Twenty years. An international military presence, extraordinary expenditure, a new government, a trained army and an enormous reconstruction effort. Then, in August 2021, the Taliban returned to power.
What exactly did we build? That question matters more than another argument about whether the withdrawal happened too quickly.
The collapse exposed something more fundamental: Afghanistan had not acquired the independent capabilities needed to sustain the political and security order created around it. The United States spent approximately $145bn trying to reconstruct Afghanistan, including its security forces, public institutions and economy. It also spent hundreds of billions on the war itself.
The money was real. The programmes were real. But expenditure is not architecture, and activity is not a functioning state. A military force can secure roads, defend installations and defeat an opponent in battle.
It cannot, by those operations alone, create a productive economy, legitimate institutions, capable administration or a society with a credible future. For that, a country needs an operating model.
Start with employment. What does an ordinary person do when the foreign soldiers leave? Where are the factories, workshops, logistics businesses and commercial employers? Where does a young person acquire a profession? What income allows a family to pay for housing, food, education and transport without depending indefinitely on foreign assistance?
Then examine infrastructure. Electricity is not useful as an isolated construction project. It must serve homes, industry, water systems, hospitals and businesses.
A road has value when it connects productive activity. A school needs teachers, budgets and a labour market in which education becomes useful. A hospital needs trained staff, supplies and institutions capable of keeping it operational. These are not separate projects to be counted in a report. They are interdependent functions of a country. The security architecture is equally important.
An army is not independent because its soldiers possess uniforms, weapons and certificates from foreign instructors. It is independent when it can command itself, maintain its equipment, move supplies, pay personnel, gather intelligence and sustain operations without another country’s contractors, aircraft or logistics. Afghanistan demonstrated the consequences of confusing trained forces with selfsustaining forces.
The Afghan military remained heavily dependent on American support. When that support was withdrawn, the military structure rapidly unravelled. A functioning state cannot have its most important dependencies permanently located outside the state. Political institutions face the same test.
A ministry is not an institution merely because it has an office, a minister and a budget. It must have an operating purpose, competent personnel, enforceable rules, reliable funding and a relationship with the population it serves. And people must see a reason to defend the order that those institutions represent.
This is where reconstruction should begin: not with a collection of contracts, but with the architecture of the future country. Define the functions required for independent operation. Determine their dependencies. Build productive capacity and public institutions together. Test whether the whole system can function when outside support is progressively removed. If the answer is no, the mission is not finished, regardless of the amount spent or the number of completed projects.
There is also a migration consequence. When an economy collapses, institutions disappear and security fails, people leave. Europe then debates fences, asylum procedures and deportations as though migration started at its border. It did not.
The causes were produced years earlier, often in regions where Western powers were deeply involved. Managing arrivals while ignoring the failures that produce displacement is another attempt to solve a systemic problem at its final stage. Afghanistan should have taught us a basic engineering lesson: a protected system is not necessarily a viable system.
Twenty years should have been enough to understand the difference. A military presence can hold a country together temporarily. Only a functioning country can hold itself together.
Mateusz Chrzanowski is a System of Systems Architect and Infrastructure System Engineer, founder of Archestral Studio, member of INCOSE, and author of The Layer Above. With 15 years of experience in system architecture and complex operations, his work focuses on the dependencies and structures that determine how complex systems function.
COMMENT: Twenty years in Afghanistan. What did we actually build?
The Afghan civil service has been rapidly shedding and demoting female employees since the Emirate took power in 2021. From teachers to police officers to administrators, women have been sacked, often with little or no explanation. Others have been forced into menial roles or hit with pay cuts. Their struggles are all the more severe when seen against a backdrop of a squeeze on households in a shaky economy. This report from Rachel Reid and Rama Mirzada analyses the trends and hears from 12 women, six who were sacked and six who are still in work, who speak of terrible financial impacts as well as mental health struggles.
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The erosion of women’s role in the civil service is all the more glaring because it has come at the same as male employment rose, the result of an Emirate hiring spree after they took power. This means that while women once made up 26 per cent of the civil service in 2020, by 2026 this had dropped to 16 per cent. This is part of an Emirate drive to remove female employees, except those in “essential services” such as health and education. This was always where most women were employed — particularly as teachers — which means tens of thousands of women still remain in the public sector, most of them working as primary school teachers. Other ministries, such as Higher Education, which once employed thousands of female professors, have been particularly aggressive in their dismissals.
This report analyses the gender trends in civil service employment and it hears from the women who have been employed, as well as those who still are working in this sector. For those who have been sacked, across a range of professions, the impacts can be financially devastating for their families. We heard about families having to move house, borrow money or ration food. The women also speak of deep psychological harms. “Sometimes,” said one, “I feel like I’m a totally useless person who is of no benefit to my family, children, or society.”
For those still working, the most fortunate were already stationed in a relatively segregated context, so for them, the changes are not so significant. For others, though, who have faced demotions, or have been forced into less paid work or jobs involving difficult commutes or conditions, it has been a bruising experience, both financially and mentally.
The interviews show a pervasive sense of insecurity, particularly given the harsh economic climate and the wider challenges for women in the labour force. This means most are forced to be pragmatic about taking whatever work they can get. For example, one interviewee who spent years as a senior police officer with command responsibility is now a body checker at gates and check posts. “Our work is hard, our pay is low,” she said: “we do the work because we have to. But still, we are happy that at least we have a job.”
Edited by Roxanna Shapour and Jelena Bjelica
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Afghanistan has the ninth-highest fertility rate in the world. It is an outlier in the region, its high birth rate similar to some of the countries in sub-Saharan Africa. However, under the Islamic Republic, the average number of children women were having was coming down, albeit with considerable variation by province, education and whether a woman lived in the city or countryside. High fertility is associated with early marriage, limited family planning and restrictions on women’s education and employment – all aspects of life under the Islamic Emirate. As there are no recent statistics on Afghanistan’s fertility rate, Kate Clark and the AAN team have been asking midwives and doctors around the country what they are seeing in their hospitals and clinics: Are Afghan women again having more children?
Afghanistan entered its fertility transition around the turn of the century. This is when child mortality falls, to be followed by a decline in fertility rates, as families begin to trust that their children will survive into adulthood. If family sizes are again increasing and that transition has gone into reverse, it would be highly unusual: declines in fertility tend to be ‘sticky’ because the education of women already in their childbearing years and preferences for smaller families do not reverse quickly. The consequences would be grave. Nearly half of the Afghan population is under 15 years of age, so the population is already set to increase by a third by 2040. Any increase in the fertility rate would build in even greater ‘population momentum’, as those children have children, with intensified pressure on the environment, economy and the push to migrate.
For Afghan women in particular, a rise in the fertility rate would be perilous: the risks of pregnancy increase markedly when mothers are adolescents or have multiple pregnancies back-to-back. The dangers would also be increasing in the wake of a deterioration in maternal healthcare over the last five years.
Most of the health professionals we heard from said they were seeing more teenagers, married and pregnant. Early marriage was being driven, they thought, by the barring of girls from high school and their having no future as women with professional jobs. Also important was acute economic need: the family gets a bride price from the groom’s when their daughter marries and, for some families, having one less mouth to feed also plays into their calculus.
The midwives and doctors also described the loss of autonomy for women who had become unemployed, making it more difficult for them to resist pressure from husbands, in-laws or wider society to have a big family. It is evident that, while Afghanistan did enter its fertility transition, small families never became the norm and strong pronatalist, patriarchal sentiments to have more children, especially sons, remain. Meanwhile, any choice by women/couples to space births or prevent pregnancies is undermined by how much weaker family planning provision has become, part of the general diminishment of health services under pressure from funding cuts by donors and Taliban budget choices.
Edited by Jelena Bjelica and Roxanna Shapour
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Within Afghanistan, the Taliban has consolidated power and avoided mass famine, state collapse and renewed civil war. Yet the country remains economically fragile, politically repressive and far from international integration even as its rulers are increasingly accepted as an enduring political reality.
In the five years since returning to power in Afghanistan, the ruling government known as the Taliban has had considerable success in building relationships in its neighbourhood. It has, for instance, engaged seriously with nearly all of the Central Asian states as well as India, and its diplomatic links with Pakistan have survived severe strains over security issues. Western governments have shown little interest in removing the Taliban from power or arming resistance groups. It has sent de facto ambassadors to Central Asia, the Gulf states, Pakistan and Türkiye, and Kabul now hosts ambassadors from countries including China, Indonesia, Iran, Japan, Pakistan, Qatar, Russia and Türkiye. The city has hosted a European Union delegation and regular visits from the United Kingdom’s special envoy for Afghanistan.
The Taliban has capitalised on the willingness of countries such as China, Pakistan and Türkiye to treat its envoys like formal ambassadors, even if they do not formally recognise Afghanistan’s government. Senior Taliban leaders and officials periodically travel abroad in high-profile visits. In June 2024, Interior Minister Sirajuddin Haqqani performed the Hajja in Saudi Arabia and led a delegation to the United Arab Emirates (UAE), where he met President Sheikh Mohamed bin Zayed Al Nahyan. In June 2026, a Taliban delegation travelled to Brussels for talks with EU officials on facilitating the deportation of Afghan asylum seekers convicted of crimes. While these engagements represent a gain in de facto acceptance, Russia remains the only state to have formally recognised the Taliban as Afghanistan’s legitimate government, which underscores limitations in the government’s ability to convert cooperation into diplomatic recognition.
Relations with Pakistan
Afghanistan’s relationship with Pakistan has not broken down, but it remains extremely tense. For Islamabad, the armed group Tehrik-e-Taliban Pakistan (TTP) is the principal concern and the government’s position is that the Afghan Taliban must choose between the TTP and Pakistan. Islamabad’s other policies – from the mass deportation of Afghan refugees to prolonged border closures and airstrikes inside Afghanistan – are intended to apply pressure on Kabul. Pakistani negotiators argue that the TTP, which pledged allegiance to the Taliban’s emir, Mullah Akhundzada, has openly defied his edict in which he declared the jihad to be over. They criticise the Taliban’s failure to rein in the group and attribute its reluctance partly to fears that a confrontation would prompt disaffected TTP fighters and some Afghan Taliban members to defect to Islamic State–Khorasan Province (IS–KP).
For years, Pakistan’s official narrative attributed the TTP’s rise to external factors, such as spillover from the United States’ war in Afghanistan and support from the Indian and former Islamic Republic of Afghanistan intelligence services. The past five years have highlighted the role of the Taliban’s Afghan nationalism alongside its Islamist ideology. Anti-Pakistan sentiment, long a feature of Afghan political and social discourse, remains an outlet for nationalist expression under the Taliban as it was under the former republic.
The past five years have highlighted the role of the Taliban’s Afghan nationalism alongside its Islamist ideology.
However, within the Taliban, attitudes towards Pakistan also vary. For the Haqqani network, which ran its operations from North Waziristan for decades and developed close ties with Pakistan’s Inter-Services Intelligence, Pakistan was a place of refuge. Others have more bitter memories. Mullah Abdul Ghani Baradar, now deputy prime minister for economic affairs, was arrested in Karachi in 2010 in a joint Pakistani–US operation. Pakistan’s participation in the operation was partly motivated by Baradar’s outreach to the government of Hamid Karzai without Islamabad’s approval. He spent eight years in Pakistani custody before being released in 2018 at Washington’s request to facilitate peace talks. Many Taliban leaders who spent the insurgency in Quetta or Peshawar likewise resent the control that Pakistan exercised over them. These differences complicate Islamabad’s search for sympathetic and reliable interlocutors in Kabul.
The Taliban’s strategic calculus has diverged sharply from Islamabad’s expectations. Shaped by deep ideological affinity with the TTP, and seeing the group as a source of leverage, the Taliban has refused to sever ties with it or to treat it as a terrorist threat. Taliban officials point to their efforts to move TTP fighters and their families away from the border areas and blame Pakistan for making it impossible for the Taliban to establish permanent security posts along the border. Despite a sharp rise in TTP violence in the former tribal areas and some settled areas of Pakistan, including Peshawar and Dera Ismail Khan, the group has failed to destabilise major Pakistani cities such as Islamabad, Karachi and Lahore as it did in the past. This partly reflects sustained pressure from intelligence-led operations against the TTP, as well as the group’s limited sophistication and use of young Afghan fighters who lack the local knowledge and identification documents needed to infiltrate areas with tighter security.
