In June 2026, Taliban morality police arrested dozens of women and girls in Herat, primarily from the predominantly Hazara neighbourhood of Jibraeel, on charges of violating the dress code. On June 9, Hazara residents staged a peaceful protest against the arbitrary detentions. Taliban security forces opened fire on protesters, men, women, and children. At least two people, including a boy, were killed. More than twenty were injured. Many of the wounded reportedly avoided hospitals out of fear of further arrests.
This is what religious freedom looks like under Taliban governance in Afghanistan’s third-largest city, in the year 2026.
The protests in Jibraeel did not occur in isolation. They occurred against a backdrop of systematically tightening restrictions on Shia religious life, on Muharram and Ashura commemorations, on Shia institutions, on the visible expression of a faith practised by millions of Afghans, that has intensified with each passing year of Taliban rule. The closure of Tamadon TV and Khatam al-Nabieen Seminary, the detention of mosque officials and journalists covering Ashura, the removal of religious flags and symbols from roads and markets across Kabul, Herat, Mazar-e-Sharif, Ghazni, and Bamiyan: these are not isolated security measures. They are a coordinated, nationwide policy of sectarian suppression dressed in the language of governance.
The Contradiction at the Heart of Taliban Religious Authority
The Taliban claim religious legitimacy as the foundation of their governing authority. They present themselves as defenders of Islamic values, enforcers of divine law, and the only legitimate interpreters of faith for the Afghan population.
That claim collides directly with the reality of what they have done to one of Islam’s most revered commemorations.
Ashura, the observance of the martyrdom of Imam Hussain (RA), grandson of the Prophet, is among the most spiritually significant dates in the Islamic calendar, observed across the Muslim world by hundreds of millions of people. Muslim leaders across the region publicly honour Imam Hussain’s legacy of justice and sacrifice. The Taliban responded with restrictions, arrests, and silence, neither issuing an official Ashura message nor attending commemorations despite invitations from Shia religious institutions.
A Shia cleric in Kabul felt compelled to publicly appeal to Taliban authorities not to interfere in people’s religious beliefs, a statement whose significance lies precisely in its restraint. He did not issue a political challenge. He asked, plainly, to be left alone to practise his faith. The flag of Imam Hussain, he noted, carries no political slogan. It is a religious symbol. The fact that this needed to be said to the governing authority of a Muslim country reveals the depth of the problem.
The Hazara Dimension: A Community Under Compounding Persecution
The restrictions on Shia religious practice cannot be separated from the broader campaign against Afghanistan’s Hazara community, a predominantly Shia ethnic minority comprising between ten and twenty per cent of the Afghan population, and the group bearing the most concentrated burden of Taliban sectarian and ethnic persecution.
The documented record since August 2021 is extensive and sobering. In the three years following the Taliban takeover, at least 61 attacks against Hazaras were documented, with Taliban forces responsible for 12 and ISIS-Khorasan for 16. The Taliban forcibly displaced an estimated 25,000 Hazaras during this period. Hazara women and girls exist at a triple axis of persecution, their ethnic identity, religious affiliation, and gender converging to make them among the most vulnerable people in Afghanistan.
The targeting of Hazara physical and cultural space has been deliberate and systematic. On August 18, 2021, within days of returning to power, the Taliban blew up the statue of Abdul Ali Mazari in Bamiyan, a Hazara leader the Taliban had killed in 1995. In September 2024, they demolished a second statue of Mazari and a square dedicated to him in Kabul, in a predominantly Hazara area.
Land seizures and forced displacement have accelerated. In July 2025, Taliban authorities forcibly cleared an entire Hazara village in Bamiyan after siding with Kuchi claimants in a land dispute. In Khas Uruzgan alone, at least 14 Hazaras were arbitrarily killed by Taliban-backed groups from neighbouring areas, forcing many families to flee, with their homes and lands subsequently confiscated.
The legal architecture protecting Shia identity has been dismantled. The Law on Personal Affairs of Shi’a Muslims has been revoked, removing essential legal protections linked to Hazara religious identity. A 2023 Ministry of Higher Education decree ordered the removal of all books belonging to the Shia sect or written by Shias from educational institutions. Marriages between Shias and Sunnis were banned. Provincial Ulema Councils were constituted with no Shia representation.
The Taliban have forcibly evicted Hazara families from their ancestral lands in several provinces, particularly in Daykundi, Uruzgan, and Balkh, forced displacements that amount to ethnic cleansing in certain districts.
