Islamabad is using a domestic insurgency to justify its broader pursuit of strategic dominance.
Since October 2025, Pakistan has carried out multiple air strikes in Afghanistan, causing large-scale civilian casualties and destruction. The deadliest came on March 16, 2026, when a drug rehabilitation centre in Kabul was hit, killing 269 civilians and injuring 122, according to United Nations figures.
In a report released on July 21, Amnesty International called on Pakistani authorities to explain the strike and urged that it be investigated as a possible war crime.
Pakistan says its operations target the Tehreek-e-Taliban Pakistan (the Pakistan Taliban or TTP), which it accuses the Afghan Taliban of supporting. The Taliban authorities deny supporting the group and insist the insurgency is Pakistan’s internal problem. Yet the strikes have failed to eliminate any prominent TTP leader or commander. Is the TTP the true source of contention, or are there other dimensions to the conflict?
A crisis rooted in Pakistan
The roots of the TTP lie inside Pakistan. In November 1994, Sufi Mohammad led an armed uprising in Swat and Malakand to impose Sharia law, the first such campaign led by a cleric in the country. Thirteen years later, Baitullah Mehsud, from South Waziristan, united several militant factions under the TTP banner. Sufi Mohammad’s son-in-law, Mullah Fazlullah, led the group from 2013 until his death in a US drone strike in 2018. The movement from which the TTP emerged therefore predates the Afghan Taliban itself.
Over the past two decades, the Pakistani military has launched nearly a dozen major operations against the group. Yet the TTP survived not only because of its resilience or ideological appeal, but because of Pakistan’s distinction between “good” and “bad” militants. Islamabad’s covert support for the insurgency in Afghanistan, intended to weaken and ultimately bring down the former Afghan republic, sustained militant networks and infrastructure from which the TTP also benefitted.
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Pakistan has long been accused of using militant groups to pursue geostrategic objectives in Afghanistan and against India. Following Afghanistan’s 1978 communist coup and the Soviet invasion the next year, it became a key Western ally, particularly for the United States, in containing Soviet influence. Pakistan was already hosting Afghan opposition figures, including Gulbuddin Hekmatyar and Ahmad Shah Massoud, who had fled during President Mohammad Daoud Khan’s rule.
With US backing, Pakistan became the main base for supporting the mujahideen. The indigenous Afghan resistance was increasingly dominated by Pakistan and Western-backed factions. The Pakistani military established training centres along the Durand Line, where local communities were exposed to systematic radicalisation. Thousands of madrassas were established, literature glorifying jihad distributed and local fighters encouraged to join the Afghan mujahideen. Many were later mobilised alongside the Afghan Taliban against the United States and the former Afghan government.
After the September 11 attacks, the Pakistani military under General Pervez Musharraf publicly yielded to US pressure and joined the “war on terror”, while continuing to support selected militant groups it considered useful. The discovery of Osama bin Laden near Islamabad, where US Navy SEALs killed him in 2011, remains a damning symbol of this double game.
Many analysts therefore question whether Pakistan genuinely intends to eliminate the TTP and other militant networks. They argue that Islamabad still regards some groups as strategic assets and seeks not to eradicate militancy, but to keep it below a manageable threshold as a controlled insurgency.
If the TTP alone does not explain Pakistan’s attacks on Afghanistan, what broader objective is Islamabad pursuing?
From strategic depth to strategic dominance
Pakistan has not abandoned its longstanding pursuit of “strategic depth” in Afghanistan. Traditionally, this meant cultivating a friendly government in Kabul that could provide political and military space in a conflict with India. Today, however, that policy appears to have evolved into strategic dominance: treating Afghanistan not as a fully sovereign neighbour, but as an extension of Pakistan’s security perimeter.
This attitude was reflected in a recent social media post by Pakistan’s former special representative for Afghanistan, Asif Durrani, who said the Taliban’s growing ties with India “at the expense of Pakistan’s interests”, while Afghan territory remained available to armed groups, would cross a Pakistani “red line”. He offered no evidence that India was using Afghan territory against Pakistan. His comments reflected Islamabad’s assumption that even normal diplomatic relations between Afghanistan and India constitute a threat.
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Afghanistan has historically remained neutral in India-Pakistan disputes, including over Kashmir, and did not take sides in the wars of 1965 and 1971. Yet Pakistan expects Afghanistan to view India through its security lens and limit its foreign relations accordingly.
The Central Asian dimension
Former Pakistani senator and political analyst Afrasiab Khattak argues that Pakistan is pursuing a Western agenda to contain Russian and Chinese influence. In his view, Islamabad supported the Taliban not only to seize power in Afghanistan, but in the expectation that militancy would spread into Central Asia. He attributes recent tensions partly to the Taliban authorities’ unwillingness to facilitate such destabilisation.
Khattak also argues that Pakistan is using the TTP as a pretext for attacks while seeking a renewed US military presence in Afghanistan. In September 2025, US President Donald Trump said Washington wanted to regain Bagram airbase, citing its strategic location near China. Days later, he warned that “bad things” would happen unless Afghanistan returned the base to the US.
The following month, Pakistani strikes in Kabul and Paktika sharply escalated the fighting. Khattak argues that Islamabad ultimately seeks a counterterrorism monitoring mechanism that would give it greater scope to intervene in Afghanistan and pursue its objectives in Central Asia and beyond.
Suppressing Pashtun and Baloch nationalism
According to Khattak and other regional analysts, Pakistan regards Pashtun and Baloch nationalism, rather than the Afghan Taliban or even the TTP, as the more fundamental threat. Khattak argues that the TTP weakens Pashtun nationalist movements in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa and that Pakistan has therefore left the province’s southern districts at the group’s mercy.
Pakistani intelligence agencies have also been accused of using militants to assassinate tribal elders, Pashtun nationalists and political activists who criticised state policies and demanded greater rights. According to the Human Rights Commission of Pakistan, nearly 1,200 tribal elders were killed in North and South Waziristan between 2004 and 2014. Rather than address legitimate Pashtun and Baloch grievances, the authorities have often portrayed those raising them as foreign proxies.
The same coercive logic shapes Pakistan’s approach to Afghanistan. Islamabad has used political, economic and military pressure to compel the Taliban authorities to act according to its wishes. The mass deportation and mistreatment of Afghan refugees, trade and transit closures, and air strikes that have killed civilians have all failed and proved counterproductive.
The roughly 2,600km Durand Line has been fenced, severing longstanding tribal and social ties. Entry point closures have disrupted trade and livelihoods, affecting millions in both countries. Yet militancy has intensified, with the TTP and Baloch armed groups continuing their deadly campaigns in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa and Balochistan.
Pakistan must put its own house in order
The tribal areas along the Durand Line once served as a buffer between Afghanistan and British India, and later Pakistan. They remained semiautonomous until their merger with Khyber Pakhtunkhwa in 2018. Decades of military operations have cost local communities lives, homes and livelihoods, deepening their alienation from a state many now regard as an occupying force. The TTP maintains a significant presence inside Pakistan from which it can organise and launch attacks.
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Conditions in the tribal areas and Balochistan increasingly resemble the final years of the former Afghan republic, when the Taliban controlled large parts of southern and western Afghanistan while government authority was confined largely to provincial and district centres.
Rather than blame external actors, Pakistan must abandon its failed military strategy and address its domestic crises through political engagement and dialogue. Armed groups retain territory, manpower and some local support, while the suffering inflicted on tribal communities continues to fuel resentment and TTP recruitment.
Further military adventurism against Afghanistan will deepen regional instability, strengthen non-state armed groups and carry grave long-term consequences for Pakistan itself.
The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Al Jazeera’s editorial stance.
Zardasht Shams is a former Afghan diplomat. He served as Afghanistan’s deputy ambassador to Pakistan from 2017 to 2019 and as deputy minister of information and culture from 2015 to 2017.
Pakistan’s attacks on Afghanistan are about more than the TTP
A new book tells the story of the Taliban’s brutal silencing of women and the life of resistance of journalist Zahra Joya
Nearly five years after the Taliban took control of her country and she fled Kabul, Afghan journalist Zahra Joya is telling her story. Her book The Vanishing Girl of Kabul, written with British-American journalist Amie Ferris-Rotman, is a mirror not just for Joya’s life, but for millions of other Afghan women and girls, who she describes as currently living in “home prisons”.
The book tells the story of the Taliban’s brutal silencing of women and Joya’s own life of resistance. How she pretended to be a boy in the 1990s so she could go to school. How her family quickly packed up her grandfather’s handwritten Persian epic while the Taliban raided local villages for banned books. And how she feared for her life when the Taliban returned five years ago. Being a Hazara woman – Hazaras are a persecuted minority in Afghanistan – she grew up with extreme violence levelled at her people.
“It was important for me to record it, for people to understand, for the next generation and the history of Afghanistan,” Joya told Index.
The day before the Taliban returned, she recounts in her book, she had the freedom to go the beauty salon. The next day offered a stark contrast.
“Everything collapsed, including my own freedom,” she said.
As the Taliban drew further into Kabul, she and her colleagues at the women-led publication which she had founded, Rukhshana Media, continued reporting. As Joya saw it, she was standing up for her rights and for freedom of expression, and was making sure the world knew about what was unfolding.
“We never imagined that the Taliban would come to power so quickly, and everything would vanish very soon. We never thought that one day journalism would be a huge risk for the whole team,” she said.
Joya had set up Rukhshana Media only a year before, and even then she was doing something courageous. In Afghanistan’s patriarchal society, the media space was dominated by men, who often held leadership positions.
Now, Joya continues to run Rukhshana Media from London. Her journalists across Afghanistan work underground, protecting their identities by remaining anonymous and never meeting each other. Joya feels she has a heavy responsibility on her shoulders.
Just before she spoke with Index, she received a voice message from one of her journalists describing how she wakes up every morning afraid of what she is going to lose on that particular day. Women and girls are banned from secondary and university education, and most jobs are closed to them. They must cover their bodies completely and even visiting a doctor requires a male chaperone.
“The reality of Afghanistan under the Taliban regime is a complete gender apartheid system,” Joya said.
Since she’s been in the UK, Joya has received a vast number of direct messages on social media from Taliban supporters, threatening her directly for her work and sending her videos of sexual abuse.
But she has received supportive messages too. Now, she hopes readers of her book will reflect on the story, perhaps even take a photo of themselves with it and send her a message.
Writing about her own life has been a difficult experience, and she has had to be careful around details of her relatives who are still in Afghanistan. But Joya said that remaining silent is not a solution.
“It is part of my struggle against the misogyny, discrimination and injustice that is ongoing in Afghanistan,” she said. “The Vanishing Girl of Kabul. Maybe it’s me because I have had to disappear many times and find myself again, but I feel like she could just as easily be the millions of women of Afghanistan.”