Relations with the US and counter-terrorism issues
The Taliban’s relationship with the US is essentially frozen, which it currently perceives to be one of its main barriers to sanctions relief, international investment, a seat at the United Nations and normalised relations with the wider world. During Joe Biden’s presidency, the main obstacles to closer US–Taliban ties were the Taliban’s record on women’s rights and, to a lesser degree, its refusal to formally renounce and cut ties with al-Qaeda. The former issue was championed by the Afghan diaspora in the US, by members of the former government (most of whom are based in Türkiye, the UAE or the US) and by human rights and Afghanistan-focused non-governmental organisations. The EU and Western European governments, including the UK, have prioritised the same issues in declining to normalise relations with the Taliban. Their officials have called for a more active US role and a diplomatic presence in Kabul. US normalisation could encourage closer European engagement in pursuit of counter-terrorism, deportation and migration-control interests.
Instead, US–Afghanistan relations deteriorated further towards the end of the Biden administration. In October 2024, the US Department of State announced that Thomas West would step down as special representative for Afghanistan, without naming a successor. His responsibilities passed to the deputy assistant secretary of state for Central Asia, a broader portfolio, and to the chargé d’affaires at the time, Karen Decker, at the Afghanistan Affairs Unit in Doha. The unit had replaced the US embassy in Kabul as Washington’s diplomatic mission to Afghanistan but lacked regular contact with the most senior Taliban figures. By the time US President Donald Trump’s second administration took office, diplomatic relations were limited.
The Taliban initially saw the second Trump administration as one of its best opportunities to achieve some form of normalisation with Washington, under a president it believed it knew how to work with. After Trump’s re-election in November 2024, Abdul Qahar Balkhi, spokesman for the Taliban’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs, posted on X that the Taliban hoped the incoming administration would take a ‘pragmatic approach to ensure tangible advancement in bilateral relations allowing both nations to open a new chapter of relations grounded in mutual engagement’. He cited the Doha agreement, signed in February 2020, during Trump’s first term, as evidence that the two sides could work together. Although contact with the Taliban began during Barack Obama’s presidency and the withdrawal was completed under Biden, the agreement that set the terms of the withdrawal of US forces was negotiated during Trump’s first term by Zalmay Khalilzad, then-US special representative for Afghanistan reconciliation. The Taliban’s foreign minister, Mawlawi Amir Khan Muttaqi, has since invited the US to reopen its embassy in Kabul and urged the Trump administration to explore mining opportunities in Afghanistan.
Yet despite Trump’s de-emphasis of human rights in US foreign policy, and his willingness to engage adversaries directly and at a senior level from the outset rather than at the culmination of talks, his administration has further downgraded US–Afghanistan relations during its second term. One limiting factor is the Taliban’s unpopularity across the US political spectrum. Another is Trump’s preference for running foreign policy from the White House through special envoys – often trusted associates from outside the diplomatic establishment – bypassing normal Department of State channels and reporting directly to the president, or through unofficial intermediaries such as Jared Kushner and Khalilzad. This centralisation has coincided with a major restructuring involving substantial personnel cuts and the consolidation or elimination of offices, including on the Afghanistan desk, weakening the team’s influence.
The result is a US foreign-policy apparatus with less bureaucratic capacity for sustained attention to issues that are not White House priorities. The administration has made the release of detained US persons its principal issue of engagement with Afghanistan. For much of Trump’s second term, the only public contact between Taliban officials and the US government has come through Adam Boehler, former special presidential envoy for hostage response, sometimes accompanied by Khalilzad in a personal capacity and on at least one occasion by Sebastian Gorka, deputy assistant to the president and senior director for counterterrorism at the National Security Council. At least 11 Americans have been released from Taliban custody since 2021, roughly half under Biden and half during Trump’s second term. Boehler is now unwelcome in Kabul following a heated exchange with senior Taliban officials on his previous trip.
The Taliban has refused to formally sever ties with al-Qaeda, owing to long-standing ideological bonds, a sense of obligation to former partners in jihad and, as with the TTP, fears that doing so would alienate hardline members and aid recruitment by competitors such as IS–KP. It therefore treats the issue as non-negotiable.
As the emir refuses to shift policy on al-Qaeda or women’s rights, the Taliban’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs, with his support, has offered cooperation in other areas in the apparent hopes of improving relations with the US. These include counter-terrorism cooperation against IS–KP, the eradication of poppy cultivation, investment opportunities and the release of detained Americans. The Taliban has contained IS–KP, preventing the group from holding territory, and authorities claim that IS–KP attacks have fallen by more than 90% since 2021. However, IS–KP has begun to target Chinese interests in Afghanistan. The most significant attack came on 19 January 2026, when an IS–KP suicide bomber killed seven people, including a Chinese national, at a restaurant in Kabul’s Shahr-e-Naw neighbourhood. Although Kabul is not a heavily securitised city and has relatively few checkpoints, its newest Chinese restaurant now operates under the protection of a Taliban security detail.
Domestic conditions
Since September 2021, girls have been barred from attending school beyond the sixth grade. In March 2022, the Taliban briefly reopened girls’ secondary schools, only to reverse this decision on the same day, announcing that girls’ education above the age of 11–12 was suspended until further notice. West, then-US special representative for Afghanistan, responded by cancelling planned meetings with Taliban officials in Doha. In December 2022, the Taliban extended the restrictions to women attending university, and in July 2023 it banned beauty salons. The emir, who rules from Kandahar, has maintained the restrictions on women’s education. In January 2025, Sher Mohammad Abbas Stanikzai, then-deputy foreign minister for political affairs, who had also served in the first Taliban government, publicly argued that there was no justification for the ban on girls’ education. He subsequently left Afghanistan for exile in the UAE. Many senior Taliban leaders and technocrats support reopening girls’ schools, but the most conservative leaders close to the emir do not.
On 7 September 2025, Taliban security forces began barring Afghan women, including UN staff, contractors and visitors, from entering UN premises across the country, impeding humanitarian operations and further restricting women’s participation in the humanitarian sector and programmes for women and girls.
Nevertheless, the extent to which women remain part of public life varies across the country depending on local customs and the enforcement of restrictions. In Kabul, women remain visible on the streets, especially in areas where cultural norms are less restrictive, such as the Hazara neighbourhood of Dasht-e-Barchi. Their movement between cities is limited without a mahram (a close male relative who acts as a chaperone). Formally, women may not travel more than 72 kilometres from home without one, but in practice the rule is enforced inconsistently by individual Taliban members and even bus drivers, sometimes more strictly than the formal standard. Afghan women are not permitted to leave the country without a mahram, although exceptions are often made for women of Afghan origin who hold foreign passports or permanent residency abroad.
Economic fragility has so far had limited political consequences for the Taliban.
Although Afghan women have been almost entirely removed from the public sector and public-facing jobs, they are still employed in several industries. These include the back offices and women’s branches of banks, medical clinics, the family sections of higher-end restaurants and entrepreneurial ventures such as women-owned bakeries and handicraft shops. These women-owned firms account for around only one in ten businesses and are concentrated in the clothing and food sectors. The medical sector remains the most important of these, since female patients are generally expected to be treated by female staff, but the Taliban’s ban on women attending medical institutes could reduce this workforce over time, even though apprenticeship-style training is occurring at individual clinics.
According to the World Bank, Afghanistan’s economy grew by an estimated 4.8% in the 2025 fiscal year, but the return of some 3.7 million people pushed population growth to around 11%, so GDP per capita fell by 5.6%. Inflation averaged 3.6% over the year before climbing to 7.6% by March 2026, driven by a poor harvest, higher demand and trade disruptions. Food insecurity has reached about 40% of the population. While aid has fallen, domestic revenue has risen due to lower levels of corruption and mining licences. Afghanistan’s private banks maintain correspondent banking relationships with banks in the region but have few or no such connections beyond it. Economic fragility has so far had limited political consequences for the Taliban.
Outlook
Taliban officials have expressed disappointment at what they see as unfair treatment by the US and its close partners, and at the limited recognition of the sharp fall in poppy cultivation following the emir’s ban. The government’s regional experience indicates that bilateral cooperation can grow without formal recognition. The fact that Europeans are interested in migration control and counter-terrorism offers an opening to pursue a similar approach in those capitals, even as the chances of achieving broader normalisation are low. Without unforeseen developments, US–Afghanistan relations are unlikely to advance under the Trump administration. The risks associated with large-scale investment and connectivity projects in Afghanistan continue to limit their appeal. While licensing mining rights, often to Chinese firms, has helped sustain government revenues, large mining projects have been slow to take off.
Engagement with Washington will probably remain limited, with little prospect of Taliban concessions on al-Qaeda or women’s rights.
The Taliban is likely to retain its ties to the TTP, prolonging tensions with Pakistan and the risk of further border clashes. Engagement with Washington will probably remain limited, with little prospect of Taliban concessions on al-Qaeda or women’s rights. Meanwhile, mass returns and shrinking aid are likely to keep the economy under strain, with living standards continuing to fall.
Every morning, hundreds of men gather on street corners across Kabul, hoping to find a day’s work. For these day labourers, each morning brings a new gamble: will they earn enough to feed their families or go home empty-handed? Even those who manage to find work struggle to make ends meet, with their meagre earnings falling short of the rising cost of living. In this instalment of the Daily Hustle, AAN’s Hamid Pakteen hears from Farhad, a 45-year-old former policeman from Samangan who came to Kabul in search of work. Four months on, he is still struggling to find regular employment and support his family of ten. His account offers a revealing look at the day-to-day uncertainty of the life of a day labourer and the consequences for families who depend on their precarious earnings.
Every morning, after prayers, I walk half an hour to Kabul’s Sarak-e Naw-e Kart-e Naw, where I wait for someone to come looking for workers. This is one of the many places in the city where people come if they need someone to do manual work. Usually about 100 people turn up at the corner, from ten-year-old boys to men in their sixties. Some are from Kabul and others, like me, have come from the provinces because we couldn’t find work at home.
We sit around in little groups, chatting and passing the time. Some men bring tea in a thermos and share it with others. People wander from one group to another to catch up on what’s been happening. Some of us have been coming here for a long time, so we know each other pretty well. We talk about all sorts of things. We ask after each other’s families – a mother who was in hospital last week or a son who’s been in Iran for the past year. But we always keep one eye on the road, watching out for that car or truck that might stop to pick up workers.
When a car does stop, everyone gathers around it, hoping that this time he’ll be the one who gets picked out. People call out to the driver and push each other out of the way. One man says, “I’ll go,” and another says, “It’s my turn.” Sometimes, fights break out and things can turn violent. In the end, the driver picks one or two workers and the rest of us go back to the corner to wait for another car and another chance to be picked.
If you’re lucky, you get work two or three days in a week, but sometimes seven or eight days can go by without any work coming your way. I myself haven’t found any work for the past seven days. People usually come to find workers early in the morning and with each passing hour the chance of finding work fades, but we keep waiting and hoping. After it gets dark and it’s obvious that no one’s coming, people start leaving one by one. But, like all the other men on the corner, I come back the next morning hoping that this day my luck will turn and someone will choose me.
How I ended up here
My name is Farhad. I’m 45 years old and I’m from Aybak in Samangan province. I finished high school and worked as a policeman during the Republic. I never imagined I’d end up on the streets of Kabul looking for a day’s work, but when the Republic fell, I lost my job. There are ten of us in the family: my parents, my wife, our six children and me. I’ve got two sons, aged 7 and 10, and four daughters, aged 2, 4, 13 and 15. My sons go to school, but my older daughters don’t. I’m the only one earning money, so the whole family depends on me.
After I lost my job with the police, I found work in a coal mine in Samangan. The pay wasn’t great and the work was hard and dangerous, but I needed the money and there wasn’t much other work around. Then the two men who owned the mine had a falling-out and decided to cut back on the number of workers. I was one of the people who lost their jobs. I tried to find something else in Samangan, but there was nothing. In the end, I decided to come to Kabul, hoping I’d have a better chance of finding work. I’ve been here for four months now, but I still haven’t managed to find steady work. So every morning, I go to the labour corner and take whatever work I can get.
A day’s work, if you’re lucky
These days, there are way too many men looking for work and not enough people wanting to hire us. There are even men with university degrees who can’t find jobs, so they’ve ended up at the labour corner looking for a day’s work, just like the rest of us.
People come looking for workers to do all sorts of things. Sometimes, they just need someone for a day to carry things, move furniture, load or unload goods, dig the garden or do odd jobs around a house or office. Other times, they need a few men for a construction site. Those are the best jobs because, if you’re lucky, you might get several days’ work out of them. But jobs like that are getting harder and harder to find. People don’t have much money these days, so fewer of them come looking for workers. Someone who might’ve hired several men in the past now takes only one or two. Once someone picks you, you discuss what needs doing and how much he’ll pay. We all know roughly what the going rate is, so there’s not much room to negotiate. You might try to get a little more, but when there are so many men waiting to take your place, you can’t really afford to turn down what’s being offered.
