By AHMAD SEIR, TAMEEM AKHGAR and DAVID RISING

KABUL, Afghanistan (AP) — Reports of targeted killings in areas overrun by the Taliban mounted Friday, fueling fears that they will return Afghanistan to the repressive rule they imposed when they were last in power, even as they urged imams to push a message of unity at Friday’s prayers.

Terrified that the new de facto rulers would commit such abuses, thousands have raced to Kabul’s airport and to border crossings, desperate to flee following the Taliban’s stunning blitz through the country. Others have taken to the streets to protest the takeover — acts of defiance that Taliban fighters have violently suppressed.

The Taliban say they have become more moderate since they last ruled Afghanistan in the 1990s and have pledged to restore security and forgive those who fought them in the 20 years since a U.S.-led invasion. Ahead of Friday prayers, leaders urged imams to use sermons to appeal for unity and urge people not to flee the country.

But many Afghans are skeptical, fearing that the Taliban will erase the gains, especially for women, achieved in the past two decades. Reports of abuses are growing, and an Amnesty International report provided more evidence Friday that undercut the Taliban’s claims they have changed.

The rights group said that its researchers spoke to eyewitnesses in Ghazni province who recounted how the Taliban killed nine ethnic Hazara men in the village of Mundarakht on July 4-6. It said six of the men were shot, and three were tortured to death. Hazaras are Shiite Muslims who were previously persecuted by the Taliban and who made major gains in education and social status in recent years.

The brutality of the killings was “a reminder of the Taliban’s past record, and a horrifying indicator of what Taliban rule may bring,” said Agnes Callamard, the head of Amnesty International.

The rights group warned that many more killings may have gone unreported because the Taliban cut cellphone services in many areas they’ve captured to prevent images from being published.

Separately, Reporters without Borders expressed alarm at the news that Taliban fighters killed the family member of an Afghan journalist working for German broadcaster Deutsche Welle on Wednesday.

“Sadly, this confirms our worst fears,” said Katja Gloger of the press freedom group’s German section. “The brutal action of the Taliban show that the lives of independent media workers in Afghanistan are in acute danger.”

Meanwhile, a Norway-based private intelligence group that provides information to the U.N. said it obtained evidence that the Taliban have rounded up Afghans on a blacklist of people they believe worked in key roles with the previous Afghan administration or with U.S.-led forces. A report from RHIPTO Norwegian Center for Global Analyses that was obtained by The Associated Press included a copy of one of the letters.

In an email to the AP, Christian Nellemann, the group’s executive director, said the organization knew about several threat letters sent to Afghans, including a man who was taken from his Kabul apartment this week by the Taliban.

“We had access to hard copies of concrete letters issued and stamped by the Taliban Military Commission to this effect,” he said.

The AP could not independently verify the claims made by the group.

Under the Taliban’s previous rule, women were largely confined to their homes, television and music were banned, and public executions were held regularly. Fearing a return to those days, thousands have tried to flee the country, braving checkpoints manned by Taliban fighters to rush to Kabul’s airport.

Mohammad Naim, who has been among the crowd at the airport for four days trying to escape, said he had to put his children on the roof of a car on the first day to save them from being crushed by the mass of people. He saw other children killed who were unable to get out of the way.

Naim, who said he had been an interpreter for U.S. forces, urged others not to the come to airport.

“It is a very, very crazy situation right now and I hope the situation gets better because I saw kids dying, it is very terrible,” he said.

The United States is struggling to pick up the pace of evacuations it is running from Afghanistan, where thousands of Americans and their Afghan allies may be in need of escape.

Dozens of other flights have already brought hundreds more Western nationals and Afghan workers to Europe and elsewhere.

But continued chaos at the airport has hindered flights. Spain’s Defense Minister Margarita Robles said Friday that its military transport planes are leaving Kabul partly empty in the tumult.

“Nobody’s in control of the situation,” Robles told Spanish public radio RNE.

Getting to the facility is also a major challenge. Germany was sending two helicopters to Kabul to help bring small numbers of people from elsewhere in the city to the airport, officials said. Australia’s prime minister said that his country’s citizens who live outside Kabul have not been able to be evacuated.

As concerns mount about what a Taliban government will look like, the group’s leaders are meeting with some officials from previous Afghan administrations.

An Afghan official familiar with those talks indicated nothing would come of them before the last U.S. troops leave, currently planned for Aug. 31.

The Taliban’s lead negotiator, Anas Haqqani, has said the group agreed with the U.S. to “do nothing” until after that date, according to the official, who spoke on condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to give information to the media. The Taliban have said they want an inclusive government, but, as with their other promises, it was not clear if they would make good on that.

