Too Extreme for The Taliban: The Insurgents Terrorizing Afghanistan’s Minorities
Eli Lang, Online, Staff Writer
November 11th, 2022
When the Taliban reclaimed governing powers in Afghanistan in August of 2021, they made a series of optimistic promises for which they are sorely failing to deliver. Among the array of failures was the assurance of safety for all of Afghanistan’s ethnic and religious minorities. Violence against Afghan minorities has been continuous and unsettling for decades. However, the newly formed Taliban government is demonstrating hesitancy and incompetence in the process of combating the ongoing terrorist threat in Afghanistan.
The Taliban is, so far, failing to handle the the threat of terrorist insurgencies in the country, unable to protect these groups’ most common victims. The most prominent among these groups is the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria-Khorasan Province (ISKP), which has launched increasingly deadly terror attacks throughout Afghanistan in the last year. The worst of these attacks have been conducted from cells inside Kabul itself (Ochab, 2022). The primary targets and victims of these attacks have been Afghanistan’s Hazaras. The Hazaras are an ethnic minority, many of whom follow the Shia Branch of Islam. The Hazaras have historically faced discrimination and violence, and the Taliban itself has a dark history against the group.
During the leadership of the Afghan Interim Administration (AIA), the Hazaras were disproportionately targeted by insurgent terror. However, in roughly one year under the Taliban government, the number and magnitude of the attacks have become jaw dropping. According to Human Rights Watch, since August of 2021 ISKP has claimed responsibility for 13 attacks and been associated with three others, leading to the deaths and injury of 700 people. These claims by the ISKP likely do not indicate the full extent of attacks carried out. ISKP attacks in Kunduz, Kandahar and the neighborhoods in West Kabul have targeted minorities in their workplaces, schools and places of worship (Adili, 2022). One infamous mosque bombing in Kunduz reportedly killed 150 Shia Hazaras in October of 2021. Hazaras have found themselves unsafe everywhere, from their desks to their prayer mats, and face extreme unease during their most sacred holidays.
The extremist group targeting the Hazaras most violently are the ISKP, who are an ISIS affiliate group formed by Al-Qaeda defectors in 2014 (Doxsee, 2021). ISKP goals and methods are even more extreme and violent than those of the Taliban. Although to a lesser extent, NATO and the AIA had their own struggles with ISKP insurgency up to the week the coalition left the country.
The Taliban’s new administration and security forces are in no position to subdue the group. It is clear that ISKP will increasingly spread terror throughout Afghanistan not only because of the insurgent’s activity during the last year, but also because of the Taliban’s apparent willingness to turn a blind eye to extremism within their state.
The Taliban has far more expertise in the areas of spreading terror against minorities than preventing it. Ever since their deposition in 2001, the Taliban have spent a great deal of time as insurgent terrorists themselves. The Taliban have an established history of cooperating with and harboring other fundamentalist terror groups in Afghanistan. It is clear that they are not well experienced in the practice of enforcing peace and stability within a state. Possibly the Taliban’s most infamous instance of minority based violence was the Massacre in Mazar Al-Sharif. In 1997, the Taliban summarily executed 2,000 Hazara men and boys in the city of Mazar upon its surrender (Human Right Watch, 1998). During the Afghan civil war of the 1990s, the Taliban frequently committed war crimes against civilians of many ethnic minorities. This year, the Taliban have also been accused of evicting Turkmen, Uzbek, and Hazara people from their homes and land for its occupation by Pashtun Taliban followers (Amnesty International, 2022). Just as it is not convincing that the “new Taliban” has changed its positions regarding the rights of women, or fundamentalist Islamic law, the current Taliban administration’s attitudes towards minorities may also be soiled by its predecessors’ actions.
As of now, the Taliban’s primary approach to dealing with the slaughter of minorities in their capital follows their playbook of downplaying and denying in times of crisis. A common claim from Taliban officials is that they will solve all of the country's problems given time. However, much less common are answers regarding the details of how they will do so (Vicenews, 2021). The Taliban’s primary aim at the moment is to solidify the narrative that they are Afghanistan's saviors, and to establish a semblance of credibility (Adili, 2022). The group is downplaying serious safety concerns facing the Hazaras, even diluting the figures regarding reported attacks on the group. The Taliban overlooking the terror insurgency threat and underestimating the growing strength of the ISKP may exacerbate the security situation in the future.
In 2021, the Taliban leadership tried to convince the global community that they represented a new and reformed organization, different from the regime that led the state in the 90s. The Taliban’s incompetence and reluctance in the protection of the Hazara people indicates yet another link in their chain of promises being broken. The Taliban’s failure to address the issue of the ISKP should concern the world given ISKP’s affiliates and their extremism. The prospect of Afghanistan once again becoming a haven for the most extreme organizations of terrorists in the world should certainly be alarming. These issues should alarm the global community because of the sheer inhumanity of ISKP attacks, and because of the Taliban’s high reluctance to address the threat of terror. The Taliban needs to demonstrate a true effort to reform and improve their approach and capabilities. If ISKP is continuously permitted to function and gain momentum as they have been recently, Afghanistan’s minorities, and any other ideological enemies of ISKP, could begin to face even deadlier attacks.
Bibliography
Ali Yawar Adili. “A Community under Attack: How Successive Governments Failed West Kabul and the Hazaras Who Live There.” ecoi.net, January 17, 2022. https://www.ecoi.net/de/dokument/2066629.html.
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Rep. Afghanistan: The Massacre In Mazar-I Sharif. Human Right Watch, November 1998.
Doxsee, Catrina. “Examining Extremism: Islamic State Khorasan Province (ISKP).” Examining Extremism: Islamic State Khorasan Province (ISKP) | Center for Strategic and International Studies, October 28, 2021. https://www.csis.org/blogs/examining-extremism/examining-extremism-islamic-state-khorasan-province-iskp.
Ochab, Dr. Ewelina U. “Yet Another Attack on the Hazara in Afghanistan.” Forbes. Forbes Magazine, October 12, 2022. https://www.forbes.com/sites/ewelinaochab/2022/10/01/yet-another-attack-on-the-hazara-in-afghanistan/?sh=5e76e6fb2fa6.
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