In the past decade, Afghans aged 14 to 23 have become the single largest group of migrants in the Western Balkans. More than 2.5 million people – a fifth of them Afghans – are estimated to have crossed through this region since 2015 on their way to Western Europe. Over that time, Afghan migrant-smuggling networks have become ‘professionalised’, transnational and in some locations, violent criminal organisations. To understand how they have evolved and adapted over time, and how they operate now, AAN’s Jelena Bjelica and Fabrizio Foschini visited Serbia’s capital, Belgrade, and the country’s northern border with Hungary in June this year – for the third time in the last ten years. In this report, they synthesise a brief history of the Afghan migrant-smuggling networks in the Balkans, based on interviews with smugglers, migrants, government officials and organisations providing aid to people on the move. Their report begins in a migrant squat in Serbia.
In the heat of a Belgrade summer afternoon, the makeshift migrant squat – hidden by groves of wild acacia bushes in one of the capital’s suburbs that dot the southern bank of the Sava River – was buzzing with activity. Pakistani folk music crackled out of a wireless speaker in an improvised kitchen, kitted out under an electric-blue tarpaulin. A squat young smuggler crewman was cooking chicken karahi with rice over a firepit for a group of seven or so migrants and as many of his fellow smugglers.
Most of the smugglers were trying to pass the time by enticing others into a game of volleyball on an unlikely pitch, interspersed, as it was, with thorny acacias. One was napping in a tent, resting after a work shift that had seen him take a group of migrants to the northern border with Hungary a couple of days earlier. He had then been caught by the Serbian police and sent to a government centre for migrants in Preševo, far to the south on Serbia’s border with Northern Macedonia, from whence he had just returned. Two other smugglers suddenly stopped their volleyball game, saying they were going to shower in the flat they rented in a nearby neighbourhood; the rest stayed where they were, casually keeping a watchful eye on the ‘passengers’,[1] a prized asset, sometimes in short supply these days.
In the shade of a nearby shrub, a couple of worried-looking migrants were quietly chatting. They looked uneasy and often turned to us visitors, as if to determine, from our expressions more than from our words, what our real assessment of their current situation was and of their chances of reaching their destination. It was time for the group to have one last warm meal before they ‘hit the game’,[2] that is, try to illegally cross from Serbia into Hungary and the European Union.
Like many others, the group of migrants we encountered in Belgrade was forced to rely on smugglers. The days of ‘DIY migration’ for Afghans to Europe have all but disappeared in the face of the more aggressive posture of security forces and, now also, of smuggling networks. Fewer people travelling – IOM estimated that in 2025, 35,000 migrants passed through the Western Balkans compared, in 2022, to more than 192,000 – has also made for tough competition between the different groups of smugglers, often involving gun violence.
Although we did not see any weapons during our visit to the squat, they have become a staple item with smugglers and deadly clashes among groups for control of turf have become common. For example, a few weeks before our visit, on 12 May 2026, in a makeshift squat in Obrenovac, another suburban municipality of Belgrade city, two rival groups shot at each other, leaving one person dead and one wounded, both Afghans (Vreme). In 2022 and 2023, gunfire between rival migrant groups was often exchanged on the outskirts of the northern Serbian town of Subotica on the Serbian-Hungarian border (Al Jazeera) and sometimes even on Serbia’s western border with Bosnia (Nova.rs). There have also been news reports of migrants being kidnapped and held for ransom, robbed or abused by rival groups of smugglers, or even by their own travelling groups.
These developments point to new smuggling patterns in the Balkans. With DIY migration to Europe no longer really possible, migrants moving on the Balkan route really have only one choice – which smuggling group to opt for. Indeed, despite the increasing sophistication of the smuggling networks and their boasts of the high success ratios of their operations – at least if one is to believe what they consistently advertise on TikTok and other social media – it became evident on our trip that ‘good’ smugglers these days are hard to find.
This report opens with a brief history of migrant-smuggling networks in the Balkans, divided into two periods: 2001 to 2015 and 2016 to 2026. The period between October 2015 and March 2016, during which the route functioned as a humanitarian corridor for migrants, including Afghans (more detail in this earlier AAN report), was chosen as the cut-off between the two longer phases. This is followed by an account of how the route functions today, in 2026, as witnessed by the authors during their visit to Serbia. The two final sections discuss the crucial role of hawala as a secure money-transfer system, which functions like an escrow account, ensuring there is trust between the migrant/their family and the smugglers; and the innovative role of social media as a platform for smugglers to advertise and commercialise their ‘services’ and to recruit.
The information and insights in the report are synthesised from interviews with smugglers, migrants, journalists, government officials and organisations providing aid to people on the move, as well as published literature and the authors’ own long experience covering migration, especially in the Balkans.
Chicken karahi cooking in improvised kitchen, kitted out under an electric-blue tarpaulin. Photo: Jelena Bjelica/AAN, 5 June 2026
Migration in the new century: 2001 to 2015
In the first decade of the twenty-first century, smuggling activities were largely organised through Afghan diaspora networks concentrated in Iran, Turkey and Greece, rather than through permanent operational structures in the non-EU Western Balkans (comprising Serbia, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Montenegro, Kosovo, Albania and North Macedonia). Facilitators commonly came from the same family, clan, ethnic group or geographic area as the migrants themselves and functioned primarily as brokers who connected migrants with people who could provide transport and fake documents and with other intermediaries further along the route.
Norwegian sociologist Kristian Berg Harpviken argued in his seminal 2009 work on Afghan migration that it was fundamentally shaped by social networks, which provide information, financial resources and security.[3] Rather than acting independently, smugglers were embedded within these wider networks of relatives, friends and diaspora communities. Trust and reputation were essential, with migrants typically choosing facilitators recommended by family members or previous migrants whom they knew, rather than unknown brokers. This network-based organisation reduced both the perceived risks of migration and the transaction costs associated with illegal travel.
In those early days, Afghan smuggling networks were generally smaller, less visible and more clearly oriented towards facilitating transit, rather than, as is the case now, criminal groups bent on exercising territorial control.[4] They operated primarily to enable smuggling and were embedded in Afghan communities, linking people in Afghanistan with Afghan diasporas in Iran, Turkey, Greece and Western Europe. At this stage, however, the Western Balkans had not yet emerged as the dominant migration corridor it would later become. Most Afghans seeking to reach Europe travelled through Iran and Turkey before entering Greece or Italy, or accessed asylum systems through other means.
By 2010, Greece had become the principal gateway for Afghan migration into the European Union. The Evros/Maritsa River between Greece and Turkey emerged as a major entry point and Afghans constituted one of the largest groups seeking asylum in Greece. During this period, Athens developed into an important staging area for Afghan migration networks. Smuggling activities remained highly fragmented, with migrants frequently purchasing journeys in stages rather than through a single organisation. Routes typically followed the sequence Afghanistan–Iran–Turkey–Greece–North Macedonia–Serbia–Hungary–Austria and then going on to Germany and other Western European destinations. Afghan smugglers generally did not control movement within the Balkans directly, but instead relied on Turkish facilitators, Kurdish intermediaries and local people for transport and to provide fake documents. Their principal role was managing the gangs’ access to Afghan migrant communities and coordinating their relationships with migrants.
However, after the European Border and Coast Guard Agency (Frontex)[5] deployed its first-ever Rapid Border Intervention Teams (RABIT) to the Evros region in November 2010, the situation changed and in the years that ensued, the current incarnation of the Balkan migration route emerged. Although the RABIT mission ended in March 2011, Frontex has maintained a permanent operational presence and continued surveillance and border management activities along the Evros border to date. These increased controls, including the construction of fencing along the Evros River, encouraged route diversification, north, through Bulgaria, Serbia and Hungary. During this period, migrant smuggling expanded significantly in the Western Balkans, although the organisational infrastructure remained relatively informal compared with later developments. Afghans appear to have operated mainly as recruiters, brokers, payment coordinators and providers of information, while local Balkan facilitators managed transport, accommodation and border crossings.
In 2015, migration from Afghanistan increased sharply, driven by deteriorating security in Afghanistan, combined with the opening of the Balkan humanitarian corridor for refugees from Syria (later to include Afghans) and Germany’s asylum policy and perceived openness.[6] According to UNHCR, more than 213,000 Afghan asylum applications were lodged in Europe in 2015, making Afghans the second-largest nationality of asylum seekers after Syrians that year.
Afghan smuggling networks had, by this stage, accumulated considerable experience in moving migrants through Turkey and Greece, but the large-scale movements of 2015 transformed the system primarily because of their volume. The opening of the Western Balkan ‘humanitarian corridor’ for migrants between September 2015 and March 2016 provided certain nationalities, including Afghans, with transportation to the outer fringes of the European Union and temporarily reduced migrants’ dependence on smugglers, as governments themselves facilitated transit by registering migrants, organising transport and showing a degree of official tolerance (AAN). Afghan smugglers did not disappear, but their role diminished considerably as legal or semi-legal transit opportunities became available.
Overall, Afghan smuggling networks before 2015 were closely linked to Afghan diaspora communities in Istanbul, Athens, Tehran and functioned as migration-support systems as much as illicit enterprises. Turkey served as the principal centre of coordination for Afghan migration logistics, while the Western Balkans remained, primarily, a transit space. Unlike the more recent period, there is little evidence prior to 2015 that Afghan smuggling groups maintained any territorial control, employed violence or resembled conventional organised crime groups.
Towards ‘professionalisation’: 2016 – 2026
The closure of the humanitarian corridor in March 2016, as AAN reported (for links, see footnote 7), revived demand for clandestine facilitation services and gave new importance to Afghan smuggling networks as organisers of onward movement toward Western Europe. This was true especially at the most critical border crossings, such as those between Turkey and Greece/Bulgaria or between Serbia and Hungary/Bosnia/Croatia.
Between 2016 and 2020, Afghan smuggling networks in the Balkans could still be predominantly characterised as decentralised and facilitating migration, rather than hierarchical criminal organisations. Afghans acted as brokers, intermediaries and guides embedded within Afghan migrant communities, often connected to their ‘customers’ through family, village, ethnic and diasporic ties. At this time, Serbia, particularly Belgrade, emerged as a major logistical hub where migrants regrouped, arranged payments, received instructions and organised onward travel toward Hungary, Croatia, Austria and Germany.[7] Smuggling operations functioned through segmented chains of facilitators, rather than through vertically integrated transnational organisations, with different actors specialising in transport, accommodation, border crossings and communication. Migrants still largely relied on word-of-mouth recommendations and telephone contacts to access these networks.
From approximately 2021 onwards, a change becomes evident, as reported by the Global Initiative Against Transnational Organized Crime (GI-TOC), Europol and the Balkan Investigative Reporting Network (BIRN).[8] While Afghan networks were still community-based and flexible, parts of the smuggling operations appear to have become more professionalised, territorial, transnational and violent. They also became more visible on social media platforms, which they were increasingly using to promote their services and recruit new low-level smugglers.