The Violence That Continues
The physical attacks on Hazara life have not abated. On September 30, 2022, an attack at the Kaaj Education Centre in Dasht-e-Barchi killed more than 60 Hazara students and injured over 100, mostly female. On April 29, 2024, a gunman stormed a Shia-Hazara mosque in Herat Province, killing six worshippers, including a child. Between October 2023 and mid-January 2024, ISKP claimed responsibility for a string of IED attacks in Dasht-e-Barchi, with around 100 casualties reported by UNAMA, striking a sports club, two minibuses, and a commercial centre.
The Taliban’s response to ISIS-K attacks on Hazara communities has been to claim they are investigating, while simultaneously restricting the religious commemorations, closing the institutions, and removing the public symbols that constitute the cultural life of the same community being targeted.
The Pattern Behind the Policy
What the restrictions on Muharram and Ashura represent, viewed within this broader context, is not a discrete security measure or an administrative decision about public order. It is an expression of a governing ideology that treats Shia religious identity as inherently suspect, as something to be managed, contained, and progressively eliminated from Afghanistan’s public sphere.
The restrictions imposed on Muharram in 2024 illustrated what analysts have called a “managed tolerance” model: ceremonies allowed, but overshadowed by restrictions, limited days, controlled venues, and heightened surveillance. The current pattern of arrests, closures, and symbol removal suggests that even this managed tolerance is being further compressed.
The nationwide coordination of these restrictions, implemented across Kabul, Herat, Mazar-e-Sharif, Ghazni, and Bamiyan simultaneously, confirms that what is happening in any one city is not a local commander’s excess. It is policy, applied at scale, with institutional consistency.
Closing Observation
A regime that fires on peaceful protesters mourning arbitrary detentions, that removes the flags of Imam Hussain from public spaces, that closes Shia seminaries and television channels, that forcibly displaces Hazara communities from ancestral land, and that has revoked the legal protections specific to Shia religious identity, that regime is not governing a religious community. It is suppressing one.
The Hazara Council of Great Britain and the All-Party Parliamentary Group on Hazaras have documented escalating persecution that presents compelling evidence of crimes meeting international thresholds for crimes against humanity and potentially genocide. The UN Special Rapporteur on Afghanistan has described a system of institutionalised discrimination. The Human Rights Council has received testimony. The documentation exists.
What has not kept pace with the documentation is the international response proportionate to what that documentation describes. The Hazara community of Afghanistan, ancient, resilient, and under compounding siege, deserves more than a record of its suffering. It deserves a world that reads that record and acts accordingly.
Taliban’s War on Religious Freedom
In June 2026, Taliban morality police arrested dozens of women and girls in Herat, primarily from the predominantly Hazara neighbourhood of Jibraeel, on charges of violating the dress code. On June 9, Hazara residents staged a peaceful protest against the arbitrary detentions. Taliban security forces opened fire on protesters, men, women, and children. At least two people, including a boy, were killed. More than twenty were injured. Many of the wounded reportedly avoided hospitals out of fear of further arrests.
This is what religious freedom looks like under Taliban governance in Afghanistan’s third-largest city, in the year 2026.
The protests in Jibraeel did not occur in isolation. They occurred against a backdrop of systematically tightening restrictions on Shia religious life, on Muharram and Ashura commemorations, on Shia institutions, on the visible expression of a faith practised by millions of Afghans, that has intensified with each passing year of Taliban rule. The closure of Tamadon TV and Khatam al-Nabieen Seminary, the detention of mosque officials and journalists covering Ashura, the removal of religious flags and symbols from roads and markets across Kabul, Herat, Mazar-e-Sharif, Ghazni, and Bamiyan: these are not isolated security measures. They are a coordinated, nationwide policy of sectarian suppression dressed in the language of governance.
The Contradiction at the Heart of Taliban Religious Authority
The Taliban claim religious legitimacy as the foundation of their governing authority. They present themselves as defenders of Islamic values, enforcers of divine law, and the only legitimate interpreters of faith for the Afghan population.
That claim collides directly with the reality of what they have done to one of Islam’s most revered commemorations.
Ashura, the observance of the martyrdom of Imam Hussain (RA), grandson of the Prophet, is among the most spiritually significant dates in the Islamic calendar, observed across the Muslim world by hundreds of millions of people. Muslim leaders across the region publicly honour Imam Hussain’s legacy of justice and sacrifice. The Taliban responded with restrictions, arrests, and silence, neither issuing an official Ashura message nor attending commemorations despite invitations from Shia religious institutions.
A Shia cleric in Kabul felt compelled to publicly appeal to Taliban authorities not to interfere in people’s religious beliefs, a statement whose significance lies precisely in its restraint. He did not issue a political challenge. He asked, plainly, to be left alone to practise his faith. The flag of Imam Hussain, he noted, carries no political slogan. It is a religious symbol. The fact that this needed to be said to the governing authority of a Muslim country reveals the depth of the problem.