When I do get picked, I usually earn between 300 and 400 afghanis (USD 4 to 5.50) for the day. That’s not much, but I’d be happy to earn even 300 afghanis every day. At least then I’d know how much money I had coming in and could make some sort of plan. But I might get work one day and then spend the next several days waiting around, only to go home empty-handed. How can you plan anything when you don’t even know if you’ll earn something tomorrow? The work itself is hard manual labour. Usually, whoever hires you provides transport and food and you get paid at the end of the day. That makes a huge difference because, at least on the days I work, I don’t have to spend money on food. Sometimes, if I’m working in someone’s house, they even give me leftovers to take home.
Living in Kabul
I share a room with five other men I met at the labour corner when I first arrived in Kabul. We’re all looking for work. The rent is 2,500 afghanis a month (USD 33), so my share is a little over 400 afghanis (USD 5.50). It isn’t a good room. There’s no kitchen and no proper bathroom, but we can’t afford anything better. We sleep on the floor and split the expenses between us. I’m very careful with my spending because every afghani I spend here is an afghani I can’t send home.
Whatever we have, we share and we take turns cooking on a Primus stove in the hallway. Most of the time we eat potatoes and rice. Sometimes we make qabuli palaw (rice, raisins and carrots). We rarely eat meat, but if we have a little money to spare and the butcher has some scraps he’s selling cheaply, we might buy some. If one of us comes home from a job with leftover food, we share that too. If one of us hasn’t worked and can’t pay his share of something, the others chip in to cover it. Most nights, we’re too tired to do much. We come back, eat something, say our prayers and sleep. Sometimes, if we know there probably won’t be work the next day, like at Eid, we stay up later and talk. But even at Eid, a few men go to the labour corner before or after prayers, just in case someone comes looking for workers. Usually nobody does, but they go anyway because they’re desperate for money.
Finding money to send home
Friday is usually the day when we rest. I wash my clothes, help clean the room, relax a little and call my family. I miss my children and it’s a treat to hear their voices. Sometimes one of my sons calls and asks me to send money, but on those days when I don’t even have a single afghani in my pocket, I don’t know what to tell him. Normally, I look forward to hearing from my family, but when I haven’t found work, I sometimes dread those calls. I’m afraid they’ll need something I can’t provide.
They’re waiting for me to send money and I’m here in Kabul waiting for someone to give me work. When I can’t send anything, they have to borrow from friends or relatives to get by. Sometimes I have to borrow from my friends here in Kabul too, just to cover my own expenses. Then there’s the question of how we’re going to pay back what we owe.
On the days I do find work, I have to decide whether to keep some of the money to pay my rent and buy food, or send it home to my family. If I send it all home, I might not have enough for myself. But if I keep it, my family might not have enough to eat. In the end, I know that I have to send the money I have to my family, even if it means going without myself. I try to spend as little as possible on myself so I can send more money home. And I just pray nobody gets sick because we don’t have any money put aside for an emergency.
Any day I find work feels like Eid to me. At least I know I’ve earned something and my family can buy bread and whatever else they need. But even when I work, the money doesn’t go very far. If I were to work six days a week and earn 400 afghanis a day, I’d make around 10,400 afghanis (USD 139) a month. But that almost never happens. Sometimes the wage is only 300 afghanis and there are plenty of days when I don’t find work at all. By the time I’ve paid my expenses in Kabul and sent money home, there’s nothing left to save.
Winter is coming
When I came to Kabul four months ago, I’d hoped I’d find enough work to cover my expenses, send money home and put something aside for winter. But I’ve barely managed to get by and now winter is coming. My children need warm clothes. We need food for the winter and wood or coal to heat the house. These are all things my family needs, but I don’t have enough money for everything. I don’t even know what I should buy first. Do I buy clothes for the children? Do I buy food? Or do I buy fuel to keep the house warm?
Fewer people come looking for labourers in winter and work becomes even harder to find. I’ll stay in Kabul for as long as I can and keep trying to find work, but eventually I’ll have to go back to Samangan. I can’t keep paying to live here if I’m not earning anything. I’m worried about going home empty-handed, because my children will be expecting me to bring them something from Kabul. They don’t know what my life here’s been like, how many hours I’ve spent sitting on the street waiting for work or how hard it’s been to earn even a little money. I want to take them some presents and I’d feel ashamed that after being away for so long I may not be able to bring home even enough to get us through the winter.
When I go back to Samangan, I’ll look for work there again. Of course, I’d rather find something close to home. Nobody wants to spend months away from their family, living in a room with five other men and sleeping on the floor. But I’m not very hopeful. There wasn’t any work when I left and I don’t think things have improved. If I can’t find anything, I’ll have no choice but to come back here.
For now, I have to keep trying to earn while the weather holds. Tomorrow morning, after prayers, I’ll go back to the labour corner and sit waiting with the other men. Maybe somebody will have brought tea and we’ll share it. We’ll talk about our families and whatever else there is to talk about. And all the while, we’ll watch the road. Maybe a car will stop. Maybe a truck will pull up. Maybe someone will come looking for workers. Maybe I’ll be chosen. Or maybe I’ll spend another day waiting with nothing to show for it.
Edited by Roxanna Shapour and Kate Clark
Waiting to Be Picked: The daily struggle to find work in Kabul
Pakistan’s decades-long strategy of supporting the Taliban to reduce India’s influence in Afghanistan has failed to deliver the expected results, according to an Indian analyst, who says the Taliban’s expanding engagement with New Delhi has exposed the limits of Islamabad’s influence.
Raghav Sharma, director of the Centre for Afghanistan Studies at O.P. Jindal Global University in India, said in an interview that Pakistan had spent roughly three decades supporting the Taliban in the hope of strengthening its position in Afghanistan. Instead, relations between the former allies have deteriorated, while the Taliban has pursued contacts with other regional powers, including India.
He compared Pakistan’s current difficulties with its experience in the 1990s, when Islamabad supported Afghan mujahideen groups in the expectation that allied forces would give it decisive influence over Afghanistan’s political direction.
Sharma said the current tensions between Pakistan and the Taliban were genuine rather than a political performance. He argued that the Taliban had sought to demonstrate its independence from Pakistan’s military establishment and challenge perceptions that its decisions were controlled by Islamabad.
Security dispute strains Pakistan-Taliban ties
The dispute over the Tehrik-e-Taliban Pakistan (TTP), an armed group that carries out attacks in Pakistan, remains a major source of tension. Islamabad has repeatedly accused the Afghan Taliban of allowing the TTP to operate from Afghanistan territory and has demanded action against the group. The Taliban authorities deny providing sanctuary to militants and have rejected Pakistan’s accusations.
Sharma said the Taliban was unwilling to meet Pakistan’s demands to sever its ties with the TTP, leaving a major obstacle to improving relations. The dispute, he argued, also illustrates the limits of Pakistan’s ability to influence the Taliban leadership.
The analyst raised the possibility that Pakistan could be supporting armed opponents of the Taliban in Afghanistan, including groups operating in Badakhshan and Nuristan. However, he did not provide evidence for the allegation in the interview. He also said he saw no clear indication that Pakistan had decided to seek the Taliban’s overthrow.
India pursues a pragmatic approach
Sharma described India’s engagement with the Taliban as a pragmatic policy driven by national interests. He said New Delhi recognised that the Taliban remains Afghanistan’s dominant political and military force and that meaningful engagement with the country requires dealing with the authorities in Kabul.
He said the Taliban also had reasons to expand ties with India, including gaining leverage in its dispute with Pakistan and strengthening its domestic position. Nevertheless, Pakistan retains advantages through its shared border with Afghanistan, social and religious links, and established connections with Taliban leaders.
Sharma also said China’s role as a potential mediator was complicated by Pakistan’s need to seek help in resolving a dispute with a group Islamabad once regarded as an ally. Beijing, meanwhile, remains concerned about the presence of Uyghur militant groups in Afghanistan, he said.
The shifting relationships among the Taliban, Pakistan, India and China underscore the increasingly complex regional competition over Afghanistan, where former alliances are being tested by security disputes and changing diplomatic interests.
The report is based on an interview with Raghav Sharma, director of the Centre for Afghanistan Studies at O.P. Jindal Global University in India, published by Afghanistan International Radio on October 21, 2026.
Pakistan’s Taliban Strategy Failed to Curb India’s Influence in Afghanistan: Analyst
Because of its position, Italy has been a major junction in Afghans’ migration to Europe for the past two decades. The area around Trieste on Italy’s northeastern border, in particular, has come to represent in recent years one of the foremost terminals on the land route from Turkey, the so-called Balkan Route, and a veritable gateway to the European Union. Despite this and the very high recognition rates for Afghan asylum seekers, Italy has remained mostly a country of transit and unlike other European countries, still lacks major well-established Afghan diaspora hubs. AAN’s Fabrizio Foschini, who has worked with or closely observed Afghan migrants in Trieste for over a decade, reflects on what is holding back the development of the Afghan diaspora in Italy and how recent changes in asylum policy at the European Union and Italy are affecting Afghans’ movements and decisions.
The story goes that when Amir Amanullah (r 1919-1929) visited Italy in January 1928 during his ‘Grand Tour’ of Europe, he was met by the Italian King, Vittorio Emanuele, with a witty remark: pointing to the similarity between their names, the Italian monarch bestowed on his Afghan homologue a royal decoration, the Supreme Order of the Most Holy Annunciation, in the effect, making him an honorary cousin. One-and-a-half years later, dethroned by the revolts against his attempts at modernisation, Amanullah made it back to Italy as a refugee, broken in power and spirit, but with a number of family members and retainers and expecting suitable assistance and hospitality by his Italian ‘cousin’. Taken aback, Vittorio Emanuele was forced to oblige, probably cursing his earlier attempt at wittiness.
The dynamics between the Italian state and the Afghan asylum seekers could be said, half-jokingly, to repose on similar misunderstandings. On one hand, for the best part of the past two decades, Italy has honoured its commitment to Afghanistan and the plea of those fleeing first violence and now lack of freedom there with some of the highest asylum recognition rates in the EU; on the other, behind the façade of this recognition and beyond the legitimation of their status, Italy does not have much to offer Afghan refugees.
This report, following AAN’s update[1] in the summer on the situation of Afghan migrants along the Balkan Route, will outline aspects of Afghan migration to and through Italy, looking at the numbers of those transiting and those staying in the country over the past decade and to the living and working conditions they face,with a particular focus on the country’s northeastern border region.
Patterns of Afghan migration through and to Italy
Since the early 2000s, Italy has featured consistently on the map of Afghan migrants. At first, they mostly travelled through Greece and reached Italian shores by ferry, often hidden in lorries. While most continued to other destinations, some stopped in Italy and small communities started to develop in Rome and Milan, with Hazaras representing a relative majority. In the mid-2010s, the land route through southeastern Europe, later known as the Balkan Route, gained prominence. Afghans thus entered Italy through the border between Slovenia and the Friuli Venezia Giulia region, often regrouping in the regional capital, Trieste, or in Gorizia, located near or, in the case of the latter, on the border.
The humanitarian corridor of 2015-16 saw unprecedented numbers of migrants, many of them Afghans, reach Europe via the Balkan Route. Although the main branches of the humanitarian corridor bypassed Italy, Friuli Venezia Giulia was still affected because of its proximity. However, only a small number of the Afghans arriving in Italy in that time applied for asylum: rather, they took the chance to reach destinations further north and west and it was mostly migrants from other nationalities, especially Iraqis and Pakistanis, who opted to claim asylum in Italy.
Although not experiencing a surge comparable to those in other European countries, the number of Afghan asylum seekers in Italy increased steadily from the mid-2010s.[2] Applications rose from 1,365 in 2012 to 2,056 in 2013, to 2,994 in 2014, peaking at 3,975 in 2015. In 2015 Italy awarded a record number of asylum decisions to Afghan asylum seekers: 4,283, of which the great majority consisted of either of the five-year types of international protection, that is the status of ‘political refugee’ (381 instances) or being granted ‘subsidiary protection’ (3,279 instances). Only 59 requests were rejected, making Italy one of the surest countries for asylum applications for Afghans in the whole EU.[3] 2016 saw only 2,860 applications.
In the following years, recognition rates for Afghans remained constantly above 95 per cent. The subsidiary protection became the standard decision issued to Afghan nationals almost by default, being awarded on average to around two-thirds of those applying. Rejections were altogether very rare and Afghans had very good chances of seeing any overturned on appeal. At any rate, Italy never arranged the deportation of Afghans whose demands had been rejected, as was done by a number of other EU countries in the years before 2021.
