REPUBLIKA.CO.ID, KABUL -- The injured Taliban fighter stands shackled, with his face covered by a ski mask and wearing a helmet to block out noise so that, for security reasons, he cannot tell where he is.
The insurgent was wounded while battling the Afghan army and is now flanked by soldiers throughout his medical treatment at the nation's largest military hospital.
He is cared for alongside the very men whose comrades he once faced in battle, and the troops are furious about the arrangement at Kabul's Sardar Mohammed Daoud Khan hospital.
"We are treated in the same place, it's very strange but there is nothing I can do," says Mohammed, a soldier with a bullet wound to the leg who is just two rooms away from his enemy.
"Senior people make these decisions for us. It's appalling," he added. The Taliban "have no dignity... they don't have enough courage to be soldiers so they destroy our country and kill".
The policy to treat Taliban fighters who have waged a decade-long insurgency in Afghanistan is a sore point at a time when casualties among security forces are soaring.
More than 4,000 Afghan soldiers and police were killed and over 8,000 wounded in the first half of the year, compared to 5,000 who lost their lives in the whole of 2014, and the loss of life continues.
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