Afghanistan’s Hazaras: An Unknown Genocide?

In the late 19th century, the Sunni king of Afghanistan, Abdur Rahman Khan, declared a jihad (holy war) against the Hazaras of central Afghanistan. Until this time, this relatively isolated and autonomous community had been ruled by local leaders known as mirs or begs. Abdur Rahman Khan’s war brought an end to the community’s autonomy. The Hazaras suffered countless massacres; according to Hazara oral history, 65% of the community was killed during the war in the 1890s.

The geographical spread of the community was also inevitably impacted by the war. Prior to the war, some Hazaras had resided in the southern provinces of Afghanistan, mainly Kandahar and Helmand, but after the war the Hazaras were mostly concentrated in the central highlands of the country. Many Hazara women were raped during the conflict, and some Hazaras were captured and taken as slaves. Those who were able to fled to neighbouring Iran and British India, now Pakistan. This marked the first major outward migration of Hazaras. As a result, there are now sizeable Hazara communities in the cities of Mashhad and Quetta.

After the war, the Hazaras found themselves at the bottom of the country’s socio-economic hierarchy. As many Hazaras had been enslaved, they were subsequently perceived by other ethnic communities as the slave class, and in later decades as the labourer class. Although slavery was outlawed in the 1920s by King Amanullah Khan, the grandson of Abdur Rahman Khan, slave ownership persisted. It is claimed that Hazaras were the cheapest slaves in the country at the time.   

Due to their isolation, ostracism and low social status, the Hazaras lacked political representation for much of the 20th century. This predicament was reinforced by the assassination of former king Nadir Shah by a Hazara student, Abdul Khaliq, in 1933.

For much of the 20th century, Afghanistan was under monarchical rule. The last king of Afghanistan, Zahir Shah, was overthrown in a coup in 1973. This led to the formation of the Republic of Afghanistan under President Daoud Khan. Eighteen months after Daoud Khan’s assassination in 1978, the Soviet Union invaded Afghanistan. The subsequent Soviet-Afghan war lasted for almost a decade, until 1989.

The Taliban was founded in 1994 under the leadership of Mullah Omar. The name ‘Taliban’ comes from the word ‘ṭālib’, the name for the madrasa (religious school) students who joined the movement. The Taliban pride themselves on the movement’s Deobandi-Islamic religious ideology, Pashtun-nationalism and highly militant nature. Their extremely strict interpretation of Islamic Sharia law was copied from the villages from which many of its original members came. Many Afghans see the Taliban as an exclusive and hard-line movement.

With their human rights abuses and use of collective punishments, the Taliban are an unforgiving and relentless force in Afghanistan. The movement appears hostile towards anyone who holds different religious or political views. As a result of this extreme cultural conservatism combined with a harsh and cruel interpretation of Islamic customs, unarmed and unsuspecting Afghan citizens are frequently subjected to punishment and retribution. Women who fail to wear the burqa as prescribed are subject to public beatings by the Taliban’s hard-line religious police force.

Whenever it has been in power, the Taliban has ruled with an iron fist. Although this harsh approach won the movement considerable support when fighting crime and corruption in the early 1990s, the Taliban’s brutality quickly span out of control. The regime is dominated by an ‘eye-for-an-eye and tooth-for-a-tooth’ philosophy; people who commit ‘crimes’ under the law and justice system are often dispatched swiftly. One such example, from November 1999, was the public execution of a woman accused of having killed her husband in his sleep. The Taliban’s courts are strict, merciless, male-dominated institutions in which extreme religious laws override basic human rights.

Modern Afghanistan continues to be riven by ownership disputes. Competing claims to land, water, food, cattle, and even social hierarchies often arise between ethnic and religious groups. The different ethnic communities form tangled webs . As no census has been conducted in Afghanistan to date, it is not possible to give exact figures for the country’s many ethnic groups. Many of the problems that are currently afflicting Afghanistan have been shaped by these complex historical, cultural and legitimacy-related factors.

The Taliban learned quickly during the brutal civil war, pouring resources into arming and training themselves against possible opponents. The movement used guerrilla tactics and short, powerful strikes against its enemies. Shootings and bombings in densely populated areas struck fear into those who opposed its rule, and proved to be an effective strategy. During the civil war, the Taliban quickly grew in size and strength, developing from a mere local insurgency into a full-scale national powerhouse. From 1996 to 2001, they were strong enough to patrol the streets of large cities such as Herat and Kabul, effectively ruling the country under their first Islamic Emirate.

The Taliban swiftly rose to power by aligning themselves with various mujahideen warlords, whilst intimidating those who dared to challenge them in the remaining areas. By September 1995, they controlled the large city of Herat and held the entire south the country. In the spring of 1996, the Taliban command gathered support from many Pashtun tribal leaders, allowing them to declare their first Islamic Emirate. Given the Taliban’s fundamentalist origins, it should come as no surprise that the first period of rule was marked by violent clampdowns, silencing, and an overall lack of humanity within state-controlled forces and judicial systems. The Taliban's tactics and hard-line character helped the movement to gain control over most of Afghanistan.

Securing control over the northern regions of Afghanistan proved difficult for the Taliban, especially as local insurgents there received the backing of Iran, Russia and India, who considered the Taliban a threat to regional stability. Meanwhile, the Taliban also faced problems in the central regions of the country, which were dominated by the Hazaras, not Pashtun warlords. In Hazarajat, the Hazaras proved a natural ally for the West in the latter’s fight against the Taliban, as they shared the goal of either overthrowing or at least limiting the Taliban’s control over these regions. Of course, this only worsened the relationship between Hazaras and the Taliban as time went on.