In 2022, Europol described migrant-smuggling groups (of all nationalities) in Europe as dynamic transnational enterprises, operating through compartmentalised cells. It described their exploitation of digital communications, encrypted applications and online recruitment methods and said:
Criminal networks involved in migrant smuggling are adaptable and responsive to changes in their environment, and are flexible in the routes and modi operandi used. Furthermore, criminals plan their routes by capitalising on existing infrastructure such as availability of transport logistics, travel restrictions, law enforcement presence or weather conditions.
The GI-TOC also reported on the transnational nature of these groups, saying that foreign nationals “often collaborate with Balkan smugglers to navigate complex borders.” As an example, the report cited the case from November 2024, when the Bosnian police arrested an Afghan citizen on suspicion of human smuggling and organising a criminal group for this purpose. According to the report, the arrested individual allegedly had, with help from Balkan smugglers, smuggled more than 250 illegal migrants, primarily of Turkish or Kurdish origin, and unlawfully earned more than 100,000 euros (USD 114,000).
Most significantly, there has been the emergence of violence as a defining feature of parts of the migrant-smuggling economy in northern Serbia and Bosnia and Herzegovina. Investigations by BIRN describe Afghan groups as among the principal actors competing for control over profitable crossing corridors near Subotica, Horgoš and the Hungarian border fence.[9] Armed confrontations between Afghan and Moroccan groups were reported in 2023, with reports of automatic weapons, territorial disputes and clashes over access to migrants and border routes.[10]
Some Afghan-linked networks evolved beyond facilitation into more coercive forms of criminality, including extortion, kidnapping and ransom demands. They include the BWK (usually understood to stand for ‘Balkan Warriors Kabul’), which emerged in late 2024 in the Pirot area along the Bulgarian-Serbian border. After that, it shifted its activities to the Bihać/Gradiška area in Bosnia for approximately six to twelve months before relocating or expanding its centre of operation to the Loznica area on the Bosnian border in Serbia in early 2025. The group is primarily seen to kidnap migrants travelling with rival groups to demand ransoms from their relatives in Afghanistan. Their victims have included entire families, including women and children. The alleged activities of the group represent perhaps the clearest example of this shift in the nature of Afghan smugglers, with researchers describing practices involving detention, physical abuse and the extraction of ransom from migrants’ families.[11] According to a BIRN journalist, Saša Dragojlo, the change in the way the smuggling networks operate has brought a shift in the nature of violence: “Violence shifted from primarily inter-gang conflicts to more violence against migrants themselves, as a model of smuggling changed from smuggling fees to extortion and kidnapping as revenue streams.”
The significance of Afghan smuggling networks has been bolstered by the fact that, in the last ten years, Afghans aged 14 to 23 became the single largest group in the Western Balkans.[12] That strength in numbers helped lead to achange in the way Afghan smuggling networks and groups operate. The networks themselves have also demonstrated high adaptivity, responding rapidly to changes in migration policies, border controls and law-enforcement pressure. Yet it would be inaccurate to describe Afghan smuggling in the Balkans as controlled by a unified ‘Afghan mafia’. Afghan migrant-smuggling networks more closely resemble a fragmented ecosystem of numerous networks of varying size, sophistication and criminal orientation. Even so, there is a broad trajectory of Afghan smuggling networks in the Balkans since 2015 that reflects a broader paradox: the restrictive border policies outlined earlier in this report – the fences, the crackdowns, the expansion of Frontex to deal with unauthorised migration – have not eliminated smuggling. Rather, they have, as an unintended consequence, altered its organisational structure and in certain areas driven its criminalisation.[13]
Nowadays, the role of smugglers is especially prominent in Serbia and Bosnia and Herzegovina as these two countries are often used as respite points on the route, mainly due to relatively lax anti-immigration policies there. Smuggling networks have an entire infrastructure based in those countries – people who manage squats and flats, rendezvous with migrants arriving from Bulgaria and Greece and get them to the next border, as well as navigators, ie the people who get migrants across the borders using GPS coordinates.
In the following section, we describe a network as we witnessed it operating in Belgrade in June.
Migrant movements along the Balkan Route in 2026. Map: Roger Helms for AAN; Graphics: Žolt Kovač for AAN, 2026
Higher costs, fewer travellers: the Balkan Route in 2026
The group of seven Afghan migrants introduced at the beginning of the report had just arrived in Belgrade or rather had been delivered straight to the makeshift squat, with no chance to see the city or get their bearings. They were all Pashto speakers, comparatively young lads in their mid-twenties, from a broad range of provinces, from Kandahar to Kunar. They had all, without exception, recently embarked on the second leg of their journey from Turkey to Europe. Most had spent several years in Turkey, working in textile factories or livestock farming, earning enough to travel onwards. A couple had spent a year in detention for being undocumented migrants in Turkey. They all wanted to reach faraway countries to the north and west of Europe – the UK, Ireland, France and Germany – but were all heading first to Italy, from where they would embark on the rest of their journey. They had arrived in Belgrade in different groups. Some had come through Greece and North Macedonia; the others through Bulgaria where Bulgarian drivers had picked them up for short lifts to pre-set stages, then directed them on how to proceed over the border. Once they crossed into Serbia, the drivers on the Serbian side of the border, a local transport provider, had brought them to the Belgrade square where we met them.
The smugglers looked roughly the same age as their customers, most of them possibly even younger. They are no big shots in the smuggling industry: a couple of them looked like tough guys, one slightly more senior with a sterner, more conservative attitude, and one youngish and boastful. The rest were just sidekicks and helpers, ranging from ‘squat hands’ and housekeepers to bag carriers, ladder carriers and GPS navigators. Such segmentation and professionalisation is a long way from the pre-2016 system where one of the migrants would adopt a temporary role as jelaw-ro or guide.[14] All claimed to be Afghan except for a single Pakistani Pashtun. A few of the smugglers had quite clearly returned via the Balkan Route after spending time – and obtaining asylum papers – in Italy.
Some markers, mostly clothing items, differentiated the smugglers from migrants. Those going westwards, who were constantly on the move, could hardly afford the luxury of donning a traditional piran wa tomban (long shirt and baggy trousers) or a glittering, embroidered chamani cap. Such markers were hardly needed in a small and half-empty camp like the squat we visited; however, being easily spotted can be useful for meeting arrivals at the border, or at night, when smugglers need to first gather larger groups of migrants together before splitting them up again to try and ensure they cross unnoticed.
The fact that they, the smugglers, were as numerous as their customers, and that there were few more incoming migrants in the coming days, did not seem to over-concern them. Their earnings were apparently guaranteed. A trip from Turkey to Italy can now cost between 6,000 and 8,000 euros (USD 6,850 to 9,100), although in some instances, migrants might be asked to pay additional sums along the route.[15] So although migrants are fewer, the cost of the journey has increased significantly – ten years ago an entire trip from Kabul to Germany would cost around 4,000 euros (USD 4,550);[16] now only one leg of the journey, the trip through the Western Balkans, costs more than that. The smugglers in the Balkans region seem to be making good profits.
Migrants and smugglers walk along a railway track in one of Belgrade’s southern suburbs. Photo: Jelena Bjelica/AAN, 5 June 2026.
On the subject of fewer migrants, there is some discussion about the magnitude of that reduction. Frontex estimates that between 2024 and 2025 there was a 42 per cent reduction in the number of illegal crossings on the EU external border – into Croatia and Hungary – from the Western Balkans. The IOM, which does not measure the number of illegal crossings, but estimates the migrant population in selected regions, also recorded a decline in the number of people on the move in the six countries of the non-EU Western Balkans. According to IOM, the number of people on the move dropped from over 192,000 in 2022 to around 163,500 in 2023, then declined further to around 56,200 in 2024 and to about 35,300 in 2025. The estimates for further into the EU, in the Italian city of Trieste, which is now a major terminal of the Balkan route, also show a decline, although somewhat differently. The Italian Consortium of Solidarity, an organisation working with migrants there, told AAN it estimated the reduction in arrivals in Trieste last year at about 15 per cent and argued that in the first months of 2026, there was actually an increase. The IOM in Serbia also recorded an increase in the number of migrants in the Western Balkans in the first quarter of 2026 – a 37 per cent increase compared to the same period in 2025.
At the border
When AAN visited the border area between Serbia and Hungary in the Subotica region in June 2026, the change in the ‘smuggling landscape’ was clear. It was once dotted with small migrant camps, both informal and government-run. It is still a major transit point for migrants – as it has been for 15 years now – but they are no longer visible. Instead, migrants are brought to the area at night from Belgrade, split into smaller groups to cross under a cut in the fence at strategically selected points, and are over the border before dawn. One such transit point that we visited, an abandoned property near the Horgoš 2 border crossing, bore signs of both a long-term migrant presence dating back some years and of a recent, hurried passage. Access to such places still constitutes a bone of contention between smugglers, something to be fought for control of.
The need to secure favourable border crossing spots and the competition surrounding them have brought some groups of smugglers to develop favoured routes on which they specialise. The camp in the southern outskirts of Belgrade that we visited was, for example, managing mostly the crossings into Hungary. A parallel group, affiliated to the same gang but based in a separate camp, was more oriented towards leading migrants into Bosnia. Getting into Bosnia is easier compared to Hungary, despite the need to cross the River Drina, with its unpredictable whirlpools and fast currents. Boats and bridges are used, arguably with some level of connivance from local border authorities. Other gangs specialise in crossing into Croatia; indeed, AAN heard reports that crossings of the Serbia/Croatia border near Šid have resumed in recent months, after having been nearly abandoned for years due to tight controls. Some reports point to a laxer attitude also among Croatian police since its accession to Schengen, but crossing from Serbia or Bosnia into Croatia still carries significant risk.[17] However, most of the Western Balkan countries seem to be underreporting arrivals and transits to showcase success in repressing migrants on behalf of the other EU countries.
Stables on the abandoned property near the Horgoš 2 border crossing. Photo: Jelena Bjelica/AAN, 7 June 2026
The role of hawala
One key part of the infrastructure for smuggling migrants is not controlled by the smugglers and their gangs. Indeed, it is one of the few ways that there are checks on the smugglers and their gangs. This is hawala, the informal money transfer system used across South Asia and the Middle East. One of the people we met during our trip explained why it is of such pre-eminent importance. Saqeb (name changed to protect his identity) arrived in Belgrade in 2017 as a 13-year-old minor and over the past ten years has completed primary and secondary school in Serbia, eventually finding a job as a translator with an international organisation. Drawing on what he has learned from translating for Afghan migrants, he explained how hawala oils the machinery of migrant smuggling: “Smugglers often film the migrants crossing a border,” he said, “or just sitting in a squat, doing everyday things.” They then send the video to the hawaladar, the broker located at the point of departure or at another stage along the route, as proof that a migrant has arrived at a certain destination. Only after that will the hawaladar authorise payment to the smuggler.[18] “Some of the videos,” said Saqeb, “are then re-used in social media for promotion and recruitment.”