Despite this, Afghan asylum requests fell to 982 in 2017 and 599 by 2019. A new spike in the number of asylum requests came in 2021 (5,250) with the re-establishment of the Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan (IEA). This was clearly linked to the evacuation of August 2021: Italy airlifted nearly 5,000 Afghan nationals in the wake of the collapse of the Republican institutions (Italian Embassy in Afghanistan).[4]
The following year, 2022, asylum demands fell to 2,113. However, reflecting the backlog of requests from 2021, the number of asylum decisions rose: 4,211 and 4,230 decisions were made in 2021 and 2022, respectively, and were overwhelmingly positive. Meanwhile, the Italian government, in partnership with civil society and charitable organisations, launched a humanitarian visa scheme for selected Afghans (vulnerable individuals and families, and those who had a history of working with Italian organisations in Afghanistan) admitting 1,200 people in 2022-23 and a further 700 in 2025, via a third country (Pakistan, Iran or Turkey) (AIDA p58).
In 2023, 1,900 Afghans applied for asylum in Italy and in 2024, 2,042. Afghans still ranked better than most countries in terms of the outcome of their asylum demands: in 2024, out of 1,833 decisions on Afghan asylum seekers, only 149 were rejected, an 8 per cent rejection rate, inferior only to those from Burkina Faso and Mali. Afghans were also, by far, the nationality most often granted full refugee status in 2024, with 851 applicants qualifying for it; an additional 782 were given subsidiary protection and only 51 a lower-type special protection (UCS).
Afghan applications have been slightly on the increase in the last three years because of both continued favourable recognition rates in Italy and declining acceptance in other EU countries, especially those already hosting large numbers of Afghan refugees, such as the Scandinavian countries, Germany and Belgium. Faced with higher hurdles and uncertainties, many Afghan asylum seekers originally directed there – or already arrived there – considered falling back on Italy as a more viable second choice. Most Afghans still arrive via the Balkan Route, while a smaller but significant fraction reached Italian shores by boat from Turkey, circumventing Greece. Most of the Afghans on the Balkan route are single men. The sea route, presenting a different range of dangers, came to be the route of choice for many single women and families.[5]
A separate mention must be made for non-accompanied minors. Already in 2017, AAN reported on the comparatively high numbers of Afghan children transiting through Italy. Most seem originally to be aiming for Switzerland, but a significant number end up applying for asylum in Italy, which offers decent reception programmes for minors.[6] Indeed, Afghan nationals still top the list of nationalities among non-accompanied minors who apply for asylum in the country. In 2025, they represented roughly a quarter of those in the reception system and made up almost the same percentage of those who applied for asylum in 2025, with 219 out of 950 (Ministero del Lavoro; AIDA p124).[7]
In every EU state, ‘subsequent applications’ (as opposed to first-time applications) by Afghans, once negligible, were at their highest ever in 2025, making up almost half of the total 108,765 asylum requests by Afghan nationals across the union (UNHCR). This has created a new group of asylum seekers, the so-called ‘failed refugees’, who often subsequently try to apply in other countries. In 2025, NGOs began to report increasing numbers of Afghans seeking assistance in Ventimiglia on the western Italian border, where they would normally transit when leaving for France, Belgium, or the UK: they were returning to Italy to apply for asylum after having their applications rejected in other countries (AIDA p57). The same movement has been happening on the northeastern border of Italy, where it is Afghans who saw their applications rejected in Austria, Germany or the Scandinavian countries who are arriving.
However, long-established patterns of asylum recognition for Afghans in Italy might have begun to change. In 2025, 2,755 Afghans applied for asylum, but positive decisions decreased to 82 per cent, and the rate of five-year international protections also fell relative to a two-year type of protection issued by Italy, labelled ‘special’ or ‘humanitarian’ protection.[8]
In 2025-26, different estimates of the number of migrants on the Balkan Route circulated, contributing to uncertainty about the number of arrivals in Italy. Frontex, the European agency for the management of external borders, and, to a lesser extent, other organisations such as IOM and UNHCR have pointed to a marked decrease in overall migration flows on the land route (see our previous report), while some NGOs working with migrants at Italy’s northeastern border have disputed this.
At any rate, the continued arrival of Afghans in transit and as asylum seekers in Italy seem certain for the next future, as proved by the most recent data from the first half of 2026. Afghans made up around twenty per cent of the 5,000 migrants identified as entering the EU via the land route in Southeastern Europe, most of them heading to Italy, as AAN has detailed in its previous report on the situation in Serbia. Moreover, during the first half of 2026, Afghans were, together with Bangladeshis and Egyptians, the most represented nationality on the Eastern Mediterranean sea route,[9] which proved the most used in 2026 so far, with nearly 17,000 arrivals (UNHCR). A significant number of those Afghans who arrived in Greece will likely continue on to Italy, either by land or by sea, in the coming months.
Another recent survey by UNHCR which heard from Afghans en route to Europe found 21 per cent of 657 migrants interviewed between January 2025 and July 2026 in the Balkans listed Italy as their choice of destination, second only to Germany. It is unclear how many intended to apply for asylum and stay in Italy, though. And then, even for those who may want to stay, it is not clear if this is going to prove a viable choice in the long run.
Migrant movements along the Balkan Route in 2026. Map: Roger Helms for AAN; Graphics: Žolt Kovač for AAN, 2026
An unstable diaspora
According to a recent migration survey, as of 2025, around 19,000 Afghans were residing in Italy (ISMU, p103). As a new migrant group in the country, the community’s numbers have shown clear growth over the past fifteen years, from fewer than 4,000 in 2011 (Wikipedia, based on Eurostat data). The increase was driven by the high number of asylum applications between 2014 and 2016 and after 2021. Altogether, the Afghan diaspora in Italy is still negligible compared to those that have developed in other EU countries such as Germany or France or even in less-populated ones such as Sweden or Austria.
In its 2017 report, AAN had already described the difficulties Afghans were facing in establishing themselves in Italy, without an already rooted diaspora community to provide newcomers with support, advice and access to jobs.[10] After a decade of Afghan migrants transiting through the country, with a significant proportion applying for and obtaining asylum, it remains difficult to assess whether this obstacle has been overcome. Numbers alone do not necessarily work here, as we reported back then:
…obtaining protection and the various necessary documents in Italy has not meant the beginning of a new, sedentary life for the majority of Afghan newcomers. Mostly, they would move out of Italy to try and find a job in some other European country.
Although difficult to verify, prolonged observation suggests that many Afghans who obtain asylum in Italy eventually move on and relocate, temporarily or permanently, out of the country. The transient nature of the presence of many Afghans in Italy has hindered the development of numerically relevant and cohesive communities, apart from a handful of major cities such as Rome, Milan, Bologna or Turin. This lack of rooting stems from several factors. As explained in our previous report, there existed already “an ‘insulation’ between older migrants [ie the few high-profile refugees already in Italy, where Zaher Shah and part of his entourage had also fled in 1973], from urban and educated backgrounds who are fully integrated, and more recent newcomers.” Afghans were therefore divided by fault lines of economic status and ability to integrate in Italian society.[11]
Along similar lines, a division may currently be reproducing itself between refugees who were evacuated in 2021 or through successive relocation programmes and those entering Italy through the Balkan Route. The first come often from urban and educated backgrounds, have better working skills and, in some cases, even previous knowledge of the Italian – or at least English – language. Moreover, they are often in family groups and usually end up in the care of committed organisations that run efficient programmes capable of providing the tools for successful integration into Italian society and the job market. On the other hand, migrants coming via the Balkan Route are mainly young men from rural areas, often with only basic education and language skills. The language and training courses they are offered during reception programmes have been shrinking, along with the average reception time they are granted and their chances of entering subsequent government support programmes.
Moreover, Afghans arriving from the Balkan Route are overwhelmingly single men. Once they receive asylum, they do not automatically succeed at bringing their families from Afghanistan. Family reunification has always been a long and complex procedure and a source of frustrations for Afghan refugees in Italy. Nowadays, the process has become even more arduous and burdensome: with the Italian embassy in Afghanistan closed, Afghan citizens who apply for family reunification need to do their paperwork at embassies in nearby countries (Pakistan or Iran) and often to reside legally in the country where the embassy is located in order to be able to access it. Finally, family reunification is impractical not only from a bureaucratic perspective but also from an economic one, as Afghans in Italy soon learn.
Italy: A republic founded on informal labour?
Italy’s job market for newly arrived migrants is constrained and most available jobs are in the agricultural or tourism sectors, both characterised by seasonal and informal labour. For those with limited professional and linguistic skills, it is virtually impossible to pursue other occupations, except for those with the capital to open a small shop, grocery, call centre/money transfer, fast food, or other services directed at migrant communities. Consequently, it is mostly single young men from rural areas who opt to spend time working in Italy after receiving asylum documents – their families left behind in Afghanistan, at least for the time being – while those with a degree, previous working experience or a family with them try to get a better job in other EU countries as soon as they can.
The resulting dispersal of many Afghan refugees who stay in Italy to rural areas, together with their frequent relocations to pursue short-term job opportunities, perpetuates the fragmented and transient nature of the Afghan diaspora in Italy. Moreover, even for day labourers, job competition is tough: Italy sits at the crossroads of three major migrant routes into Europe and sees other large communities from Africa and South Asia seeking low-skill or seasonal work for wages many Afghans cannot readily accept. As an Afghan migrant said: “Behind each of us there is half a village back home, that we have to support.” That may be true for every migrant labourer, but Afghanistan is not a cheap country to live in and the cost of living has been on the rise due to the now year-long border closure with Pakistan.
The pervasive presence of informal labour in the Italian economy allows some members of migrant communities to position themselves as providers of labourers to a range of economic actors, from farms to building companies, and to exploit their compatriots and other migrants by having them work without proper contracts or safety regulations, or for longer than the recorded working hours.[12] This so-called caporalato (‘gangmaster’) system is based, along with the connivance of many Italian economic actors, on the willingness of its victims to be exploited in order to get to work and earn some money at all. The people involved at the various levels can be from very different national backgrounds. However, a shared nationality usually facilitates both access to the labour market through gangmaster intermediaries and, it seems, the acceptance of exploitation by the labourers. Afghans, like most other migrants, need to earn money fast in order to support people at home, but rarely have the numbers or the connections to be those running the rackets.
The author has observed several Afghans quitting their prospective careers in the shipyards of Monfalcone near Trieste – the biggest in Italy, where the non-unionised workforce is largely from Bangladesh and mobilised through Bangladeshi small firms and labour agencies – and leaving for other EU countries because of the impossibility of progressing beyond a certain level of recompense.
Where most migrants involved in this abusive system are easily coerced into accepting poor working conditions and pay, either through proximity (if compatriots of the gangmasters) or because of their irregular or vulnerable juridical status in Italy, ie failed asylum application – Afghans are an exception, with regular permits of stay by virtue of their high recognition rates as asylum seekers. This apparent strength can make them more vocal in claiming their rights and some exploiters are well aware of that. The author remembers many futile attempts by a very gifted young Afghan tailor to find employment in the Chinese-managed, largely informal, textile district in the city of Prato. Each time, he came back puzzled by the rejection, until a fellow Pakistani would-be tailor, who had just been hired, explained: “They saw your papers: you are a political refugee, you’re gonna be a troublemaker.” Such situations take a dramatic turn, when migrants who protest against unfair wages or abusive working and accommodation conditions are punished with violence and even death by their exploiters, be them Italians or fellow migrants.[13]
In this context, it is no surprise that, after receiving their asylum documents in Italy – which allow them to travel legally across the EU – many Afghans move on to other countries and return to Italy only to renew them. The single most important factor limiting the growth of the Afghan diaspora in Italy is probably the appeal of many other European countries, where, despite the ever-present risk of abuse and exploitation, wages and salaries are considerably higher at almost all levels. This is especially true for refugees with connections to compatriots or prior experience in a given country, but the pull factor is not limited to those cases. There is a sheer economic incentive at play: the awareness among Afghans in Italy that the country’s salaries have been stuck longer than in any other European country amid an ever-growing cost of living. Even many Afghans who have been living for over a decade in Italy, perfectly integrated and skilled so as to be part of its social and economic life and some even having obtained citizenship, are leaving in search of better wages. Secondary movement within the EU after initiating an asylum procedure (European Parliament briefing) and continued mobility after asylum have both been observed and researched as recurring phenomena for Afghans refugees in Europe (Global Migration Research Paper). In this case, however, Afghans are also reacting to a situation specific to their country of asylum. Despite the obvious differences, by leaving Italy, they behave like the increasing number of young Italians who also leave to seek better jobs elsewhere (Reuters).
