Taliban’s Cheese Factory Tour in Belarus Vanishes From the Internet

Officials from Afghanistan’s Taliban government recently toured a cheese-making facility in central Belarus — and it seems the Belarusian government would very much like you to forget it ever happened.

The visit to the Slutz Cheese-Making Plant was covered enthusiastically by local media on August 21, but according to Radio Free Europe (RFE), those reports have since been scrubbed from websites and social media channels. Even a post tied to Belarus’s National Academy of Sciences appears to have been pulled.

The abrupt memory-holing came after opposition figures and dissidents pointed out the awkward optics: female employees of the cheese plant explaining their craft to an all-male delegation from a regime that has effectively banned women from work and education in Afghanistan.

Opposition leader slams Lukashenko’s ‘friends’

Exiled Belarusian opposition leader Svyatlana Tsikhanouskaya seized on the visit as proof of President Alexander Lukashenko’s priorities.

“On the one hand, the regime declares Belarusian journalists, activists, and civil society groups ‘extremists’ and ‘terrorists.’ On the other, it quietly welcomes representatives of the Taliban and discusses business with them,” Tsikhanouskaya said, according to RFE.

“Belarusians see who Lukashenka is choosing as Belarus’s friends. They did not choose isolation. They did not choose partnership with the Taliban, North Korea, or other dictatorships,” she added.

Lukashenko is a close ally of Russian President Vladimir Putin, and Russia remains the only country to have formally recognized the Taliban government since it took power in 2021.

Backlash echoes Soviet-era war wounds

The visit also reopened painful memories for many Belarusians, whose countrymen fought and died in Afghanistan during the Soviet invasion in the 1980s. On social media, angry commentators sarcastically suggested the Taliban might be offered a tour of monuments honoring those fallen soldiers.

Belarusian officials’ attempts to erase the visit haven’t fully succeeded. Dissidents quickly made backups of the photos and articles before they were deleted, ensuring the embarrassing episode lives on.

The Taliban, for its part, is still happily posting about its “high-level delegation” in Belarus, boasting that it was there to “explore modern production technologies.”

Who was in the delegation?

According to the Kabul Tribune, the delegation was led by Ataullah Omari, Afghanistan’s minister of irrigation and livestock, and included around a dozen officials from the Taliban’s agricultural, transportation, finance, and commerce ministries, as well as representatives of Afghan state-owned companies.

Not the first awkward visit

This isn’t the first time a former Soviet republic has found itself in hot water over hosting Taliban officials.

In early August, three officials from the Taliban Agriculture Ministry paid a similar visit to Moldova to discuss “expanding practical and technical cooperation between the two countries.” That trip also sparked public outrage, with many Moldovans furious that their government would roll out the welcome mat for the Islamist extremists.

Moldovan official Vasile Sarban defended the invitation, saying it came at the urging of businessmen looking to profit from exports to Afghanistan.

“I believe it is right for the authorities of Moldova to look after Moldova’s economic operators. If our producers say they have nowhere to sell, the state should help them find markets,” Sarban said.

The backlash forced the Moldovan government to backpedal, insisting it would comply with all international sanctions against the Taliban and promising no “bilateral meetings or official contacts” with the Taliban emissaries.

Whether Belarus will follow suit remains unclear — but the deletion campaign suggests the government knows the visit wasn’t a good look.

Source: www.breitbart.com — https://www.breitbart.com/asia/2026/08/25/photos-of-taliban-visiting-slutz-cheese-making-plant-in-belarus-disappear/