In January 2001 in central Afghanistan, during the first Islamic Emirate of the Taliban, the Hazara community was shaken by the Yakaolang massacres. This represented the first structured and pre-planned mass assault by the Taliban against the local Hazara populace. It followed the Hazara’s support for a brief incursion by Hezb-e Wahdat, during which Wahdat had executed multiple Taliban fighters over several days. The Taliban retook the area quickly, however, and struck back harshly against the Hazara rebels and the local population. The Yakaolang massacres lasted several days, during which the Taliban targeted local Hazara men, women and children. At least 300 unarmed men and some women and children were killed. The victims were murdered in a mix of individual and summary executions by Taliban occupiers.

On 23 July 2017, a group of highly-educated Hazaras employed by the Ministry of Mines were targeted by Taliban bombings in central Kabul. Eight employees were killed and twenty-seven were wounded when their bus was struck by a magnetic bomb attached to a nearby minivan. The chaos worsened with a second explosion, this time caused by a suicide bomber who blew himself up just metres from their vehicle. This was followed by a third and final explosion hitting the bus itself, killing another seven civilians and wounding at least twenty more.

The Taliban claimed responsibility for the first explosion, but denied involvement in the other two, stating that ISIS might have caused them. ISIS claimed responsibility for two explosions but did not specify which ones. According to the Taliban, its initial car bomb was meant to kill a dozen foreign agents aboard the bus. However, these three attacks appeared to have been a purposeful attack on well-educated government officials from the Hazara ethnic group.

On 5 August 2017, the Taliban and ISIS briefly worked together on an operation that saw the murder of dozens of Hazara residents of the Mirza Walang village in Sar-e-Pul. A UN investigation estimated that at least twenty-seven civilians, including one woman, four teenage boys and thirteen men in their sixties were killed. Afghan government officials meanwhile estimated that there were at least fifty casualties.

It remains unclear why the Taliban and ISIS worked together on the assault. Al Jazeera claimed that a local conflict between an Afghan government militia and their Hazara backers against ISIS and the Taliban had provoked a revenge feud. The Taliban denied that it had needed ISIS’s assistance to capture the village, and also denied that any civilians had been killed in the siege.

On 8 May 2021, the Taliban was accused of having bombed the Sayed al-Shuhada public high school in the Hazara-dominated Dasht-e Barchi neighbourhood in Kabul. As female students left the building during their Ramadan fasting break, a powerful car bomb detonated outside the school entrance. Two more bombs followed soon after, as did mortar shelling in an area packed with students. Around one hundred civilians, mainly young female Hazara students, were wounded in the attack, and over sixty died. The attack took place just a week after another bomb had killed twenty-one children in Logar province, just south of Kabul.

The massacre was one of the most gruesome and bloody attacks on the Hazaras in years. The president of the Afghan Republic at the time, Ashraf Ghani, blamed the Taliban for the attack. The Taliban, in turn, denied responsibility and blamed ISIS’s terrorist network, as it had carried out multiple similar attacks on schools and universities in preceding months. However, the attack occurred soon after the West had announced it was likely to delay its retreat from Afghanistan. At this time, the Taliban had again become increasingly vocal about banning girls from schools, leading many to suspect that the movement was indeed behind this slaughter.

Following the announcement of the retreat of Western forces from Afghanistan under the Biden Administration in 2021, the Taliban retook control of Afghanistan and declared the establishment of an Islamic Emirate. This political shift marked the return of brutal repression, denial of fundamental human rights, ultra-conservative traditionalism and fundamentalist cultural interpretations and punishments.

Abandoned by the international community, the fate of the Hazaras appears bleak. Due to their geographic and demographic position in some of the poorest, least industrialised and most dependent and vulnerable regions of the country, humanitarian crises such as droughts and food shortages affect the Hazaras to a catastrophic degree. The limited international aid to Afghanistan often fails to reach the Hazara community.

Prior to the return of the Taliban to power in August 2021, there were concerns among the Hazaras about their safety and security once international forces withdrew. Although the Taliban claimed their ideology had changed since the 1990s, there was no evidence for this. Even before the events of summer 2021, the Hazaras’ concerns were shown to be justified.

Given the continued persecution of Hazaras in Afghanistan, the diaspora in the West has been very active in campaigning to raise awareness about human rights violations against their community, as well as lobbying politicians to do more to help the Hazara people. Social media has become a key tool for organising demonstrations, ‘Twitter storms’ take place, and information about Hazaras and their oppression is shared.

One popular movement that has gained widespread support online, especially since the return of the Taliban in 2021, is the ‘Stop Hazara Genocide’ campaign and hashtag. On Twitter/X, the hashtag ‘#StopHazaraGenocide’ is frequently used in the aftermath of targeted attacks against Hazaras in Kabul. It is also used on the anniversary of previous attacks or when events on Hazara persecution are organised, and forms a popular slogan on placards during Hazara-related or Afghanistan-related demonstrations. There has been a concerted effort among the community to refrain from referring to attacks against Hazaras as massacres and instead to call them a genocide, given the ‘intent to destroy’ the community both in the 1890s and again since 2016 by both ISIS and the Taliban.  

In November 2022, Melbourne Council voted to recognise the Hazara genocide. As such, it was the ‘world’s first government body to recognise the Hazara genocide’. The Hazara diaspora in the UK has also been very active in engaging with local MPs. Due to this engagement and lobbying, politicians have raised the issue of targeted attacks against Hazaras in Afghanistan and the community’s predicament in the British Parliament on multiple occasions since 2021. In May 2023, a meeting was held at the Canadian Parliament to discuss the Hazara genocide. A key campaign issue within the diaspora is the need for Hazaras to be recognised as a vulnerable community for refugee resettlement overseas.