More stable Afghan communities will have a chance to develop only in those areas of Italy featuring the coexistence of more structured, post-2021 relocation programmes involving whole families in urban environments and a more varied job market. Such conditions may favour the economic and cultural integration of sufficiently large groups of Afghans, thereby enabling the capacity to attract and employ other Afghans in catering or in providing services to their compatriots. So far, however, the development of this type of community has been stunted even in the very city that has seen the highest number of Afghans transiting or applying for asylum over the past fifteen years -–Trieste. To understand the situation there, it is necessary to look more closely at trends in migration flows on Italy’s northeastern frontier and at the policies trying to regulate, control, or discourage them.
Number-crunching on the Balkan Route
When the land route through the Balkans became prominent for Afghan migrants in 2010s, Trieste, a medium-sized port city on Italy’s northeastern border, could boast of a fairly well-developed reception system. Local NGOs and government offices relied on expertise gained during previous refugee crises caused by the ex-Yugoslavia wars of the 1990s. Until 2015, all asylum seekers were hosted in small flats spread across the city and offered intensive language courses and vocational training. Later, rising numbers of refugees and reduced government support for such programmes posed increasing hurdles to this model, reducing reception to its basics (for details see our 2023 report).
Even after that, Trieste has continued to represent for migrants a major goal, a place where they could finally discard the fear of being detained by police and pushed back across a border, or harassed by greedy smugglers and criminal groups.[14] Some migrants cash in their ‘Game’ achievement and stop in Trieste to apply for asylum; others simply rest and regroup before continuing on. Indeed, once migrants overcome the last risks posed by informal push backs at the Italian-Slovenian border,[15] the city offers them a rare chance to come safely out of hiding and live openly.[16] After weeks spent almost entirely in hiding or in the care of their smugglers’ handlers, this comes as a respite, even if it means living on the streets and sleeping rough in abandoned old buildings (InfoMigrants). Local authorities have neither the scope nor the will to assist all migrants, but long-established charities still offer migrants help and advice.
Every evening since 2018, a network of volunteer organisations united under the umbrella Linea d’Ombra (Shadow Line) has been present in the square in front of Trieste train station, providing medical first aid, warm meals and information to migrants. The choice of venue is no accident: the square has long been the meeting place for migrants in Trieste. Newly arrived migrants, after walking across the border that runs along the Karst plateau above the city, head to the square to get information and find a place to stay in the Silos area of the old port, located just behind the railway tracks; those already there, waiting for a place in the reception system or to start the next leg of their journey, gather daily with relations or friends already living or staying in the city.
The presence of a large number of migrants occupying public spaces in the centres of major cities also characterised the height of the Balkan Route in 2015-16, hence the various ‘Afghan Parks’ of Belgrade and other southeastern European cities (read this 2016 AAN report). Since then, local government or upscale urban development projects have evicted migrants from central and visible locations and relegated them to marginal places, typically disused industrial complexes and railroad hubs at the city outskirts, which offer migrants basic accommodation and transport facilities, while being conveniently invisible to residents and tourists.[17] In Trieste, such a marginal space, the old port with its dilapidated warehouses, dead railway lines and empty wagons, is located too close to the heart of the city centre and cannot be insulated from it.
The daily gatherings have split the city’s public opinion and become a national case, with many volunteers from Trieste and across Italy and neighbouring countries joining to support migrants,[18] while local right-wing parties and some city residents criticise them, especially after episodes of criminality among migrants squatting in nearby areas. In the face of the decidedly anti-migrant tones assumed by the political debate and part of the local institutions, this mobilisation of civil society transcends a purely charitable effort to take up a social and political role: in cooperation with organisations for migrants’ rights such as ASGI, Linea d’Ombra aims to uphold the moral and legal standards connected to the right of asylum, which they feel the institutions in Trieste are neglecting (InfoMigrants).
These organisations also reported on the number of migrants’ arrivals in 2025-26; they differed from statistics made available by some international bodies. Frontex, for example, claimed a 42 per cent reduction in irregular border crossings on the Western Balkan Route (includes the land borders of Romania, Hungary, Croatia, and Bulgaria) in 2025 and another 24 per cent in the first half of 2026 (Frontex, Frontex). Organisations working with migrants in Trieste have instead said that the overall drop in arrivals over the past couple of years is minimal. The director of the Italian Consortium of Solidarity (ICS), Gianfranco Schiavone, estimates that arrivals in Trieste fell by only about 15 per cent last year and argues that, in the first months of 2026, they increased. The International Rescue Committee (IRC) also reported a 27 per cent decrease in arrivals in Trieste in 2025 (IRC 2026) and a 31 per cent increase in the first eight months of 2026 (RaiNews).
This shows that increased border controls have not effectively reduced the flow of migrants to a trickle, as the official narrative would have it. Rather, like the karst rivers that crisscross this region, securitisation policies have forced the flow underground, only for it to resurface in Trieste. Many migrants in the Western Balkans stay under the radar of even the humanitarian actors present in the Balkans, moving secretively and relying on their smugglers’ network for accommodation. As the efforts of police forces in Serbia, Croatia and Bosnia and Herzegovina increasingly concentrate on making migrants invisible, the number of migrants on the Balkan Route is likely being underreported by organisations like Frontex.
Data by the local organisations corroborate the notion that the arrival of migrants at Italy’s northeastern frontier has continued unabated in 2025-26 and that among them, Afghans continue to represent the major group. According to the IRC registry, Afghans have ranked first among the nationalities arriving in Trieste for the past five years, with altogether nearly 30,000 Afghans spending some time in the city between 2021 and 2026 while on transit or eventually applying for asylum there. Although their number declined after 2023, with 3,889 individuals registered in 2025, they still constituted 40 per cent of the total (IRC 2026). Moreover, in 2025 the IRC recorded, for the first time, an increasing trend among Afghan migrants to state that Trieste was their final destination; 41 per cent said so, a notable shift from previous years when they pointed to other destinations inside the EU (IRC 2025).
Indeed, 2026 so far shows a prospective increase, with 2,735 Afghans recorded as arriving in Trieste in the first eight months of the year. Unaccompanied minors featured prominently, accounting for 576 of a total.
Arrival of Afghans in Trieste January-August 2026. Data from the IRC/Diaconia Vallese monitoring monthly surveys in Trieste Central Station
Other cities in the Friuli Venezia Giulia region also reported rising numbers of Afghan asylum seekers. Gorizia, which, like Trieste, sits right on the Slovenian border, recorded a major spike in Afghan asylum seekers in July 2026; they were almost the only nationality arriving in the city. September saw a more varied background among asylum seekers; however, Afghans still featured prominently, with around one hundred demands.[19] Udine, though slightly more removed from the border, also recorded that Afghans formed the vast majority of those applying for asylum in the spring of 2026 – 83 per cent of the 450 individuals contacted by the local organisation Ospiti in arrivo during their survey.
This is consistent with the EUAA’s mid-year review, which at the end of June 2026 reported a 77 per cent increase in asylum demands by Afghans in Italy compared to the same period in 2025 (EUAA, p26). What are the reasons for these numbers, given what has been said about Italy’s economy not offering great opportunities for Afghan migrants? One is certainly the lack of alternative opportunities: although some other EU countries, and Germany foremost, remain the most coveted destinations, lower recognition rates, longer waiting times for asylum papers and the risk of deportation[20] in case of rejection make Italy a reasonable choice. Moreover, some EU-designed asylum mechanisms influence migrants’ choices, sometimes with unexpected results.
A bureaucratic twist across the EU
In the past, the Balkan Route used to split in Belgrade, from where it went in two completely different directions: migrants who went north and crossed into Hungary would continue further north and west into Slovakia and Austria, to reach Germany or Scandinavia. Those who headed west into Bosnia or Croatia continued through Croatia and Slovenia until they reached Italy and then France.
This may no longer be the case; all routes seem to lead to Trieste, or at least to the eastern Italian border. Speaking to Afghans in Belgrade and in Trieste, AAN heard that many migrants heading from Serbia to Hungary report plan to travel from Hungary through Slovenia to Italy; once there, they would continue on to Austria and Germany. It is not only the controls on the Austrian – Hungarian border that influence the decision to make such a detour, but also the fact that being fingerprinted in the Eurodac biometric system in Italy can be a bonus for migrants. By now, asylum seekers with their first EU fingerprints in Croatia are routinely reassigned to that country under the terms of the Dublin agreements[21] if they later try to lodge an application in central or northern Europe. By contrast Italian fingerprints seem to prevent other countries from sending back asylum seekers. Italy is one of Europe’s major recipients of migrants in transit from both the Mediterranean and the Balkan routes and hosts a sizeable number of asylum seekers, so initiating a Dublin transfer procedure with Italy is an arduous enterprise that many other EU countries would rather not face or, at any rate, not be able to carry out with success.
In 2025, Italy received 19,889 Dublin requests (ie requests for Italy to ‘take back’ asylum seekers), down from 24,217 in 2024. Not a single Dublin-related transfer took place last year, however, likely because Italy suspended transfers to other EU countries on 5 December 2022 and was still maintaining that suspension in 2025 (AIDA).
The inability to activate a Dublin procedure is sometimes also due to a shortage of facilities for families in the Italian reception system, which is shaped by arrival patterns that see a vast majority of single men. In recent years, moreover, the need to expand reception capacity, reduce benefits and their duration to cut costs, as well as the political hostility of state organs at the local and national level towards programmes aimed at long-term, resource-intensive reception systems have further reduced suitable structures for families. As a result, requests by other EU countries for Italy to accept responsibility for an Afghan family may be blocked by the need to ensure guarantees about the type of reception that family will receive once there (AIDA p102).[22]
The flip side of the coin is that, among the Afghans currently applying for asylum in Italy, a growing number are not first-time applicants, but individuals whose claims have been turned down by other EU countries. As mentioned in the first section of this report, they have reached almost half of the total asylum requests by Afghans across the EU in 2025.
The new country of asylum may deem such applications inadmissible and send applicants back to the first if no new elements are presented or the situation in the country of origin has not deteriorated; for Afghans, different recognition rates can be enough to secure success. Moreover, recent jurisprudence offers hope to subsequent asylum seekers. In late 2023, the Court of Justice of the European Union (CJEU) issued a ruling on questions posed by civil courts in Rome and Florence about the transfer of asylum seekers to Italy who had already been rejected elsewhere. The CJEU ruled that the Italian judges could decide to apply the sovereignty clause and examine asylum claims when transferring the applicant to another EU country might ultimately lead to their deportation to an unsafe country, thus violating the non-refoulement principle.[23] The courts subsequently decided in favour of the two Afghan asylum seekers who had applied against the transfers to, respectively, Germany and Sweden, and their applications were examined anew in Italy (AIDA pp93-94).
Differences in recognition trends and policies across the EU countries have long influenced each other more to the effect of causing dysfunctionality than bringing about a balanced and cohesive system. Even recent developments connected with the European Pact on Migration and Asylum (known in Italy as PAF), which is aimed at standardising policies and procedures, are now affecting asylum practices at Italy’s northeastern border in new and unpredictable ways.
The (il)logic of deterrence in 2026
As summer 2026 was approaching, all eyes – migrants and workers on migrant issues – were fixed on the European Pact on Migration and Asylum, set to be applied from 12 June 2026. Some migrants feared radical overnight changes, and smart smugglers no doubt made good use of those fears to extract higher prices from their unfortunate customers. What happened in Trieste after the fateful date was indeed a radical departure from the established legal framework.
Under decree-law n.100, issued by the Italian government on the same day the EU migration pact entered into force,police in Trieste began applying the so-called accelerated border procedure to asylum applicants crossing the border between Italy and Slovenia.[24] The normal asylum procedure was thus replaced with one that offers fewer guarantees to applicants and shorter time windows to appeal against decisions. Although the PAF was devised to sort asylum seekers from countries considered safe under EU rulings more quickly and should thus not affect those from Afghanistan, in Trieste, several Afghans have been subjected to it and later appealed its rulings. Moreover, any future radical change to the reception system in Trieste, such as shrinking reception places, would affect Afghan asylum seekers as well.
