MEReports: Is it a clash between Pashtun tribal culture and Farsiwan (Tajiks, Turks, Hazaras, etc.)? To some degree it is: Farsiwan culture is sophisticated and extended from Iraq and Anatolia to India and over the Oxus into Central Asia and Inner Asia. Persian culture produced hundreds of thousands of titles of scientific and literary import;
8am: Since August 15, Taliban officials from the province’s agriculture and livestock department began collecting tithes from people in Bamiyan. In the process, the Taliban took one-tenth of every crop and animal of the peasants. Click here to read more (external link).
By RFE/RL’s Radio Azadi December 15, 2021 Amnesty International says it has documented torture and extrajudicial executions committed by the Taliban as the group seized power in Afghanistan in August. Taliban members have “tortured and killed ethnic and religious minorities, former ANDSF (Afghan National Defense Security Forces) soldiers, and those perceived as government sympathizers in
Members of Afghanistan’s Hazara community, an ethnic minority made up of mainly Shi’ite Muslims, say they are facing a wave of persecution under the new Taliban regime. Families who fled to Kabul from Daikundi and Uruzgan provinces report that Taliban officials forced them out of their homes in the middle of the night and
8am: As the Taliban came to power, a number of Pashtuns close to the Taliban and Kochi tribe forced hundreds of families from the Pato district of Daikundi province to evict. They say that they live in difficult conditions in the desert and mountains without food, shelter, or fuel after two months. Click here to
Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty November 17, 2021 Two explosions hit the Afghan capital, Kabul, on November 17, killing one person and wounding six others, Afghan media said. The casualties were reported in the first blast that occurred in the mainly Hazara neighborhood of Dasht-e Barchi in Kabul’s west, TOLOnews said, citing a Taliban official. Three
WSJ: The Taliban’s new outreach to the Shiite minority goes only so far. Hundreds of Hazara families were displaced by Pashtuns in parts of the Daikundi province in September. The community’s sole representative in Afghanistan’s new government, dominated by Pashtun Sunni clerics, is a deputy minister of health. In Bamiyan province, overwhelmingly populated by Shiites,
By RFE/RL’s Radio Azadi November 13, 2021 A bomb attack on a minivan in a Shi’ite neighborhood of Kabul has killed a well-known Afghan television journalist, according to an Afghan media watchdog and the journalist’s wife. The Afghan Journalists’ Center tweeted hours after the November 13 blast in western Kabul’s Dasht-e Barchi neighborhood that the explosion
The Washington Post: As a military commander, Maulavi Mahdi never captured territory or killed Americans in battle. Yet the Taliban considers the 33-year-old ethnic Hazara a godsend. Click here to read more (external link).
Al Jazeera: As one of the largest ethnic groups in Afghanistan, the Hazara people have endured various forms of oppression from Pashtun rulers and governments, including slavery, systematic expulsion from ancestral homes and lands, and massacres. These experiences have led some to consider Hazaras to be one of the “most persecuted people in the world”.