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 A senior board member of Afghanistan's central bank is urging the U.S. Treasury and the International Monetary Fund to take steps to provide the Taliban-led government limited access to the country's reserves or risk economic disaster.

The Taliban took over Afghanistan with astonishing speed, but it appears unlikely that the militants will get quick access to most of the roughly $10 billion in assets held by Da Afghanistan Bank (DAB), which are mostly outside of the country.

U.S. President Joe Biden's administration has said any central bank assets the Afghan government have in the United States will not be made available to the Taliban, and the IMF has said the country will not have access to the lender's resources.

Shah Mehrabi, an economics professor at Montgomery College in Maryland and a member of the bank's board since 2002, told Reuters in a telephone interview on Wednesday that Afghanistan faces an "inevitable economic and humanitarian crisis" if its international reserves remain frozen.

Mehrabi stressed he doesn't speak for the Taliban but is making this push in his capacity as a sitting board member. He said he plans to meet with U.S. lawmakers this week, and hopes to talk with U.S. Treasury officials soon as well.

"If the international community wants to prevent an economic collapse, one way would be to allow Afghanistan to gain limited and monitored access to its reserves," he said.

"Having no access will choke off the Afghan economy, and directly hurt the Afghan people, with families pushed further into poverty."

Mehrabi is proposing that the United States allow the new government in Kabul a limited amount of access each month, perhaps in the range of $100 million-$125 million to start with, that would be monitored by an independent auditor.

"The Biden administration should negotiate with the Taliban over the money in the same way they negotiated over the evacuation," he said.

If the assets remain entirely frozen, then inflation will continue to soar, Afghans will not be able to afford basic necessities, and the central bank will lose its main tools for conducting monetary policy, he said.

The Taliban can survive through customs duties, increasing opium production, or selling off captured American military gear, but every day Afghans will suffer and be solely reliant on international aid if the country doesn’t have access to currency, Mehrabi added.

After nearly 20 years of American intervention, the Afghan economy is heavily dollarized, and depends on imports that largely must be purchased with foreign currency, he said.

With overseas reserves off-limits, Da Afghanistan Bank may be undermined after having cultivated a non-political, technocratic institution that so far has been allowed to continue its work under the Taliban, Mehrabi said.

"Their work there is not based on who is in power," he said, noting that he has not been personally in touch with Taliban representatives, but is in daily contact with colleagues running operations there now.

Ajmal Ahmady, who led the central bank until the capture of Kabul, has said about $7 billion of DAB's assets was held as a mixture of cash, gold, bonds and other investments at the U.S. Federal Reserve.

Most of the rest is in other international accounts and at the Bank for International Settlements, a bank for central banks based in Switzerland, and not physically in DAB vaults, he said - leaving about 0.2% or less of the total accessible to the Taliban. (Reuters)

Two Afghans with links to U.S. forces who ended up in Serbia after fleeting the Taliban advance are watching in dismay as the Islamist militants take over back home, saying the group cannot be trusted and they fear for relatives left behind.

Ahmadmir and Mohaed left about three months ago for their own security because of their past work for U.S. troops, making separate journeys across Iran and Turkey and ending up in a refugee camp in Serbia, where they are stranded.

Speaking to Reuters at the Obrenovac camp, 30 km (18 miles) west of Serbia's capital Belgrade, Mohaed, 45, said his wife, two children, brother, sister and parents remained in Kabul.

"Me and my brother used to work for the U.S. army, they (the family) are not safe, because we cannot trust the Taliban. They are in hiding," he said, speaking on condition his last name not be used due to the sensitivity of the subject.

A former handyman for U.S. forces, Mohaed said the decision by U.S. President Joe Biden to order the American military to pull out was wrong.

"Our government needed more help, and they just left," he said.

In 2013 Mohaed applied for a special visa program to move to the United States, without success.

He left Afghanistan months before the massive but chaotic airlift by the United States and its allies that evacuated more than 123,000 people from Kabul over the past two weeks.

Despite the airlift, many of those who helped Western nations during the war were left behind.

RIGHTS

Ahmadmir, a former interpreter for U.S. special forces, said the Taliban were offering false assurances of safety to those who worked for the former Afghan government, when in reality they planned to take action against them.

“They (Taliban) are telling them – no problem, come to your jobs, continue living normally, but no – that’s not the case. Things are going in a different way. Yeah... I’m so worried about it,” Ahmadmir said. "They are pretending."

Ahmadmir said his father, mother and two married sisters remained in Kabul. "You are asking me - are you scared that something could happen to your family; I say, yes, if the government is in the hands of the Taliban."

The Taliban has sought to assure Afghans it will respect people's rights, including women who it barred from studying and working during its 1996-2001 rule when it enforced its harsh interpretion of Islamic law. Those proclamations have been met with doubt by many.

Ahmadmir called a relative in Kabul and allowed a visiting team from Reuters to listen in.

"There is silence in Kabul, the bazaar is closed, the residents are not visible, everyone has disappeared somewhere ..." the relative told Ahmadmir, according to a translation of the Pashto language by Reuters.

Serbia was a focal point for migrants in 2015, when more than a million people fleeing wars and poverty in the Middle East and Asia made it to the European Union.

According to Serbian authorities, there are around 4,500 migrants in government operated camps across the country, 1,200 of them Afghans. Hundreds of other migrants are scattered in fields and forests near Serbia's borders with Bosnia and EU members Croatia and Hungary, all countries they want to enter. (Reuters)