The impact of the massive application of PAF during the summer of 2026 was strongly felt in the asylum and reception system in the city. The fast-tracking was only relative: asylum seekers could still be waiting in the streets for weeks or months before being suddenly summoned and taken by the police to a migrant hub outside Trieste. Legal advisors to migrants complain that asylum seekers are made to believe that they cannot leave its premises lest they be considered to have abandoned the reception project. This makes it difficult for asylum seekers to get legal aid in the city and, coupled with the very tight timing of the procedure once the intake has taken place, leaves many without a clear understanding of their options. The asylum interviews are reduced to a mere formality (their record hardly filling one page) and the timeline for an appeal against the decision is only five days.
As of early October, the PAF faces increasing hurdles. Throughout August and September, civil courts in Trieste and other Italian cities have upheld migrants’ appeals, ruling that the Italian-Slovenian border is not an external Schengen border (AIDA update on PAF). The police authorities have been forced to revive the ordinary procedure and shift part of the applications back to it.
According to ICS director Gianfranco Schiavone, with the PAF the government’s objective was to cancel the normal procedure in the areas of the country most affected by arrivals, or at least to make them inhospitable to asylum seekers. In Trieste, the aim would be to make the city a place of mere transit, disincentivising asylum seekers from applying for protection there. The implementation of the PAF coincided with an inexplicable months-long halt to the transfers of asylum seekers from the streets to reception projects in other parts of Italy, which, in normal times, is the only remedy for the chronic overcrowding of migrants left without shelter in Trieste. Faced with the failure of other policies aimed at containing migration flows, this type of indirect deterrence might have become an option.
The decision by many countries to suspend the Schengen area free-travel agreement and reinstate border controls in the past few years and by Italy with respect to Slovenia since October 2023 (Associated Press), has proved largely ineffective. Mixed Slovenian-Italian border patrols mostly focus on road and railway communication networks, of only marginal use by migrants crossing the Italian-Slovenian border around Trieste. True, high-profile migrants or families may opt for an all-inclusive car transfer bringing them beyond the border, but single young men, who make up the vast majority of migrants on the Balkan Route, normally cross the hilly country marking the border between Slovenia and Italy on foot. Periodic evictions of migrants from the old port warehouses have proved just as ineffective (Linea d’Ombra): given the wealth of empty buildings available in deindustrialising (and depopulating) Trieste, it amounts to kicking the problem around a few blocks without solving it.
However, if creating a bottleneck in the reception system was truly the authorities’ contingency plan to reduce pressure on Trieste from migration flows along the Balkan Route, this would require thorough revision. Deterrence, which implies leaving migrants to their own devices to live on the streets, clashes with the authorities’ parallel agenda of rendering migrants invisible so as to pacify public opinion. It also fails to account for the harsh reality of migrants’ mindsets and priorities, and what they are prepared to put up with to find a new home in Europe: given the risks and abuses they have already faced, making life harsh for them on arrival in Italy is hardly a deterrent.
Time is telling; time will tell
Time seems to be the all-important factor for Afghans when deciding where to apply for asylum. Many asylum seekers want to reach a destination where they can work and send money home as soon as possible, so are in race against time. That means the probable timeline for getting asylum papers in a particular country beats the quality of the reception programme or even proximity to relatives or friends in another. The quest for speed in bureaucratic procedures and in securing accommodation is typically hard amid crowded Italian police stations, asylum commissions and reception systems. Like the choice of which route to take or smuggler group to hire, it is also a battle largely fought out on social media. This was the case, for example, with L’Aquila, a small city in central Italy removed from any migrant route or major job market, which, after being featured in a Pashto-language video posted on TikTok in late 2025, experienced a sudden boom of arrivals and asylum requests by Afghans, hopeful of getting faster reception and, most importantly, their paperwork done (InfoMigrants).
The figures provided by migrant support organisations illustrate the scale of the problem. The gap between declared intentions to apply for asylum in Trieste and actual requests is revealing. IRC reported that in 2025, 3,607 individuals expressed their intention to apply for asylum in Trieste. Yet only one-third, around 1,200 applications, were eventually registered at the police station. Even accounting for migrants who changed their minds and moved on immediately, and for those who were transferred and induced into other reception programmes by the authorities, this still leaves a significant number of individuals who were ultimately unable to access the procedure at all and were forced to move and try to apply elsewhere (IRC).
The introduction of the accelerated border procedure in Trieste did not speed up the reception timeline; although it has sped up the procedure itself in police stations and asylum commissions once an applicant is in the system. However, any reduction in the waiting time to obtain asylum documents can become a pull factor for asylum seekers with a fair chance of getting protection. It seems likely that Afghans would easily come to terms with the risk of being ‘PAFed’, prioritising getting any type of asylum document that would allow them to move around legally, and being happy with a lower-level types of protection in a comparatively shorter time – they can always appeal against any decision, hoping, sooner or later, to see it transformed into full international protection.
So, even measures aimed at deterring migrants could turn out to be acceptable for at least some Afghan asylum seekers who are willing to cope with a rough street-life, a short and very basic reception programme – if any at all – and a horizon of informal and underpaid labour (or fast relocation to other EU countries and long-term mobility from one to another). Only, this fits exactly the representation of the migrants whom many Italians and most Italian right-wing politicians keep complaining about: young, male, uneducated, living on the margins of society and potentially engaging in criminal activities.
If the future of asylum laws lies in deterrence, it is difficult to see how far can asylum seekers and host countries be pushed. Afghans will likely be willing to accept ever-harsher conditions of travel, reception and asylum procedure. Thus, Italy’s continued role as gateway to Europe for Afghan migrants is certain. The way the situation in Italy evolves and influences Afghans’ ability to get asylum and their decision to stay or move on, will continue to be relevant for the rest of the European Union.
By comparison, in 2012, Germany saw 7,498 asylum applications by Afghans (BAMF 2012), 31,382 in 2015 and 127,012 in 2016. A great part of the 2016 figure consisted of the backlog of applications from Afghans who had arrived in 2015, but were unable to apply for asylum at once. See Thomas Ruttig, Afghan Exodus: Afghan asylum seekers in Europe (3) Case study Germany, AAN, 17 February 2017. In the same years, France recorded 444 Afghan asylum applications in 2012, 2,200 in 2015 and 5,641 in 2016 (AIDA-ECRE France).
↑3
Figures taken from the Italian government’s UCS, AIDA-ECRE and Eurostat databases.
↑4
This was one of the highest numbers among EU countries: Germany evacuated 4,100, France 2,600 and the Netherlands 2,500 (Reuters). The UK airlifted 15,000 Afghans in 2021 (UK government).
See Fabrizio Foschini and Jelena Bjelica, Afghan Child Migrants: Italy, the preferred country of transit?, AAN, 6 September 2017. Afghans interviewed in 2026 mentioned how those minors well below the age of majority cross Italy aiming to apply for asylum in Switzerland, while others, already around the age of 18, prefer the less strict admission requirements by Italy.
↑7
This does not include all non-accompanied foreign minors present in the reception system in Italy, but rather only those among them who apply for asylum.
↑8
This makes more complex the comparison of recognition rate at the European level, as such nationally-devised forms of protection are unregulated by the EU and are thus counted as negative decisions in some statistics, such as those by the European Union Agency for Asylum (EUAA).
↑9
This is defined by UNCHR as the route leading migrants from Libya and Egypt to the shores of Greece and Cyprus. Use of this route has been expanding in 2026, especially with an increase in arrivals from Libya to Crete.
Regional and ethnic background also played a role in keeping Afghan communities in Italy fragmented. Hazaras, who constituted the majority of arrivals in the early 2000s, had developed a close-knit community in Rome and even attempted to create associations. However, they had failed to include the newcomer Afghans from other backgrounds, for example a majority of arrivals from the Balkan Route who, increasingly so since 2021 and up to the present days, are Pashtuns.
↑12
Italy has witnessed in the past two decades the burgeoning growth of Bangladeshi and Pakistani diasporas – and now hosts the most numerous in Europe after the UK. Members of these communities are often better positioned than Afghans to access the job market.
↑13
In June 2026, three Afghan labourers were trapped in a vehicle and burnt to death, together with a Pakistani national, by two other Pakistanis who had hired them as strawberry pickers (The Guardian). A fourth Afghan, who managed to escape through the boot and survived with burns, said that they had been threatened for protesting for overdue pay. He said the gangmasters had set the minivan alight after blocking the labourers inside, a scene fully recorded by the fuel station’s surveillance cameras. The labourers had been moved across workplaces in various Italian regions by the same gangmasters and had to themselves pay for their transport. It is possible that the “huge Pakistani mafia.” as the survivor termed it, had decided to set an exemplary punishment, or that a personal dispute had escalated beyond the pale (MeltingPot).
↑14
The near mythical status acquired by Trieste for migrants traveling along the Balkan Route has been further explored in Claudio Minca and Dragan Umek, Trieste is Beautiful at Night’, in Thinking Like a Route: Counter-geographies of informal migration in the Balkans, Claudio Minca and Yolanda Weima (ed), Edward Elgar Publ., 2026.
↑15
Push backs were more frequent in 2019-20. They stopped after the mobilisation of local civil society and a court sentence in January 2021 which deemed that Italy’s pushbacks of migrants to Slovenia were illegal, though occasionally, they are reinstated. For example, four migrants were readmitted from Italy to Slovenia in 2025; see AIDA 2026 update for Slovenia, p25.
↑16
This is correct even though instances of smugglers’ violence against migrants in the city and its surroundings has increased in recent years: in 2025 a Pakistani smuggling network with links in neighbouring Slovenia and Croatia was busted after it had kidnapped and held Indian migrants for ransom in a Trieste flat (Rai News), while in November 2024 an Afghan smuggler was arrested for kidnapping and assaulting two migrants heading to Trieste near Lokev, Slovenia, just a few kilometres before the Italian border (Slovenian Police).
Practical and symbolic initiatives of solidarity with the migrants travelling on the Balkan route are also undertaken, such as field trips to bring humanitarian help to and monitor the situation of migrants in Bosnia or, just recently, the public commemoration of five migrants, most of them Afghans, who had drowned while crossing the river Kupa on the Slovenian-Croatian border at the end of September 2026 (Associated Press).
↑19
Personal communication with asylum personnel in Gorizia, October 2026.
↑20
Since May 2025, Germany has resumed deportations of Afghans back to Kabul. The focus has been on convicted criminals, but recently, some rejected asylum seekers with no criminal record have been included, as well (Reuters). Other EU countries are taking similar steps (New York Times).
↑21
The Dublin Regulation is a series of treaties among EU countries stipulating that asylum procedures are the responsibility of the EU country of first-entry and that asylum seekers must be transferred back there.
↑22
This situation may of course not last forever: some EU countries have recently started to push for Italy to accept Dublin transfers. It seems that after the inauguration of the European Pact on Migration and Asylum in June 2026, such efforts have been more resolute and Austria was able to send back at least four asylum seekers to Italy in August, reportedly following similar moves by Germany and Switzerland (ANSA).
↑23
Non-refoulement, a principle of international law forbidding countries from returning individuals to places where they face the risk of persecution, torture or grave harm, has often been invoked to argue against the readmission of migrants on the Balkan Route to countries where they experience abuse at the hands of security forces and criminal groups and also, as here, against the deportation of Afghan nationals back to Afghanistan.
↑24
A ministerial decree from 5 August 2019 had already identified border and transit areas for the implementation of this accelerated examination of asylum applications; these included Trieste and Gorizia as the only northern provinces in a list featuring mainly coastal areas in southern Italy. In line with this decree, in 2019, the police subjected a few migrants intercepted at a short distance from Slovenia to the border procedure, but attempts at implementing the decree were soon dropped (possibly because informal readmissions to Slovenia took priority back then) and were not revived until the EU Pact came into force.
Afghan Migration To and Through Italy: No place to call home
This week marks 25 years since the U.S.-led invasion of Afghanistan, the beginning of what would become the longest war in U.S. history. After installing a pro-Western government in Kabul in December 2001, U.S. and other NATO troops would remain in the country for the next two decades battling a stubborn insurgency — until a chaotic U.S. withdrawal in August 2021 that saw the Taliban return to power.
“During the 20 years of America’s longest war in Afghanistan, we could clearly see that failure was coming,” says journalist Emran Feroz, just back from a month of reporting in Afghanistan. He says the relative economic and political gains under the Western-backed government were undercut by widespread corruption and violence, particularly in rural Afghanistan. “You had torture prisons next to Burger King and KFC and Starbucks.”
Transcript
This is a rush transcript. Copy may not be in its final form.
AMYGOODMAN: This is Democracy Now!, democracynow.org. I’m Amy Goodman, with Nermeen Shaikh.