In addition to concerns about Taliban abuses, officials have warned that Afghanistan’s already weakened economy could crumble further without the massive international aid that sustained the toppled Western-backed government. The U.N. says there are dire food shortages and experts said the country was severely in need of cash with much of the government’s funds abroad frozen.

After the Taliban overran Kabul the market used by many in the capital to exchange money was closed down.

Underscoring the difficulties the Taliban will face in returning the country to normal life, trader Aminullah Amin said Friday that it would stay closed for the time being. There was just too much uncertainty surrounding exchange rates, how the Taliban might regulate the market, and the possibility of looting.

“We have not decided to reopen the markets yet,” he said.

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Akhgar reported from Istanbul, Rising from Bangkok. Associated Press writers Jan M. Olsen in Copenhagen, Denmark, Frank Jordans in Berlin, Barry Hatton in Lisbon, Kathy Gannon in Islamabad, and Rod McGurk in Canberra, Australia, contributed to this report.

By PAUL WISEMAN

WASHINGTON (AP) — The number of people seeking unemployment benefits fell last week for a fourth straight time to a pandemic low, the latest sign that America’s job market is rebounding from the pandemic recession as employers boost hiring to meet a surge in consumer demand.

The Labor Department reported Thursday that jobless claims fell by 29,000 to 348,000. The four-week average of claims, which smooths out week-to-week volatility, also fell — by 19,000, to just below 378,000, also a pandemic low.

The weekly pace of applications for unemployment aid has fallen more or less steadily since topping 900,000 in early January. The dwindling number of first-time jobless claims has coincided with the widespread administering of vaccines, which has led businesses to reopen or expand their hours and drawn consumers back to shops, restaurants, airports and entertainment venues.

Still, the number of applications remains high by historic standards: Before the pandemic tore through the economy in March 2020, the weekly pace amounted to around 220,000 a week. And now there is growing concern that the highly contagious delta variant could disrupt the economy’s recovery from last year’s brief but intense recession. Some economists have already begun to mark down their estimates for growth this quarter as some measures of economic activity, like air travel, have started to weaken.

Filings for unemployment benefits have traditionally been seen as a real-time measure of the job market’s health. But their reliability has deteriorated during the pandemic. In many states, the weekly figures have been inflated by fraud and by multiple filings from unemployed Americans as they navigate bureaucratic hurdles to try to obtain benefits. Those complications help explain why the pace of applications remains comparatively high.

By all accounts, the job market has been rebounding with vigor since the pandemic paralyzed economic activity last year and employers slashed more than 22 million jobs. The United States has since recovered 16.7 million jobs. And employers have added a rising number of jobs for three straight months, including a robust 943,000 in July. In the meantime, employers have posted a record 10.1 million openings, and many complain that they can’t find enough applicants to fill their open positions.

Last week’s drop in applications for aid was larger than many economists had expected, a sign that the job market’s recovery remains on track for now despite the worries surrounding the spread of the delta variant.

“As life normalizes and the service sector continues to gain momentum (delta variant permitting), we expect initial jobless claims to remain in a downtrend,” Joshua Shapiro, chief U.S. economist at the consulting firm Maria Fiorini Ramirez, said in a research note.

Shapiro added that “this report points to a continued rapid pace of job gains since the July employment data were collected.″

Some employers ascribe their labor shortages to supplemental unemployment benefits from the federal government — including $300 a week on top of regular state aid — for discouraging some of the jobless from seeking work. In response, many states have withdrawn from the federal programs, which expire nationwide next month anyway.

Economists point to other factors, too, that have kept some people on the sidelines of the job market. They include difficulty finding or affording child care, fear about becoming infected by the virus at work and the desire of some people to seek better jobs than they had before the pandemic triggered widespread layoffs.

Whatever the causes, the economy remains 5.7 million jobs shy of the number it had in February 2020. And with the U.S. recording an average of more than 100,000 new COVID-19 cases a day — up from fewer than 12,000 in late June — the delta variant is increasingly clouding the outlook for the rest of the year.

Just over 2.8 million people were receiving traditional state jobless benefits in the week of Aug. 7, down by 79,000 from the previous week and the lowest since the pandemic struck.

Including federal benefits, 11.7 million were receiving some type of unemployment benefits in the week of July 31, down from 28.7 million a year earlier. That drop is a result, in part, of the increased number of people working and no longer receiving jobless aid. But it also reflects the cancellation in many states of a federal unemployment aid program for the self-employed and a separate program for the long-term jobless.