Official Taliban websites go offline for unknown reasons

Taliban fighters display their flag on patrol in Kabul. Websites operated by the group mysteriously went offline on Friday (Rahmat Gul/AP)

Taliban websites that delivered the victorious insurgents’ official messages to Afghans and the world at large in five languages went offline abruptly on Friday in what some experts have interpreted as indicating an effort to try to silence them.

It was not immediately clear, however, why the sites in the Pashto, Urdu, Arabic, English and Dari languages went offline. They had been shielded by Cloudflare, a San Francisco-based content delivery network and denial-of-service protection provider.