mujahid. Office etiquette suggests that Ahmadi should have considered using the BCC or blind-carbon-copy function, which would have prevented every recipient of the Taliban e-mail from seeing the addresses of everyone else who got it.
The list was made up mostly of journalists, but also included “an address appearing to belong to a provincial governor, an Afghan legislator, several academics and activists,” as well as “a representative of Gulbuddein Hekmatar, an Afghan warlord whose outlawed group Hezb-i-Islami is believed to be behind several attacks against coalition troops,” ABC adds.
Mustafa Kazemi, a Kabul-based war correspondent, tweeted to his 9,500 followers that all four of his e-mail addresses were leaked, adding that the incident was “quite reassuring to my safety.”
The e-mail blunder has even rendered a new hashtag on Twitter: #talibansubjectlines.