In academic literature as well, hawala has been identified as a critical enabling mechanism of Afghan migrant smuggling, for example, in a paper about Afghan migration authored by Mahadevan, Khoruk, and Mohmanzaï.[19] The authors argue that it should not be understood merely as a method of payment, but rather as a core component of the migrant smuggling infrastructure. They said that their investigations had established that “hawala networks are the lifeblood of irregular migration from Afghanistan.” The paper explains that hawala plays an important trust-building role within the migrant smuggling economy. Afghan migrants and their families frequently rely on hawaladars as intermediaries who hold funds until migrants successfully complete a stage of their journey or reach an agreed destination. In practice, hawala therefore functions as an informal escrow system, reducing the risk of fraud for migrants while increasing confidence in smuggling services. This mechanism is particularly important in irregular migration, as migrants often travel in stages, dealing with multiple facilitators and brokers operating in different countries. Hawaladars provide the financial continuity that links these otherwise fragmented transactions.
Hawala networks are deeply embedded in Afghan economic and social life and are widely used for remittances, trade and family support. Because hawaladars possess reputational capital and are viewed as trusted actors, their involvement in migration-related transactions enhances migrants’ confidence in particular facilitators or smuggling arrangements. The fact that funds can be deposited in Afghanistan and subsequently released in Iran, Turkey, Serbia, or Western Europe without physically moving cash across borders allows settlement between hawaladars to occur later through trade transactions, debt balancing, or other informal financial mechanisms. This flexibility allows smugglers to coordinate operations across multiple jurisdictions while reducing their exposure to regulatory scrutiny and financial monitoring.
In major Afghan migration hubs, like Istanbul and Belgrade, hawala has become integrated into the broader architecture of migrant smuggling. Hawaladars effectively function as financial intermediaries, guarantors and settlement agents within the Afghan migrant-smuggling economy. Further research is needed to look into who the hawaladars are, what nationality for example, and how they fit into networks back home in Afghanistan and elsewhere.
The role of social media
While hawala is more than a thousand years old, a very modern innovation is now also facilitating smuggling. The networks have innovated new usages of social media to advertise the illicit services they offer. Recent studies suggest that social media platforms are becoming increasingly important as tools for advertising migration opportunities, disseminating information and connecting migrants with facilitators. This is a change from when AAN researched Afghan smuggling through the Balkans in reports published in 2015 to 2017 (see footnote 7 for links) which then described the heavy dependency on interpersonal networks of trust. Migrants generally found facilitators through family members, village contacts, friends, previous travellers and recommendations circulating within Afghan communities in Afghanistan, Iran, Turkey and Europe, and communication relied primarily on mobile phones, messaging applications and personal referrals.
As a joint 2021 Europol and Frontex intelligence notification titled “Digitalisation of migrant smuggling” found, that has changed: “smuggling services are heavily advertised on social media platforms, particularly Facebook or Instagram pages, but recently also TikTok.” Advertising, it said, “is carried out on personal profiles or generic/business pages, but also on chat groups in messaging platforms like WhatsApp or Telegram,” adding that, “social media pages, groups and platforms offering smuggling services contain instructions, maps, photos, videos and prices for smuggling, updated on a regular basis.” Occasionally, it said, “the content posted by smugglers is complemented by information contributed by numerous other users, in the form of comments or notifications.”
Videos frequently show border crossings, advertise transport arrangements and depict successful arrivals in Europe, portraying migration as an achievable pathway to economic security. Such content serves the smugglers in both advertising and making sales, helping them build credibility and attract clients beyond their immediate social networks. Contemporary smuggling networks increasingly incorporate digital tools, including TikTok, Facebook, Telegram and encrypted messaging applications.
AAN reviewed several TikTok accounts identified by NGOs providing services to migrants in Serbia. TikTok is a global short-form video platform where users create, share and discover videos ranging from 15 seconds to 10 minutes. It is renowned for its highly personalised ‘For You’ algorithm and features videos with a primary active lifespan of 24 to 48 hours. On these accounts, we identified several recurring features in the video messaging. The most common is the portrayal of smugglers as victorious fighters, a parallel reinforced by their posing in army fatigues and camouflage gear – be it on the Bosnian hills or at a bus stop in Bayern, Germany – or as martial arts practitioners, and by their nicknames referring to military ranks such as Toran (captain) or athlete titles such as Pahlawan (champion wrestler). This show of strength is not only intended to suggest that the smuggler in question is the strongest around – and so the safest to travel with (something to be considered these days), but also to facilitate identification with his persona among future migrants.
Some promotional videos feature smugglers in expensive clothes and big cars, shot in front of famous landmarks in sought-after European capitals (Tour Eiffel in Paris, Tower Bridge in London), largely coinciding with the dreams of a younger generation of Afghans who are on the move, hoping to attain in Europe the ‘high life’ they feel they are unable to attain in their own country. These social media campaigns are obviously aimed at young men. Although, traditionally, the decision to migrate is taken by the family, AAN has been hearing how in Afghanistan, as in Europe, young men are more commonly making their own decisions and then either convincing or forcing their families to comply with their choices. Moreover, midway through what are usually two-phase migration paths, that is, in Istanbul or other Turkish cities, these youngsters likely have even more say over which group to connect with to try to complete their trip.
The videos uploaded by TikTokers associated with a brand like B.W.K., a serial number (such as 20…60 or 400/59),[20] or seemingly more individualised labels such as Jabar Mujrim (Jabar, the Criminal) or Farhad Rahbalad (Farhad, the Guide), serve to both promote their operations and familiarise prospective customers with some of the landscapes and events they will meet on the road. By featuring groups of young men marching through woodlands, resting and warming themselves around a campfire, or cutting or climbing border fences, the videos offer practical tutorials for future users. Some even show the tools of the trade, such as alternating clips of maps with pinpointed locations and Google Street View images of rendezvous; these are what smugglers provide their customers with to navigate those sections of the trip that they have to do on their own.
Some videos are used to recruit workers to the local labour force. For example, a TikTok account ‘Transport.555’ advertised for local drivers in Croatia, promising high pay of 4,000 to 10,000 euros (USD 4,560 to 11,400). Similarly, the Instagram account for ‘Transport Balkan’ (also Croatia-based) promises drivers willing to transport migrants from Nova Gradiškain Croatia to the Slovenian border for 500 euro (USD 570) per migrant, or, if they feel like braving it, onto Trieste, in Italy, at 1,000 euro (USD 1,140) per person.
Other features reinforce the conceptual link between migrating along the Balkan route and ‘the game.’ All videos are sprinkled with emoticons of ninjas, ladders or skulls, alongside the flags of Greece, Bulgaria, Albania or other countries to be crossed; the emoticons turn into crowns on the heads of successful voyagers or smugglers once the destination is reached. Slogans, poetry or lines from songs, or at the very least the words, “Insh’allah, very soon,” appear on screen. The music in the background is, inescapably, the heavily reverberated and synthesised sound of today’s Pashto pop, but the lyrics of some of the tarana-style[21] songs are pertinent, centred on travel to Europe, the reasons for leaving one’s homeland, the hardships and cold faced in the Bosnian mountains, and so on.
Altogether, most of the material available in TikTok videos is pretty basic, but detailed information vital to the organisation as to the route can be shared on this and other social media. The presence and welfare of the customers/travellers is publicised in the videos, incidentally, showing that travellers other than Afghans – South Asians or Africans – occasionally rely on Afghan outfits to be smuggled to Europe (the same applies to Afghans, who may travel with Pakistani smugglers, for example). The profile of a smuggling group can also be raised by videos that are not strictly promotional: they may be uploaded by smugglers and migrants for private reasons, but feature the smugglers’ identifying attributes (like a series of numbers) and enhance their name recognition.
It is evident that a digitalisation of migrant smuggling services points to an expanding ecosystem in which smugglers use digital platforms to circulate information, establish reputations and reach prospective clients. Irregular migration has become a competitive online market in which visibility, trust and accessibility are increasingly mediated through social media channels.
Game on
In the face of a diminished appetite by European governments to take high numbers of Afghan migrants[22] and the increased hurdles and controls on migration routes, the activity of smuggler networks in the Balkans has become more and more pivotal and profitable. This has led to an increased role on their part in managing all aspects of migrants’ movements in this part of the world – though it is a role they now play with more discretion and without deploying or risking themselves in person whenever avoidable. This development has also brought about the disappearance of independent migrant travel and border crossing and led to unbalanced power relations between migrants and smugglers. Migrants are now heavily dependent on the smugglers, but also in greater danger from them, as seen in the frequently reported cases of abuse and violence driven by inter-gang competition.
These changing patterns, together with the increased profits available, might be reshaping the profile and status of smugglers. Despite the ruthless and questionable side of their operations, they strive to present themselves as positive, successful role models to a broader section of their community of reference – young Afghan men who are on their way to Europe or have already arrived there. The appeal of the smuggler’s career would explain the presence of many Afghans, even very young ones, who have returned to the Balkans to work with the groups after receiving protection in one of the EU countries. It would also justify the style of the TikTok videos, in which top smugglers pose as a new class of military commanders, surrounded by their aides and deputies.
It would not take much for young Afghan men who make it, say, to Italy, and are waiting in reception camps for their documents, feeling bored and seeking economic opportunities, to seize such a seemingly golden chance to earn some money and achieve a higher status. Young migrants also have the flexibility and skills to adapt to European societies and learn languages that older smugglers, the nominal bosses of the organisations, often lack. Still, it is a shortcut on a tricky route, where rules keep changing, nothing stays the same and the game is afoot.
Edited by Kate Clark
References
References
↑1
While we use ‘migrants’ and ‘smugglers’ in this report, terminology used for them varies depending on who speaks. Some NGOs providing aid to migrants refer to migrants as ‘people of the move’ and to the smugglers as ‘facilitators’. Smugglers call migrants ‘passengers’ and ‘travellers’. Migrants themselves call a spade a spade, that is, for smugglers, they use the Pashto/Dari term – actually of Turkish origin – qachakbar (more commonly transcribed by Western media as kachakbar), which can be rendered exactly as ‘smuggler’.
↑2
The expression ‘the game’ (and ‘to hit/play the game’) refers to an attempt to cross one or more international borders irregularly, in order to continue the journey towards Western Europe. Used widely among Afghan and other migrant communities, the term reflects the uncertainty, danger and repeated nature of these attempts, which often involve travelling on foot through forests or mountains, evading border authorities and risking apprehension or pushbacks. Rather than describing smuggling itself, ‘the Game’ refers to the migrant’s attempt to make an irregular crossing, which may be organised or facilitated by smugglers through the provision of guides, transport, GPS coordinates or other logistical support. See, for example, Martine van Bijlert and Jelena Bjelica, The Aftermath of an Exodus: The Balkans’ Old Smuggling Routes and Europe’s Closed Borders, AAN, 14 June 2017 and Fabrizio Foschini, Keep on Moving on the Balkan Route: No quarter for Afghan asylum seekers in Croatia and Serbia, AAN, 26 September 2023.