The Hazara Dimension: A Community Under Compounding Persecution
The restrictions on Shia religious practice cannot be separated from the broader campaign against Afghanistan’s Hazara community, a predominantly Shia ethnic minority comprising between ten and twenty per cent of the Afghan population, and the group bearing the most concentrated burden of Taliban sectarian and ethnic persecution.
The documented record since August 2021 is extensive and sobering. In the three years following the Taliban takeover, at least 61 attacks against Hazaras were documented, with Taliban forces responsible for 12 and ISIS-Khorasan for 16. The Taliban forcibly displaced an estimated 25,000 Hazaras during this period. Hazara women and girls exist at a triple axis of persecution, their ethnic identity, religious affiliation, and gender converging to make them among the most vulnerable people in Afghanistan.
The targeting of Hazara physical and cultural space has been deliberate and systematic. On August 18, 2021, within days of returning to power, the Taliban blew up the statue of Abdul Ali Mazari in Bamiyan, a Hazara leader the Taliban had killed in 1995. In September 2024, they demolished a second statue of Mazari and a square dedicated to him in Kabul, in a predominantly Hazara area.
Land seizures and forced displacement have accelerated. In July 2025, Taliban authorities forcibly cleared an entire Hazara village in Bamiyan after siding with Kuchi claimants in a land dispute. In Khas Uruzgan alone, at least 14 Hazaras were arbitrarily killed by Taliban-backed groups from neighbouring areas, forcing many families to flee, with their homes and lands subsequently confiscated.
The legal architecture protecting Shia identity has been dismantled. The Law on Personal Affairs of Shi’a Muslims has been revoked, removing essential legal protections linked to Hazara religious identity. A 2023 Ministry of Higher Education decree ordered the removal of all books belonging to the Shia sect or written by Shias from educational institutions. Marriages between Shias and Sunnis were banned. Provincial Ulema Councils were constituted with no Shia representation.
The Taliban have forcibly evicted Hazara families from their ancestral lands in several provinces, particularly in Daykundi, Uruzgan, and Balkh, forced displacements that amount to ethnic cleansing in certain districts.
The Violence That Continues
The physical attacks on Hazara life have not abated. On September 30, 2022, an attack at the Kaaj Education Centre in Dasht-e-Barchi killed more than 60 Hazara students and injured over 100, mostly female. On April 29, 2024, a gunman stormed a Shia-Hazara mosque in Herat Province, killing six worshippers, including a child. Between October 2023 and mid-January 2024, ISKP claimed responsibility for a string of IED attacks in Dasht-e-Barchi, with around 100 casualties reported by UNAMA, striking a sports club, two minibuses, and a commercial centre.
The Taliban’s response to ISIS-K attacks on Hazara communities has been to claim they are investigating, while simultaneously restricting the religious commemorations, closing the institutions, and removing the public symbols that constitute the cultural life of the same community being targeted.
The Pattern Behind the Policy
What the restrictions on Muharram and Ashura represent, viewed within this broader context, is not a discrete security measure or an administrative decision about public order. It is an expression of a governing ideology that treats Shia religious identity as inherently suspect, as something to be managed, contained, and progressively eliminated from Afghanistan’s public sphere.
The restrictions imposed on Muharram in 2024 illustrated what analysts have called a “managed tolerance” model: ceremonies allowed, but overshadowed by restrictions, limited days, controlled venues, and heightened surveillance. The current pattern of arrests, closures, and symbol removal suggests that even this managed tolerance is being further compressed.
The nationwide coordination of these restrictions, implemented across Kabul, Herat, Mazar-e-Sharif, Ghazni, and Bamiyan simultaneously, confirms that what is happening in any one city is not a local commander’s excess. It is policy, applied at scale, with institutional consistency.
Closing Observation
A regime that fires on peaceful protesters mourning arbitrary detentions, that removes the flags of Imam Hussain from public spaces, that closes Shia seminaries and television channels, that forcibly displaces Hazara communities from ancestral land, and that has revoked the legal protections specific to Shia religious identity, that regime is not governing a religious community. It is suppressing one.
The Hazara Council of Great Britain and the All-Party Parliamentary Group on Hazaras have documented escalating persecution that presents compelling evidence of crimes meeting international thresholds for crimes against humanity and potentially genocide. The UN Special Rapporteur on Afghanistan has described a system of institutionalised discrimination. The Human Rights Council has received testimony. The documentation exists.
What has not kept pace with the documentation is the international response proportionate to what that documentation describes. The Hazara community of Afghanistan, ancient, resilient, and under compounding siege, deserves more than a record of its suffering. It deserves a world that reads that record and acts accordingly.
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