NERMEENSHAIKH: This week marks 25 years since the U.S.-led invasion of Afghanistan, the beginning of what would become the longest war in U.S. history. Less than a month after the September 11th World Trade Center attacks, the United States launched airstrikes against Afghanistan. The Taliban government was ousted within months, but the U.S.-led war and occupation would continue for nearly two decades, during which more than 100,000 Afghan civilians were killed, according to the U.N. More than 2,300 U.S. service members died. The U.S. spent trillions of dollars on the war and efforts to build an Afghan government and military, that ultimately collapsed with stunning speed in August 2021.
Today, Afghanistan is facing a deepening humanitarian crisis. Women and girls have been shut out of higher education and face sweeping restrictions on their work, movement and participation in public life.
AMYGOODMAN: Our next guest, Austrian Afghan journalist Emran Feroz, is just back from a month reporting in Afghanistan. His new piece for Truthout is headlined “The War on Afghanistan Was Launched 25 Years Ago. It Still Hasn’t Ended.” He’s joining us from Stuttgart, Germany.
Emran, welcome back to Democracy Now! Why don’t you lay out what you found, as you’ve just returned from Afghanistan? The U.S. bombed Afghanistan when the Taliban were in power, and the Taliban are back a quarter of a century later.
EMRANFEROZ: Hi. Thanks for having me.
So, yes, I spent almost a whole month in Afghanistan, and the thing is that, as I wrote in this piece, I believe the “war on terror” is not over, especially because since the U.S. withdrawal, a lot of airstrikes are still taking place, especially in the last weeks and months. And all these airstrikes are being conducted by the Pakistani military regime, which kind of took over America’s role and is now using the same “war on terror” arguments that we heard for 20 years, again to hit Afghan civilians. And the recent strike just took place a few days ago in the south of the country, close to the Pakistani border. And again, most of the victims were civilians, especially children.
NERMEENSHAIKH: So, Emran, if you could say — you know, a lot of people were surprised by the fact that the Taliban came back to power so quickly. Who was supporting the Taliban in all those years?
EMRANFEROZ: I mean, during the 20 years of America’s longest war in Afghanistan, we could clearly see that failure was coming. The Afghan regime in Kabul, the pro-Western Afghan regime in Kabul, was highly corrupt and was engaging in a war that seemed to be endless because too many people were profiting from it. And this war actually made a lot of people angry and, you know, left them frustrating, and a lot of these people, actually, especially in Afghanistan rural sites, started to support the Taliban again.
But I also want to highlight that a lot of the places that I visited during the last weeks, for example, Bagram Air Base, close to Kabul, were in fact breeding grounds for America’s enemies, because you had this huge prison complex in the middle of the country, which became kind of a Little America. You had torture prisons next to Burger King and KFC and Starbucks, and a lot of young men who vanished there and who never came out, or a lot of people, including Taliban fighters, who were brought there and, in fact, became even more radicalized through the things that happened there.
AMYGOODMAN: In fact, you wrote this piece, just out, headlined “Why Bagram Air Base Remains a Target Five Years After U.S. Exited Afghanistan.” If you can talk about what’s happened to women and girls there now?
EMRANFEROZ: The situation of women and girls is pretty bad in Afghanistan. I mean, it’s — as already mentioned, they have no access to higher education. Also, there is a lot of — like, you know, a lot of problems when it comes to letting them work, allowing them work. And you could clearly see that girls and women in Afghanistan are facing these repressions, and that, actually, unfortunately, the Taliban themselves declared war against them. That’s what at least a lot of Afghan girls and women are going to tell you.
And you see that also a lot of people, for that reason, still try to leave the country. Afghanistan is still producing a lot of refugees, tens of thousands of people who want to leave the country. And especially in the cities, when you talk to people, including my own relatives and friends, they say, “OK, what should we do here? Especially when it comes to the future of our daughters, there is no future here. So we are forced to leave, even if we don’t want to do that.”
And this is, unfortunately, the harsh reality that everyone knows about, including a lot of Taliban officials. And if you talk to them, you will also hear different things. For example, there is kind of a discrepancy between the Taliban leadership in Kabul and the one in Kandahar, which is making the laws. And it seems that, especially in my case, like the things that I experienced, is that a lot of Taliban themselves do not really support these repressions, but they are forced to do it because there is a strict hierarchy, and they fear that they’re going to be split if they start to fight about this.
AMYGOODMAN: Emran Feroz, we want to thank you so much for being with us, Austrian Afghan journalist, author of Graveyard Empire: Four Decades of Wars and Intervention in Afghanistan.
That does it for today’s show. Steal This Story, Please!, the documentary about Democracy Now!, will be viewable online for the first time in an exclusive special event starting Tuesday, October 13th, at 8 p.m. Eastern Time. If you live in the United States and Canada, you can watch the film in your own home and be part of the post-screening Q&A, question and answer, with me and the filmmakers, the Oscar-nominated filmmakers Carl Deal and Tia Lessin. The conversation will be moderated by the Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Maria Hinojosa. To find out more, you can go to StealThisStory.org. You can join us and help support the impact of this film that celebrates the importance of independent media. I’ll also be at Fort Collins and in Boulder at University of Colorado the 26th and 27th of October. I’m Amy Goodman, with Nermeen Shaikh, for Democracy Now!
Afghanistan, 25 Years Later: Journalist Emran Feroz on the Legacy of “America’s Longest War”
Pregnancy is often described as a time of joy, anticipation and preparation, but for many women in Afghanistan, getting through those nine months can feel like an obstacle course. In this instalment of the Daily Hustle, AAN’s Hamid Pakteen speaks to Zarghuna, a 38-year-old mother in Kabul, about her latest pregnancy. With her husband stranded abroad, no midwife at the local clinic and little money to spare, even routine antenatal care became difficult to arrange. Her story shows how economic hardship, the Islamic Emirate’s restrictions on women’s mobility and a strained healthcare system put women’s lives in danger.
I’m 38 years old and live with my four children in a small house in Kabul’s Deh Sabz district. My daughters are ten and five, my older son is eight and my youngest is just over a year old. My husband used to be the head teacher at a private high school during the Islamic Republic, but he lost his job when the Taliban came to power. He spent several months looking for another job in Kabul, but when nothing turned up, he decided to go to Iran for work. There, he found a job on a farm. He didn’t earn much, but it was enough for him to live on and send money home every month.
The last time my husband came to Kabul, I was already pregnant with my youngest son. He told me he was planning to go into business with an Iranian he’d met at the farm and that they wanted to start a vegetable trading business in Dubai. He promised me he’d keep coming home every three months and would be there when it was time for me to deliver the baby.
But after he got to Dubai, he lost his passport and his tazkira (Afghan ID card). His visa later expired and, without a passport, he hasn’t been able to renew it or come home. Getting new documents is taking a long time. In the meantime, he’s been picking up odd jobs, mostly night shifts at Dubai’s vegetable market. He also lost money trying to get the vegetable business started and ended up in debt. Most of what he earns now goes towards his own living expenses and paying those debts, so there isn’t much left to send us.
Making ends meet
When I got married, I was 20 and was just about to finish the tenth grade. I hadn’t been able to go to school during the first Emirate, so I’d been trying to catch up and really didn’t want to stop. But my husband was against my going to school. He said that, since he was a teacher himself, he would teach me at home instead. I agreed, and he kept his word. After we married, we would sit together at home and he would teach me different school subjects.
I didn’t know it at the time, but those lessons later gave me a way to earn some money. When what my husband sent home was no longer enough to support us, I used what I’d learned from him to start a small school in our house. I mostly teach girls from the neighbourhood, teaching the Holy Quran and some school subjects.
I have about 40 students and ask each of them for 100 afghanis (USD 1.55) a month. But people around here don’t have much money, so they can’t always pay. I don’t pressure them. I just ask them to pay when they can. I know which families are struggling and, if they really can’t afford it, I don’t take anything from them. The little I earn helps cover some of our household expenses.
When I started to feel unwell
I was happy to be having another baby and, at first, everything seemed fine, so I didn’t go to a doctor. But as the weeks went by, I started to feel unwell. I was teaching in the mornings and spending the rest of the day doing housework and looking after the children. I was tired and thirsty all the time and sometimes I felt dizzy.
By the time I was in the third month of my pregnancy, I knew that I had to go to the clinic. There used to be a midwife at the clinic near our home in Deh Sabz, but when I went there, they said they didn’t have one anymore. I’d have to go to the government hospital or a private clinic in the city centre to see a gynaecologist. That made things much more difficult. Since the Taliban came to power, I can’t go out without a mahram (close male relative) and in any case, I’ve never gone into the city alone in the all the years I’ve been married. My husband told me to stop teaching for a while, rest and look after myself. He said he’d call his brother, who lives next door, and ask him to take me to the doctor.
So my brother-in-law took the day off work to take me to a private hospital in the city centre about half an hour’s drive from our house. The doctor there was a very nice woman. She did an ultrasound, listened to the baby’s heartbeat and ordered blood tests. She said I was very weak and anaemic and that the amount of water, which she called the amniotic fluid, around the baby was low. She gave me some medicine, told me to eat better and asked me to come back every month so she could keep an eye on the baby and me.
When care is hard to reach
But going to the doctor every month was easier said than done. First, I had to find the money to pay for transport and the doctor’s fee. Then I had to find someone to look after the children and a mahram who could go with me. Our home is far from the city centre and I have to walk part of the way to the main road and then take a taxi the rest of the way. I was afraid the Taliban might stop me and ask where I was going and why I didn’t have a mahram with me. Also, in our culture, a woman doesn’t usually go to the hospital, the market or into the city alone. So if I needed to see a doctor, I had to find a male relative who could go with me. The only person nearby who could take me was my brother-in-law, but he has his own family and responsibilities, and I didn’t feel comfortable asking him to take me to the doctor every month. So even though the doctor had told me to come back every month, I didn’t manage to see her again until I was seven months along.
By then, I’d become very weak. I was sick to my stomach all the time and couldn’t manage the housework anymore. My parents live in Kapisa, so they weren’t nearby to look after me or help with the children. It was obvious that I needed to go back to the doctor. Finally, I asked my husband to speak to his brother and ask him to take me. I felt embarrassed having to ask my brother-in-law for help, but by then I was so weak that I didn’t really have a choice.
I could tell something was wrong as soon as I saw the look on the doctor’s face. She scolded me: “I told you that you needed to come every month. You’re severely anaemic and dehydrated, and the amniotic fluid around the baby is very low.” She said that if I hadn’t come when I had, I might have lost the baby. Her words really shook me. All sorts of thoughts were running through my mind. What if things had gone badly wrong and I’d lost the baby or even my own life? Would my husband ever forgive me for losing the baby?
The doctor told me I needed to follow the treatment she was giving me exactly and eat better so that both the baby and I would be stronger. She prescribed a lot of medicine, as well as injections and IV fluids. She warned me that if I stayed this weak and anaemic, I could have serious problems when it came time to give birth. She told me that my body wasn’t strong enough for a normal delivery and that I’d probably need a Caesarean section. This time I took her seriously. I started the treatment and I’d walk to the nearby clinic every day with my son to get the injections and IV fluids, but by then I was so weak that even that short walk was hard for me.
As my due date drew closer, I got more and more tired. Walking became increasingly difficult and I started having pains in my stomach and lower back. I’d already decided that I’d go to a government hospital to deliver because I couldn’t afford to go private. I’d delivered my other children at a private hospital because my husband’s job at the school came with health insurance. But that isn’t an option anymore. A Caesarean section at a private hospital could cost between 20,000 and 30,000 afghanis [USD 310-466] and I didn’t have that kind of money. Even the two times I’d gone to the doctor during my pregnancy, I had to borrow the money from my brother-in-law.
My husband was still away and I couldn’t go to the hospital alone. I also needed some help with the children and housework after I delivered, so I asked my mother to come from Kapisa and stay with me.
The night I went into labour
It was early in the evening when I went into labour. At first, I didn’t think much of the pain, but as the night went on, the pain got stronger and stronger. I woke my mother and son and told them what was happening. They ran to the neighbour’s house to ask them to look after the children while we were gone and called my brother-in-law, who went to the main road to find us a car.
Meanwhile, my labour pains were getting stronger and my mother kept telling me everything would be alright, but I kept thinking about my husband and if only he were there to hold my hand and take me to the hospital. He’d been there for the birth of all our children; this was the first time he wasn’t, and in that moment, I felt his absence more than ever. Eventually, my brother-in-law found a car, and we set off for the government hospital in the city with his wife and my mother. By the time we reached the hospital, the pain was unbearable. A midwife examined me and said I was already in active labour. I was terrified. This pain was nothing like I’d experienced in my earlier pregnancies.