Frontex is the European Union agency responsible for supporting EU and Schengen countries in managing the Union’s external borders, coordinating joint border operations and combating cross-border crime. It was established in 2004 and became operational in 2005.
↑6
In 2015, Germany’s welcoming stance toward refugees, together with widespread media coverage, contributed to a perception among Afghans that they would have a reasonable chance of obtaining asylum or protection in Europe, even though recognition rates varied by nationality. See also Thomas Ruttig, Afghan Exodus: Afghan asylum seekers in Europe (3) – case study Germany, AAN, 17 February 2017.
These are IOM and Serbian Commissariat for Refugees and Migration of the Republic of Serbia estimates.
↑14
As we reported previously, some migrants opted to become a jelaw-ro (lead-the-way), a person who informally takes charge of a group of migrants and keeps in touch with the smuggler network, in order to enhance the group’s success of arriving at the next destination. See Fabrizio Foschini, Keep on Moving on the Balkan Route: No quarter for Afghan asylum seekers in Croatia and Serbia, AAN, 26 September 2023.
↑15
Transport in each Western Balkan country is provided mainly by its residents, but a number of third-country nationals or former migrants with EU documents join in. In fact, among the people detained recently while trying to smuggle migrants across the border into Italy near Trieste, there were quite a few residents of Italy and other European countries who had gone to fetch their passengers deep into Croatia or even further afield (TriestePrima, Il Piccolo).
It remains to be seen how the Common European Asylum System (CEAS) which came into effect on 12 June 2026 will affect asylum applications for Afghans (InfoMigrants). For the moment, increased deportations of Afghans from countries such as Germany aim to act as a deterrent (Bild am Sonntag). A Taliban delegation travelled to Brussels on 23 June for talks with the European Commission and representatives of 15 EU member states on consular services and the deportation of Afghans who have been convicted of crimes or whose claims for asylum have been rejected. (Al Jazeera, Amu TV). In May 2026, Austria negotiated a deal with Tashkent to use Uzbekistan as a transit hub for charter flights carrying rejected asylum-seekers, following Poland’s lead. In April 2026, Poland deported three Afghan men via Uzbekistan despite an interim ruling by the European Court of Human Rights ordering a halt (Times of Central Asia).
A Good Smuggler is Hard to Find: The evolution of Afghan smuggling networks in the Balkans
Rising Anti-Taliban Activity: The Afghanistan Freedom Front (AFF) and a newly emerged group, Sepahian-e Mihan (Patriotic Soldiers Front), have conducted successful attacks in Badakhshan, including an AFF operation on July 23, 2026, that killed 21 Taliban fighters and captured weapons in Zebak District.
Internal Taliban Fractures: The Taliban are actively disarming local fighters and managing tensions with dissident Tajik commander Juma Khan Fateh, whose forces have been linked to land seizures, extortion, and control of gold mines; high-level Taliban officials have intervened with mixed results.
Resource and Ethnic Tensions: Ongoing disputes over gold, lapis lazuli, and other mineral resources, combined with the Taliban’s mistrust of non-Pashtun local commanders, are fueling protests by miners, internal clashes, and broader instability in the predominantly non-Pashtun province.
Badakhshan Province is in the midst of severe disorders, experiencing violent anti-Taliban rebellions, intense internal mutinies within the Taliban structure, and crises over the mining of natural reserves.
On July 23, 2026, fighters of the Afghanistan Freedom Front (AFF) killed 21 Taliban fighters and injured another 37, in a series of targeted operations against Taliban bases, units, and military detachments in the Zebak District of Badakhshan Province. One AFF fighter was also killed. During the fighting, AFF fighters captured ammunition, light and heavy weapons, military equipment, and other war materials, from the Taliban.
On the other hand, as reported on July 22, 2026, the Taliban ordered gunmen loyal to dissident local commander Juma Khan Fateh to surrender their weapons as soon as possible in the Shekay and Nusay Districts.
On July 21, 2026, Taliban fighters stationed in the Nusay District of Badakhshan Province ordered 350 armed men affiliated with the group, who did not hold positions within the Taliban regime’s structure, to surrender their weapons. The notice warned that if any individual refused to hand over his weapons, Taliban fighters would use military force to seize them.
On July 17, 2026, Taliban authorities claimed that they had retaken the Yaftal-e Payin District in Badakhshan Province after an overnight attack claimed by anti-Kabul forces. Police Spokesperson Ehsanullah Kamgar stated that the attack occurred while several Taliban fighters and commanders were on leave, adding that Taliban authorities had arrested seven people in connection with the incident and seized weapons and military equipment.
On July 13, the 2026, Taliban begun disarming their local fighters in the Shahr-e Buzurg District of Badakhshan Province. Taliban’s special forces have also been deployed in the area, alongside Mawlawi Saifuddin Tayeb, the Deputy Chief of the Taliban Administrative Affairs Office. The disarmament process began after the noon prayer in the district.
According to partial data compiled by South Asia Terrorism Portal (SATP), since the Taliban takeover on August 15, 2021, 216 people, including 57 civilians, 14 militants, and 145 in the Not Specified (NS) category have been killed in Badakhshan Province in 73 incidents (data till July 25, 2026).
Some of the major incidents include:
On March 29, 2026, AFF fighters carried out a planned attack targeting a watchtower of the Taliban’s 219th Division, located in the Qalatak area of Baharak District in Badakhshan Province, killing four Taliban fighters and injuring three.
On November 29, 2025, AFF fighters carried out a rocket attack on the Taliban’s Police District (PD) 7, in Faizabad, the capital city of Badakhshan, killing three Taliban fighters and injuring two.
On October 12, 2025, at least 10 Taliban fighters were killed in fighting between rival factions of the group at Yalor village in the Yaftali Sufla District of Badakhshan Province, over control of a gold mines.
On May 26, 2025, a local Taliban commander, Zaidullah, was killed along with his wife and child, during an internal armed clash in the Shahada District of Badakhshan Province. At least four Taliban members were also seriously wounded, including Abdul Saboor, the deputy head of the Taliban’s intelligence unit in Shahada District, and Mahmood, another intelligence officer.
On May 8, 2024, at least three Taliban fighters were killed and another six were injured in an Improvised Explosive Device (IED) blast. Later, on the same day, the Islamic State-Khorasan Province (IS-KP) claimed responsibility for the blast.
On June 8, 2023, a Taliban senior commander identified as Mawlawi Safiullah and 15 others were killed in a bomb blast inside the Nabawi Mosque in the provincial capital of Faizabad.
On September 30, 2022, four Taliban fighters were killed when the National Resistance Front (NRF) attacked them in the Payan Mor area of ??Shahr Buzurg District of Badakhshan Province.
Amidst this chaos, a new anti-Taliban group, Sepahian-e Mihan (Patriotic Soldiers Front) has appeared on the scene. On July 17, 2026, the group claimed responsibility for an attack in the Yaftali Sufla District and declared that its forces had controlled the district administration building for several hours. Following this attack, the Taliban sent Army Chief Fasihuddin Fitrat to the District, to lead operations. Fitrat claimed that the assault had been foiled and that the attackers had failed to achieve their objectives. Nevertheless, on July 22, 2026, Qayum Malang, Commander of the Sepahian-e Mihan, released his first audio message, declaring that he and his fighters were safe: “I am in full health. Do not follow the enemy’s propaganda. We are all safe and well.” He also stressed that the front “has its own plans and objectives” and that its members desire freedom above everything else. The group reportedly consists of people from different sections of society, including residents of Badakhshan, who came together in response to growing dissatisfaction with Taliban rule in the province. The official logo of the group includes symbolic elements such as the Simurgh (a giant bird of Persian mythology), the sun, the Hindu Kush mountains, lapis lazuli, a sword and the golden star of Bactria. The Hindu Kush mountains are seen as a symbol of the group’s geographical roots, while the sword and star may represent its military and defensive character.
Further, Juma Khan Fateh, the influential and disgruntled Tajik commander of Badakhshan Province has become a festering wound for the Taliban leadership. Fateh, his relatives (including brothers Mohammad Musa Shahryar and Abdul Fattah), and his loyalist gunmen, have been linked to land seizures, extortion, and illegal control of gold mines in Badakhshan. As reported on June 27, 2026, increased movements and a military build-up by Juma Khan was reported in the Darwaz area of Badakhshan Province. He had organised his forces over the preceding days and held extensive meetings with residents in Nusay District.
The Taliban however, initiated a few official interventions to assess the situation. On June 25, 2026, Taliban Defense Minister, Mullah Yaqoob Mujahid travelled to Badakhshan, following unsuccessful negotiations between a special Taliban commission and Juma Khan Fatah. Taliban officials said Mullah Yaqoob’s visit was to evaluate the security situation along the Wakhan, Ishkashim, and Shughnan border areas. However, sources suggest that he was also calculating military capabilities for a possible confrontation with Fatah. Later, as reported on July 9, 2026, Fasihuddin Fitrat, Taliban’s Chief of Army staff, and Mawlawi Amanuddin, Taliban Governor of Helmand, travelled to Nusay District to meet with Juma Khan, in an effort to ease ongoing tensions. Thereafter, on July 10, Juma Khan was transferred to Faizabad, capital of Badakhshan, after receiving ‘guarantees’ from Taliban Army Chief Fasihuddin Fitrat. No details of the talks or any agreement between the two sides have yet been released. A day later, Juma Khan Fateh returned to the Darwaz region of Badakhshan after pledging loyalty to the Taliban administration.
In parallel to these ongoing ‘negotiations’ at the administrative level, Zabihullah Mujahid, Taliban Spokesperson, announced on June 22, 2026, that Juma Khan had been removed as Zabul Deputy Governor, without being assigned a new role. Mujahid added that Taliban Supreme Leader Hibatullah Akhundzada had reshuffled several senior positions across government institutions. Moreover, as reported on July 9, Taliban forces established several checkpoints in the Shekay, Nusay and Maymay Districts in Badakhshan to monitor the movement of locals.
Badakhshan is a rugged and rocky, pre-dominantly non-Pashtun province in northeastern Afghanistan, rich in gold, silver, aluminum, limestone, lapis lazuli, etc. After their takeover in 2021, the Taliban leadership has been mistrustful of the local Taliban commanders of Tajik and other ethnic backgrounds. A major point of dispute has been the control of Badakhshan’s rich mineral resources and mines. There have been frequent disputes between Taliban and local miners. For instance, on July 21, 2026, a number of mine workers gathered in front of Taliban’s mining department building in Badakhshan, protesting against the Taliban’s continued closure of mining sites, and saying that Taliban forces threatened and beat some workers and ignored their demands. According to the protesters, the situation had left hundreds of families facing serious financial hardship. Earlier, on May 9, 2026, eight people were injured after local miners and residents clashed with Taliban-affiliated forces over control of the Qatqati gold mine in the Shirin Nazm village of Shekay District in the province. The tensions began after Taliban beat several miners. Crucially, in order to take full control of mining sites, as reported on February 19, 2026, Hibatullah Akhundzada approved the deployment of 1,000 fighters to protect gold mining operations in Badakhshan. Subsequently, on July 23, 2026, Taliban’s Ministry of Interior stated that it had signed an agreement with the Taliban’s Ministry of Mines and Petroleum to provide security for four of Afghanistan’s key economic projects, including the lapis lazuli mine of Badakhshan.
Badakhshan is in turmoil, substantially due to highhandedness and ethnic biases of the Taliban’s central leadership. The perennial mistrust of non-Pashtuns, untamed greed in exploiting local resources without paying heed to the common people, the emergence of anti-Taliban forces, and the unapologetic nature of the Taliban is pushing Badakhshan deeper into distress and violence.
About the author: Sanchita Bhattacharya, Research Fellow, Institute for Conflict Management
L-R: Hannah Abdoh as Amina and Sara Taheri as Nooria.Domniki Mitropoulou – Cinétévé – 24 25 Films – France Télévisions
The BBC has acquired the upcoming series Kabulset against the backdrop of the terrifying real-life events in Afghanistan from 2021, one of the last shows to star the late Eric Dane.
The Mediawan drama for the European Alliance of broadcasters kicks off as American troops withdraw from Kabul and the Taliban enters the city. The Nazany family, like many civilians, is forced to flee, fearing retaliation. In this desperate and chaotic situation – shadowed by the looming threat of an attack by ISIS – French police officers, Italian diplomats, German military personnel, and American intelligence services must somehow coordinate to manage the influx of civilians.
Dane plays Martin. The supremely talented Euphoria and Grey’s Anatomy star died earlier this year. The international cast also includes Darina Al Joundi (The New Look), Shervin Alenabi (Tehran), Vassilis Koukalani (Kandahar), Hannah Abdoh, Jonathan Zaccaï (Le bureau des legends), Gianmarco Saurino (L’estate piu Calda) and Jeanne Goursaud (Pax Massilia).
The show, which lands on the BBC next month, is produced by Mediawan and sold by Mediawan Rights is for the European Alliance of broadcasters which comprises ZDF, Rai and France Télévisions. The BBC isn’t technically part of the Alliance but has previously been involved with shows like the adaptation of Around the World in 80 Days.
Nick Lee, Head of BBC Programme Acquisition, said: “Kabul is a tragedy of the highest stakes. A warzone story which is propelled by the real ticking clock of the evacuation that was just five years ago this summer. Global politics remain complex, but Kabul dramatises the biggest view of history through the smallest window of a human family.”
Kabul was directed by Kasia Adamik (No Escape) and Olga Chajdas (Imago) and written by Olivier Demangel (Class Act), Thomas Finkielkraut (Baron Noir) and Joey Lavy (The Shift). The series was produced by Fabienne Servan-Schreiber and Charlotte Ortiz at Cinétévé, Matthias Weber and Thibault Gast at 24 25 Films, and executive produced by Sandrine Paquot. Global sales are handled by Mediawan Rights.
BBC Buys ‘Kabul’ Drama Series About American Withdrawal From Afghanistan Starring The Late Eric Dane
Thomas Gibbons-Neff is a former New York Times reporter who covered the wars in Afghanistan and Ukraine. He traveled to Kabul, Afghanistan, in May.
The New York Times
July 23, 2026
First as a Marine and then as a journalist, I spent years tied to Afghanistan. I returned one last time to speak to a former enemy in search of answers, and perhaps closure.
I’ve had a hand in killing around six people. Maybe seven. I don’t know if one man bled out on the side of the road or was taken to a doctor. I think about him often.
The killings occurred in the winter and spring of early 2010, during one of the largest operations of the Afghanistan war: the battle of Marja. I was the 22-year-old leader of a scout sniper team of seven Marines and one Navy corpsman.
It is a strange thing, having killed people in a conflict that spanned 20 years and was ultimately lost. The sum of such an intense expenditure of human lives and trauma left Afghanistan much as it was in 2001, before any American boots touched the ground.
Killing in war often boils down to an us-or-them mentality, a defensible position common to infantry combat. But we were also directed to “win hearts and minds,” the U.S. strategy meant to earn the population’s trust and isolate the Taliban. Trying to build good will while engaging in gunfights beside people’s homes was profoundly confusing. The killing wasn’t detached; it felt deeply personal.
Patrols required a constant assessment of friend or foe, and long hours staring through high-powered optics trying to determine the intent and mannerisms of our enemies. Rarely did we see them with a rifle in their hands. Killing fell on our own instincts and an ever replenishing set of fears. Should we shoot this man? Should we not? What if we don’t? Will our friends die because of our hesitation?I
We also had a twisted culture in which killing earned you respect, as if shooting Afghans was the ultimate proof that you were competent. So we killed people. I killed people. These decisions to pull the trigger were the final steps of our part in a strategy that was doomed before I even deployed.
The Taliban, with their exclusion of women from public life and violent treatment of ethniminorities, fractured Afghan society. During its 20-year occupation, the United States often used this as a justification to prolong the war, even as it rarely addressed its strategic and moral failures or the pain and loss it was causing so many Afghans.
My journalism career — which began after I left the Marine Corps — revolved around trying to understand why this bloody cycle continued. Reporting was a way to roll back time and understand what I had done and what role I played in a conflict that was far from over. The more I saw, the more I learned, the more my contribution to this mess in my early 20s left me with a sense of shame.
Covering war also meant sustained proximity to violence, victims and trauma, and from time to time the public dishonesty that all but inevitably accompanies conflict. I had lived through enough in the Marine Corps. I was already past my fill of that. I resigned from my job, exhausted.
But in May, with a little over two weeks remaining at The New York Times before returning to school to become an English teacher, I landed in Afghanistan. I had come to speak with the people I once fought against: the Taliban.
My thinking was straightforward. Even if the Pentagon would not undertake any significant reflection for these recent decades of war, I could, at a minimum, hold myself accountable for my part in a half-baked strategy that left tens of thousands of Afghans and Americans dead.
I brought souvenirs from a gift shop near my home in Rhode Island, which I would present to a few Taliban officials whom I have known for nearly a half decade now. Hearts and minds, after all, though this time as a guest not an occupier.
Ultimately, I wanted to talk to Mullah Abdul Rahim Gulab, a Taliban commander whom I met by chance in 2021, just months after Kabul fell to the Taliban. But we had also fought against one another in February 2010 in southern Afghanistan.
I knew he would have a version of the battle in Marja that was different from mine. Maybe he had stories with his own heroes and dead friends that I could appreciate and respect, ones that he also couldn’t stop thinking about. Maybe I could feel bad for him and not just feel bad for living while my friends died.
Read Thomas’s dispatch from when he first met Mullah Abdul Rahim Gulab.
The Right Side
When I landed in Kabul in May, a Taliban deputy minister at the ministry of information and culture named Muhajer Farahi wanted to talk to me after he saw the request I submitted to speak to Mr. Gulab.
We had not met before. But sitting across from me in his office, Mr. Farahi told me his reasons for fighting the United States were simple: He wanted the Americans out of his home.
He spoke slowly and quietly, and avoided eye contact. His English was good. He made clear that his time in Farah Province in southwestern Afghanistan during the war, or jihad, as the Taliban refer to their 20 year military campaign, was difficult.
“We were on the right side,” he said. “We were fighting for our faith.”
I apologized for his dead friends and the innocent people killed in the war. He looked at me and thought for a moment before reminding me that I was a soldier, a cog in a machine that decided to invade his country and stay. It was as close as I would get to a pardon.
He wanted to discuss other things. Mostly he was curious about the number of Americans he had killed, and was still perplexed that even though he watched roadside bombs detonate under our armored vehicles, our casualty announcements from the Pentagon were relatively low. He assumed the United States lied about its death tolls.
I explained the complicated web of emergency care that was a quick helicopter flight away. He didn’t seem convinced. Instead he said something that most Talibs have echoed when discussing my time as a Marine: Don’t try to invade again.
I assured him that the United States appeared to have moved on, but he raised the latest wars in which the country had embroiled itself.
“You haven’t learned,” he said. “Look at Iran and Gaza — you are fighting for the Israelis. You don’t care about human rights.” He blamed the American people for voting a long line of presidents into power who started and continued the so-called forever wars.
As I walked into the blinding light of downtown Kabul, I felt what could only be described as a strange sense of relief. I had been lectured, yes, but on the edges it felt as if there was some acknowledgment of our humanity.
That felt like enough, for now. It was time to talk to Mr. Gulab.
Hard Facts
When I interviewed Mr. Gulab in 2021, I didn’t disclose that I had been a Marine. I questioned him as a reporter about his fighting days. He confirmed things I knew: how he and his peers would drop their weapons and greet us as friends on the streets, and that they relied on children to track our footprints to our makeshift outposts.
These had been hard facts for me to confront back in 2010, and still resonated when spoken in hindsight by a victorious insurgent, a hometown fighter who leveraged cunning to defeat us, even though we were far better armed than his band of 20 men. His tactics had formed a puzzle I navigated on every patrol so that I could survive the day. Some of my friends didn’t.
When I first met Mr. Gulab, I walked to a mud brick wall in Marja as a journalist. As a Marine more than a decade before, I had shot a young man in the head in this exact spot. I remembered the last glimpse of his face before the crack of my bolt-action rifle. My brain didn’t compute that I had killed him until later, when someone told me they had found his body dragged behind a corner with his weapon.
Mr. Gulab and I are roughly the same age, in our late 30s. He joined the Taliban because two of his brothers were killed fighting. One of them is his WhatsApp profile picture.
I joined the Marines because my dad was a Vietnam veteran who rarely spoke about the war, and because I was a short kid who grew up in a nice town and went to a nice public high school and wanted to prove myself.
In May, when I reached Mr. Gulab again, this time by phone, I told him the truth about my background: I wasn’t just a journalist, I had fought in Marja as a Marine. He said he had realized that when we first met, given the specificity of my questions.
He wondered what I wanted now: “What’s the point in talking again?”
Mr. Gulab had won his war and closed that chapter with the United States long before I did. Now he was preparing to fight another conflict, this time against Pakistan. He led a large Afghan Army unit from a base that is still known as Camp Dwyer, where I had flown from in 2010 to fight him and his mujahedeen troops.
The base was named after a British soldier: Lance Bombardier James Dwyer, who was 22 years old when his vehicle ran over a mine two days after Christmas in 2006.
Our conference call began with pleasantries before his reticence lifted, and he was willing to talk about the beginning of the Marja operation. I was curious about his side of our shared experiences, including the fate of a Taliban sniper whom Mr. Gulab would have known, or at least heard about.
That sniper had shot two of my Marines, including my assistant team leader, on the first day of the battle. It was dusk. We were on the roof of a two-story building, the only structure that high for miles. I remember what sounded like a baseball bat hitting uncooked meat. I looked up to see my friend Matt screaming. He had been shot in the arm. A week or so later we drove that sniper into an orchard, where a drone strike presumably killed him. But 16 years later, I still wanted to know for sure.
Mr. Gulab started to speak but was cut off by his minder, who said curtly that sharing such details was illegal. Instead, Mr. Gulab had questions of his own, involving that same sniper. He said he was nearby when my teammates were hit and remembered reports that two “foreigners” had been shot on that roof and fallen off.
“Did they die?” he asked.
“Why do many American soldiers who fought in Afghanistan and later returned to their country commit suicide?” Mr. Gulab asked. “I have heard this many times. What is the reason?”
It was a question that haunts many of us. I tried to explain how we carried the crushing weight of our own shattered expectations: We had grown up on the nostalgia of World War II, then done something we were supposed to be proud of. Instead, what we got from our politicians and generals were evasions and lies. Our commanders could never articulate how our deployments, and all the violence we committed and the losses we suffered, made anyone safer in the United States.
We were left to figure everything out on our own while they landed lucrative jobs at defense companies and collected big fees on speaking circuits. For some people, it was too much to handle.
Mr. Gulab’s years after the war had been nothing like that, he said. “Our mujahedeen are the opposite, because of the jihad they carried out and because of the friends they lost, they are very happy, because our jihad had a clear goal.”
While the Taliban had won the war, winning the peace had brought its own difficulties: Afghanistan remained in an economic crisis and isolated from much of the world.
“Regarding your apology,” he said, “I should say that at that time our jihad was for the sake of Allah, and we were not worried about being killed or wounded. We are also not upset about our friends who were killed or wounded, because all of us wished to be martyred or injured on the path of jihad. Since the conditions at that time were wartime conditions, civilians were often killed or wounded.”
I wished that I, too, could accept the deaths of my friends and the results of my own actions instead of inhabiting a fog of anger and bitterness over wasted youth. Mr. Gulab let me know that such sentiments existed in Afghanistan, too.
“Regarding the mujahedeen who were killed by your side, I do not know whether they or their families would forgive you,” Mr. Gulab said. “Those civilians may not forgive the foreign forces, but for me personally, I have my own authority and I have forgiven you.”
I first set foot in Afghanistan as a 20-year-old lance corporal in 2008. The Taliban were shadows in a tree line then, and characters that appeared in my nightmares as I tried to stay alive. In August 2021, I watched them shake hands with a squad of U.S. Marines as the Afghan Army evaporated, Kabul fell and my war was finally, fully lost.
Now my one-time enemy generously offered a kind of coda to a line I wrote in my journal on that first deployment 18 years ago: “It’s hard to explain this place and I feel it’s going to take the rest of my life to figure out what happened here.”
Boarding my flight back to the United States, I realized a pervasive sadness lingered in the corners of my mind. I was tired, as if litigating my war again had somehow restarted it. Mr. Gulab and I were, at one point in our lives, two people, barely men at the time, fighting for vastly different reasons. Maybe it was enough that I saw him now more, in some twisted way, as a friend than my enemy.
Some days later in Rhode Island, as I walked my dog on a muggy New England night, my phone vibrated.
Mr. Gulab had texted me in Pashto: “Have you arrived at your home?” he asked.
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Since the crash following the collapse of the Republic in August 2021, Afghanistan’s economy has witnessed a modest recovery, although many households have not. In a new longitudinal study, AAN has followed a number of families across Afghanistan and over time, to better understand how the country’s economic trajectory has played out for individual households. When we first spoke to our interviewees in late 2021, all of them, including those who had previously been wealthy, were struggling and living off the dwindling resources they still had or the credit they managed to secure. A few weeks later, in early 2022, some were already doing a little better, but it was difficult to predict what their individual trajectories would be. This year, Martine van Bijlert and the AAN Team decided to revisit the original interviewees – the ones who could still be reached – to see how they had fared.
The picture that emerged from four rounds of interviews is one of starkly diverging paths. Households that had been better placed before the economic crisis hit – with multiple assets, solid employment and strong networks of trust – were much more likely to recover. Those with less valuable assets, weaker networks and, most importantly, a narrower range of resources, often saw their situation degrade, simply because it did not improve. For them, the economic decline has tended to be cumulative and self-reinforcing, often trapping the individuals and their families in a cycle of debt, forcing them to defer necessary maintenance or sell off belongings they would need in the future. It became increasingly difficult for them to plan, save and invest and, as a result, many of them saw their chances of economic recovery dwindle.
At the heart of the economic survival of all households were countless small and large acts of informal support that each had experienced over the years. Although these acts were often insufficient to turn their situation around, they were crucial in preventing the decline from accelerating further. This informal welfare system is vital, but also dangerously strained and often comes at a considerable cost to all involved.
Afghanistan’s economy has, over the years, witnessed a modest recovery, even though many households have not. This is also borne out in the current study. The households in our sample would, ‘in normal times’, have been considered middle or lower-middle class, with enough income to cover not only their basic needs, but also savings, repairs and investments. A few had been notably wealthy. Most of them owned or co-owned a house and many a piece of land and most were, or aspired for their family to be, part of the educated class. They were the people who could, normally, be expected to both benefit from and undergird a country’s economic growth. Instead, many have depended for their survival on their informal networks of support, which have been crucial, but drawing on them has come at a high cost. Taken together, these accounts show the limitations of both Afghanistan’s modest economic growth, and of what pure macroeconomic data can tell us.
Edited by Roxanna Shapour and Kate Clark
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In one corner of the world, the “TradWife” trend on social media promotes a return to 1950s gender roles and patriarchal social structures. Advocates generally support the idea of the husband acting as the sole breadwinner while the wife manages the household and raises children.
In another corner of the world, women live under gender apartheid — a system in which their presence in public life is treated as a violation. They face public punishment, severe restrictions on their freedoms, and compulsory dress codes that conceal nearly every aspect of their appearance. Yet these Taliban-imposed policies should not be conflated with Islam itself, as the burqa is not a universally mandated requirement of the faith.
Under Taliban rule, however, women are deprived of that choice and compelled to conform, stripping them of personal agency, access to formal education past the primary level, healthcare, humanitarian assistance and much more.
The Taliban regime has transformed courts and state institutions into tools for enforcing decrees that intensify the persecution of women. For instance, Decree 12 legitimizes domestic violence, while Decree 18 allows for child marriage. Women are tyrannized, and nearly three in four Afghans cannot meet their basic needs. Meanwhile, 35% of children under five suffer from stunting.
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Nonetheless, the European Union still manages to invite Taliban representatives to Brussels for discussions on migration and the deportation of Afghan nationals. While gender apartheid was not once the topic of such meetings, diplomacy appears to be moving forward regardless.
Where is the coordinated campaign to hold Taliban representatives accountable? This effort should rest on four principles.
First, we must acknowledge the role global powers have played in Afghanistan’s instability. The country became a battlefield for a proxy war. The Mujahideen were armed during the Soviet occupation and called freedom fighters. Neighboring states have long exerted influence.
Our world is globalized, and arguments such as “it’s their country, leave it up to them” are a logical fallacy. This is a global issue, not only because of human rights concerns but because of our collective role in shaping Afghanistan’s present reality.
Secondly, the withdrawal of the United States after 20 years in Afghanistan was viewed by many as the successful conclusion of a war. Yet when I see Afghan women stripped of their most basic freedoms, I struggle to describe the outcome as a success. While another military deployment is unrealistic and not desired, withdrawal should not mean abandonment.
We must not overlook that the Taliban’s pursuit of international legitimacy gives major powers leverage. Because it seeks to escape political isolation and access the global financial system, engagement should be conditioned on meaningful improvements in women’s and children’s rights.
Whenever the European Union engages with the Taliban, it should ensure that the concerns of Afghan women and children are represented. Nations must use diplomacy as leverage rather than complicity. Although coordination can be difficult, a unified approach would be far harder for the Taliban to ignore.
Lastly, history suggests that authoritarian regimes can fall through mass uprisings. Therefore, we must leave open the possibility that Afghanistan’s people may one day overturn the Taliban’s illegitimate regime. Will an ethnically, regionally and politically diverse population be able to unite? Will the international or regional community support? And at what human cost?
Perhaps the lesson we should draw from this contrast is not that women in the West and women in Afghanistan face the same reality — they do not. Yet both raise the same question: who gets to decide what a woman should be?
In Afghanistan, that decision is imposed by the state. In the West, it is often shaped by social expectations. These are not the same struggles, but they speak to the same human need: the desire to choose one’s own path.
In my opinion, the goal is neither a return to the 1950s nor the acceptance of a future in which every woman must pursue the same version of success.
The measure of a free society is not whether women choose tradition over modernity, careers over family, or public life over private life, but whether they are free to discover who they are before the world decides who they ought to be.
Shaya Mariji is a student at Rollins College, working toward a political science major and philosophy minor.
Commentary: In Afghanistan, Taliban is still involved in gender apartheid
Since the Taliban’s return to power in August 2021, the space for organised religious activism in Afghanistan has narrowed sharply. Islamic parties have been suppressed or gone quiet. The Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan (IEA), itself an Islamist movement, has worked steadily to bring religious discourse under state control. And yet, an unusual category of religious figure has grown more prominent under the IEA than it ever was before – young, urban, ‘online-first’ preachers who blend short videos on personal piety and family life with charitable and educational projects. AAN’s Sharif Akram examines the work of four prominent Afghan Islamic influencers and looks at how their growing popularity is gently testing the scope of religious authority in Afghanistan.
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Our new report considers four online preachers – Rahmatullah Nowruz, Nasratullah Sahibi, Abdul Samad Qazizada and Jawed Ibrahimi – who have risen to prominence since the Taliban’s return to power in August 2021. Most were already active during the Islamic Republic, running small charities, posting religious content on Facebook and YouTube and quietly building schools and orphanages, but they were not particularly visible. In the last five years, that has changed, even as the Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan (IEA) has sought to monopolise religious authority. It has banned or suppressed the various Islamist parties that were active under the Islamic Republic and moved to control religious discourse, including who may legally preach, how and on what. A large number of the Taliban’s own cadre, as well as mullahs affiliated with the movement, are now embedded in state structures, as ministers, members of the security forces, university chancellors and judges, becoming the public face of religion in Afghanistan.
Despite all this, these four preachers have emerged – young, urban, ‘online-first’ Islamic influencers who blend short videos on personal piety, family life and self-improvement with charitable and educational projects. The four are marked out by dress, language and subject matter from the Taliban and Taliban-aligned mullahs who prohibit and warn, dwelling on what people must not do and what punishments await sinners in the hereafter. Emirate discourse focuses on the failings of urban Afghans, of women’s dress, music and the influence of Western media. Traditional mullahs do not, by and large, address how a young man should manage his anger, how a husband and wife should communicate or how a person should cope with depression. The online preachers address precisely these questions, in a tone that is encouraging rather than chastising. As to their appearance, instead of robes, turbans and untrimmed beards, they look more like urban professionals. Their followers collectively number in the millions and include young women as well as men. Notably, as well, none of the four has gone through the full, rigorous madrasa education, which means they are dismissed by the religious establishment and more conservatively minded Afghans as unfit to speak about Islam. Yet, their popularity keeps on growing.
Part of their appeal is that, under the Islamic Emirate, religion and the state have become increasingly difficult to tell apart. Ordinary people used to look to mullahs as figures who could, at least in principle, stand apart from power. Now, their sermons sound less like religious counsel and more like state communication. Into this gap in religious authority and teaching have stepped the online preachers. This report draws on a review of the four figures’ online output, their televised interviews, audience comments on their posts and secondary reporting by other outlets. The analysis is based on what they have chosen to say in public. The report begins by examining how religious activism operated before the Emirate takeover and why, with its return, the space for independent religious voices has opened up. Sharif looks at what they preach and how their audiences receive them. He asks whether, ultimately, the four are helping the Emirate maintain its rule, or subverting it.
Edited by Kate Clark and Rachel Reid
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In an era where social media travel feeds are saturated with picture-perfect photos, Indian travel content creator and filmmaker Sharanya Iyer — also known as ‘TrulyNomadly’ — chose a path less travelled. Speaking to Hindustantimes.com, the 36-year-old opened up about her recent two-week journey to Afghanistan, offering a raw, unfiltered look into a nation rarely traversed by tourists.
Sharanya Iyer with a Taliban soldier in Kandahar, Afghanistan.
Sharanya, who quit her corporate job in 2019 to travel full-time, made it clear that her intention was never to present a romanticized or sanitized version of the country. Speaking to Hindustantimes.com, she reflected on the vast gap between how Afghanistan treats its own women versus how tourists are treated.
No whitewashing
The Taliban regained control of Afghanistan in August 2021, following the withdrawal of US-led forces. Since returning to power, the Taliban has imposed a strict interpretation of Islamic law that has reshaped daily life, especially for women and girls.
Women have been banned from attending secondary schools and universities, barred from most jobs, restricted from travelling long distances without a male guardian, and required to follow strict dress codes. They have also been excluded from many public spaces, including parks, gyms and beauty salons.
“One thing I consciously didn’t want to do was return from Afghanistan and present only a whitewashed version of the country. A lot of travellers—especially from Western countries—have been criticised for only showing the positive side,” Sharanya told Hindustantimes.com.
“Does Afghanistan have beautiful places? Absolutely. Are the people warm and hospitable? Absolutely. But does that mean we stop talking about what’s happening to women there? I believe the answer is no.”
Why she chose Afghanistan
For Sharanya Iyer, the fascination with Afghanistan was deeply rooted in the literature and history she consumed growing up, ranging from Rabindranath Tagore’s Kabuliwala to Khaled Hosseini’s novels. She was drawn to the country’s ancient heritage and shared history with India.
Asked why she chose to travel to Afghanistan — a country facing boycott on several fronts because of its regime, the travel vlogger explained that her perspective on travelling to heavily sanctioned nations was first reshaped during a month-long solo backpacking trip through Iran in 2022.
Her experience in Iran taught her to separate a country’s citizens from its ruling regime — a philosophy she carried with her when planning her trip to Afghanistan. She also sought a sense of genuine discovery that she felt had been lost in modern, over-documented tourist hubs.
From Kabul to Bamiyan: Cost and logistics
Departing from New Delhi in November 2025, Sharanya flew directly to Kabul on Kam Air, an Afghan airline, alongside a cabin filled mostly with Afghan locals returning home from working in India.
Architectural landmarks and archaeological heritage formed the core of Sharanya’s itinerary. She travelled to the valley of Bamiyan in the Hindu Kush mountains, exploring the empty niches where the world’s tallest Buddha statues stood before being destroyed by the Taliban in 2001.
Besides Kabul and Bamiyan, she also went to Panjshir Valley, Ghazni and Kandahar, which is the stronghold of the Taliban.
The entire 12-to-13-day trip cost her approximately ₹2.1 lakh, an amount that covered flights, accommodation, meals, fuel, and entry tickets. Because she was filming her journey, she hired a private guide and driver.
“The Taliban, in the last year or more, has mandated travelling with a guide for tourists because you need permits to move between every province. My passport had to be shown, and all the permits had to be arranged before I landed in Afghanistan,” the travel vlogger explained.
“You have to have your route planned in advance, and you need a guide because they’re the ones who apply for the permits. At every checkpoint, they show the documents, and if the Taliban decides to call you out of the car, they’ll have a brief chat with you before letting you go. I had a local guide and a driver throughout my trip to travel between the provinces.”
The silent crisis
While Sharanya observed stunning landscapes and warm hospitality, the dark reality of systemic human rights abuses — particularly the extreme oppression of women — was not lost on her.
“So, if you’re not bound by the laws that Afghan women are bound by, you’ll see the warmth of the people. You’ll see them going out of their way to host you… The Afghan people are very hospitable. They love Indians. They won’t let you pay,” said the 36-year-old.
However, most of the women’s rights violations portrayed in the media are true. Women are not allowed to run businesses, can’t step out without being accompanied by a male relative, and as such have very little personal freedom.
“Women aren’t allowed to go to school beyond the sixth grade. I did see girls on their way to school in their uniforms, but they were young girls. Women are not allowed into universities anymore,” she revealed.
“In Kabul, I still saw women. They wore burqas but you could see them walking to the market in pairs. Outside of Kabul, I did not see any women unless they were accompanied by men.”
The Taliban strictly enforces the mahram rule, requiring women to be accompanied by a close male relative when in public spaces. This has severely restricted the movement of women in Afghanistan.
During her two-week stay, Sharanya saw parks and public places completely devoid of women. Men, on the other hand, could travel freely.
“Kabul is known to be a little more forward compared to the rest of Afghanistan. I went to a restaurant there at night where women were dining together with men. But everywhere else I travelled, there was a separate section for men and a separate section for women. Since I was with my guide, I sat in the men’s section rather than the women’s section,” said Sharanya.
Those for Taliban… and those seeking escape
During her interactions with ordinary citizens in local markets and restaurants, a recurring, heartbreaking theme emerged: an overwhelming desire to escape.
Many locals quietly approached her, asking for assistance with visas to India or seeking financial support to help them relocate their families. The desperation was especially profound among fathers who feared for the futures and education of their young daughters.
She revealed the story of one local who told her he was saving money so he could escape Afghanistan with his two daughters. The Indian influencer did not reveal the local’s name or location out of concern for his safety.
At the same time, she observed that many locals support the Taliban for bringing a sense of order to a war-torn country.
“For everything negative the Taliban has done—and there is a great deal that’s negative—they have also brought a degree of stability after decades of war,” she said.
“Afghanistan went through the Soviet invasion, years of civil conflict and then the American presence. People have lived with instability for decades.
“When I spoke to locals, many of them told me that, for the first time in years, they weren’t living with bombs, violence or constant war.”
“It’s easy for people outside Afghanistan to ask, “Why don’t the men rise up? Why don’t they fight the Taliban? Why aren’t they defending women? But it’s not that simple,” Sharanya continued.
“The Taliban is immensely powerful now and has deep financial backing. As outsiders, especially if we’re feminists, it’s very easy to condemn the Taliban—and I certainly do. But I also can’t ignore what ordinary Afghans told me.”
Why Afghanistan boycott is not the answer
Despite the inherent political risks and the potential that her critical social media commentary might restrict her from returning to Afghanistan, Sharanya Iyer stands firmly against the idea of completely boycotting or isolating the country. She believes that tourism provides a vital economic lifeline to ordinary citizens who are completely disconnected from the wealth of the ruling regime.
However, she issued a strong word of caution to aspiring travelers, noting that Afghanistan is not a standard vacation spot and requires a high level of travel experience and a willingness to handle extreme logistical uncertainty.
“I think the biggest takeaway for me is that you cannot boycott an entire country because of its regime, however horrific its laws may be. If we completely stop visiting places like Afghanistan, I believe we’re further isolating ordinary people and taking away whatever little opportunity they have to earn a livelihood,” Sharanya Iyer concluded.
“It’s a challenging destination, and you need to understand the risks before deciding to go. But once you’re there, I think it’s important to keep an open mind and remember that you’re travelling for the people as much as the place.”
Indian influencer Sharanya Iyer opens up about travelling to Taliban-ruled Afghanistan
The United Nations says aid workers are still in a “race against time” to remove rubble and rebuild after the devastating earthquake struck eastern Afghanistan last month, killing at least 2,200 people and cutting off remote areas.
The 6.0-magnitude quake on Aug. 31 was shallow, destroying or causing extensive damage to low-rise buildings in the mountainous region. It hit late at night, and homes — mostly made of mud, wood, or rocks — collapsed instantly, becoming death traps.
Satellite data shows that about 40,500 truckloads of debris still needs to be cleared from affected areas in several provinces, the United Nations Development Program said Wednesday. Entire communities have been upended and families are sleeping in the open, it added.
The quake’s epicenter was in remote and rugged Kunar province, challenging rescue and relief efforts by the Taliban government and humanitarian groups. Authorities deployed helicopters or airdropped army commandos to evacuate survivors. Aid workers walked for hours on foot to reach isolated communities.
“This is a race against time,” said Devanand Ramiah, from the UNDP’s Crisis Bureau. “Debris removal and reconstruction operations must start safely and swiftly.”
People’s main demands were the reconstruction of houses and water supplies, according to a spokesman for a Taliban government committee tasked with helping survivors, Zia ur Rahman Speenghar.
People were getting assistance in cash, food, tents, beds, and other necessities, Speenghar said Thursday. Three new roads were under construction in the Dewagal Valley, and roads would be built to areas where there previously were none.
“Various countries and organizations have offered assistance in the construction of houses but that takes time. After the second round of assistance, work will begin on the third round, which is considering what kind of houses can be built here,” the spokesman said.
Afghanistan is facing a “perfect storm” of crises, including natural disasters like the recent earthquake, said Roza Otunbayeva, who leads the U.N. mission to the country.
Afghanistan Peace Campaign