Waiting to be seen
The hours that followed were very difficult. We waited for a long time and no one seemed to be paying much attention to us. I could see people who’d arrived hours after us being taken inside while we were still waiting. My brother-in-law went from one doctor to another trying to get someone to attend to me. Finally, a doctor came and told me time was running out and I needed an operation. I didn’t want a Caesarean and kept hoping I’d be able to have a natural delivery. But the pain was unbearable and the doctor told me the labour had gone on too long and that unless I had a Caesarean section, the baby would die.
I was exhausted and in pain, worried about the baby and thinking about my three children at home and my husband being away. Everything was going through my mind at once. The way the doctors behaved made it even harder. They started yelling at me and using harsh words. One doctor told me that if I wasn’t going to have the operation, I should go somewhere else and stop wasting their time. How could a woman say something like that to another woman in distress?
In the end, I agreed to the operation. Then there was a lot of paperwork, with many forms to fill out and sign. I had to sign a paper saying that I consented to the Caesarean section and that, if anything happened to me during the operation, the doctors would not be held responsible. I was in so much pain, and the paperwork took a long time. The doctor told my brother-in-law to go out and buy the supplies they needed for the surgery. Once he came back with them and the paperwork was complete, they took me to the operating theatre.
When I came round afterwards, I was still very weak and had some bleeding, so the doctors kept me in the ward for two days and two nights. Once I started to feel a little better, they told me I could go home and gave me some medicine to keep taking at home.
I remember holding my baby and feeling relieved that he was safe. After everything that had happened, that was what mattered most to me.
Looking back
I’ll never forget the way I was treated in the government hospital. These problems aren’t new. They existed during the Republic too, but they’ve got worse since the Taliban took over because more people are using government hospitals now that families have less money. At the government hospital, patients aren’t treated with respect. They make you feel like you have no value. If something happens to a patient, there’s no one to answer for it. To get better treatment, you need money or connections. If you have neither, no one will speak for you.
Getting medical care has also become more difficult where I live. There used to be a midwife at the clinic near our home in Deh Sabz and because the clinic is close by, I could have gone there on my own for my monthly check-ups. But there isn’t a midwife there anymore. That meant that whenever I needed to see a midwife or gynaecologist, I had to travel into the city centre, and for that I needed both a mahram to go with me and money for the taxi.
People go to government hospitals because they can’t afford private care, but once you’re there, almost everything except seeing the doctor costs money. You have to buy your own medicine and if you need tests or other examinations, you often have to pay for those too. During the Republic, some of these things were free in government hospitals. You still had to buy medicine outside, but now patients have to pay for much more. At the same time, people have less money than they did during the Republic, so even small costs are difficult for many families to manage.
Sometimes I still wonder whether things might have been different if it had been easier for me to get care. At every stage, there was something else to arrange, someone else I had to depend on or another expense we had to find the money for. Somehow, we managed each time. But I often think about how easily things could have gone the other way.
Edited by Roxanna Shapour and Kate Clark
Nine Months Under the Emirate: One woman’s pregnancy in Kabul
In June 2026, HAMRAH Network published Taliban Madrasas: Ideological Consolidation, Gender Persecution and Afghanistan’s Future Stability, which documented the scale of the Taliban’s madrasa expansion. Drawing on ground-level fieldwork conducted in Kandahar and Bamyan provinces between March and May 2026 and interviews with more than 34 individuals with direct knowledge of the education sector, the report reveals an educational transformation of a speed and scale without precedent in Afghanistan’s modern history. In this Expert Voice, the report’s author, Timor Sharan,* presents its key findings and analyses their significance for Afghan society, regional stability and international engagement.
The full report, including sourcing, methodology and the HAMRAH Network’s recommendations, is available here.
An unprecedented transformation
Before August 2021, there were approximately 5,000 madrasas that formally registered across Afghanistan, while many more functioned informally without state regulation. In September 2025, the Taliban’s de facto Ministry of Education reported over 23,000 registered religious education institutions, with more than 3.65 million students – talib al-ilm(seekers of knowledge) – enrolled. This near-fivefold increase in four years represents not merely an expansion, but a wholesale restructuring of Afghanistan’s religious education system, with a knock-on effect on state-run schools.
Registered religious education institutions now outnumber Afghanistan’s more than 18,000 public and private schools (see Table 1 below). Against this backdrop, the Taliban established only 276 new public schools since they have retaken power, despite not all children having access to a school – a disparity that underscores the extent to which religious education has been deliberately prioritised while the public school system is reduced to a residual function.
Much of this growth has been achieved not by building new institutions from scratch, but through what might be described as a “franchise model”:[1] bringing pre-existing private, informal and community-based madrasas under Taliban administrative control in exchange for government salaries, formal certification and access to state resources. At the same time, the Taliban have systematically converted public education infrastructure. Documented cases include Abdul Haji Habibi High School in Khost province – one of the most modern secondary schools in southeastern Afghanistan – converted into a madrasa in 2022, displacing approximately 6,000 students and 130 teachers. Across all 34 provinces, teacher training institutes were shuttered and converted into jihadi madrasas, while the Ministry of Education simultaneously abolished its Teacher Training Department entirely.
Metric
2023-2024
Sept 2025
Standard madrasas
19,669 registered institutions
22,972 registered institutions (in which 27,379 students were provided with accommodation and food).
Dar ul-Huffaz
1,277 (with accommodation capacity for 1,650talib al-Ilmapproved in 2023)
Data on the total number of Dar ul-Huffaz centres is unavailable; however, 1,800 talib al-ilm were reported enrolled, of whom 300 are girls.
Dar-ul-Ulooms
115
Data unavailable
Orphanages (with religious teaching)
39
9,000 orphans receiving religious education in madrasas
Madrasas in prison
Data unavailable
92
Total madrasa enrolment
3,687,200
Exact data unavailable. The IEA is reported to have enrolled 29,013 new students (grade 1-14) in 2025-26.
Jihadi madrasa enrolment
21,000
26,000
Table 1: National Scale of Madrasa Expansion (2023-2025). Source: Ministry of Education, Summary Report on the Implementation Progress of the Ministry of Education’s Operational Plan Achievements, September 2025.NB: Figures should be treated as minimum estimates; this report’s provincial findings indicate significant undercounting. Official data do not distinguish between newly constructed madrasas, formerly private institutions brought under Taliban registration and repurposed public facilities.
A layered architecture of ideological control
The Taliban have developed a layered religious education infrastructure comprising several distinct institution types which together form an interlocking system of religious instruction, politicised ideological socialisation, leadership reproduction and societal control – see Table 1.
Standard madrasas – the largest category by number – provide mass religious conditioning through a curriculum rooted in the Dars-e Nizami tradition, with its heavy emphasis on Quranic memorisation, Hadith studies and Hanafi jurisprudence. Dar ul-Huffaz centres specialise in Quranic memorisation and typically enrol children at a very young age – they are the earliest point of entry into the broader madrasa system. Dar ul-Ulooms are seminaries, providing advanced theological training for the future clerics, judges, muftis and religious administrators who will staff Taliban governance structures for the next generation. Female madrasas have become, since the Taliban’s ban on girls’ secondary and further education, the only remaining legal education option for girls above grade six.
The most politically significant category is the jihadi madrasa. Established by decree of Supreme Leader Hibatullah Akhundzada and administered through a special Kandahar-based directorate that reports directly to him – in other words, outside the normal Ministry of Education chain of command – these institutions function in practice as screening and recruitment mechanisms for the Taliban’s administrative, religious and security structures. The acting Minister of Higher Education, Neda Muhammad Nadim and former Minister of Refugees Khalil al-Rahman Haqqani have both publicly called for madrasas to instil jihadi and military concepts. Officially, the Taliban acknowledge one jihadi madrasa per province. HAMRAH’s fieldwork in Kandahar alone documented 23.
Ultimate doctrinal authority flows from the Supreme Leader’s office through a newly established General Directorate of Religious Affairs in Kandahar. The Supreme Leader directly appoints senior administrators of jihadi madrasas, sets doctrinal parameters and exercises final approval over the curriculum. This governance architecture – the Supreme Leader holding doctrinal authority, ministries of education and higher education managing operations, ulama councils enforcing local conformity and the Ministry for the Promotion of Virtue and Prevention of Vice monitoring compliance – is designed for durability. The Generate Directorate of the Religious Affairs in Kandahar manages the operation of Jihadi schools.
What the fieldwork found: Kandahar andBamyan
HAMRAH’s provincial fieldwork illuminates both the scale of Taliban madrasa expansion and its unevenness with findings in two provinces telling markedly different stories about the same national project.
In Kandahar – the Taliban’s ideological and administrative heartland – the Provincial Directorate of Education recorded 1,522 madrasas operating across the province in 2026, with an estimated enrolment of approximately 608,800 students. Kandahar City alone accounts for 340 madrasas and approximately 136,000 enrolled students – nearly one quarter of total provincial enrolment. Researchers verified much of this data through field visits to Kandahar City and four surrounding districts and identified at least 23 Dar ul-Ulooms and jihadi madrasas in the city and its immediate surroundings alone, against the Taliban’s official acknowledgement of one jihadi madrasa per province.
In Bamyan – a predominantly Hazara and Shia Muslim province with historically high rates of girls’ enrolment in schools and a history of anti-Taliban resistance – the transformation has been starker in relative terms. Total enrolment in the province’s madrasas (all Sunni) stood at approximately 6,972 students in 2023. By 2025, that figure had roughly doubled to approximately 12,800. More than 2,500 students now graduate annually from these religious institutions, compared with fewer than 1,800 from public schools – down from more than 4,000 before 2021 (see Table 2).
Indicator
2023
2024-25
Public madrasas
84
136 (incl 16 not yet registered)
Female madrasas
1 public
1 public, 1 private
Dar ul-Ulooms
1 public, 1 private
1 public, 1 private
Dar ul-Huffaz
10
Data unavailable
Jihadi madrasas
0
1 (capacity 1,000 students)
Total madrasa students
6,972 (3,401 male; 3,571 female)
~12,800 (est.)
Annual madrasa graduates
Not recorded
>2,500
Annual public school graduates
>4,000 (pre-2021)
~1,800
Table 2: Madrasa Expansion in Bamyan Province; Sources: Bamyan Provincial Directorate of Education (2023 and 2025 data); HAMRAH Network fieldwork.
Bamyan also illustrates a hardening posture toward non-Sunni communities. In early 2026, students at Bamyan University were told that dormitory accommodation would only be available to Sunni Muslim students following the Hanafi school. A December 2025 report by Rawadari documented the Taliban’s use of coercion and financial incentives to convert Ismaili Shia communities in four districts of Badakhshan Province. These are not isolated incidents but early indicators of a hardening posture toward non-Sunni communities as the Taliban’s power consolidates.
The evidence from Kandahar and Bamyan points to a coordinated effort to rapidly expand the madrasa network, which has become a central instrument of the Taliban’s project to reshape and penetrate Afghan society. They have subordinated madrasas in these provinces to their administrative framework, repurposing them and establishing new ones as instruments of movement-building, state consolidation, enforcement of their decrees and the cultivation of popular legitimacy and support. In Kandahar, their heartland, madrasa expansion is vast and has deepened the Taliban’s reach into society. In Bamyan, it is being used to reach into non-Sunni communities and extend Taliban dominance, with plans to bring Shia madrasas under state control too.
FinancingMadrasas
The full cost of the Taliban’s madrasa expansion programme is difficult to establish; no public disclosure of expenditure has been made. The World Bank reported in 2025 that education spending accounted for 18.8 per cent of the total Taliban budget – approximately USD 675 million – the second-largest sector after security. A 2023 AAN report found that 95 per cent of the education budget went on salaries alone. Read alongside the Taliban’s own data – 87,592 religious education posts advertised nationwide, with recruitment of 50,000 personnel underway in 2025 – the implication is clear: a substantial and growing share of the Ministry of Education’s budget is directed to salaries for religious teachers, madrasa instructors and administrative personnel.
Beyond the state budget, the Taliban draw on several additional funding streams. The Supreme Leader maintains a significant discretionary budget, which funds madrasa construction and management outside normal appropriations processes. Coercive fundraising targeting private individuals and businesses has become increasingly common. As one businessman in Kandahar told HAMRAH researchers: “Paying for a madrasa’s salaries, food and building costs is the price of getting things done under the Emirate.” Sustaining and funding a madrasa has become an informal way to secure contracts, licences, or favourable treatment from authorities – conferring religious legitimacy alongside political advantage. Some of the largest madrasas in Kandahar documented in this study were linked to key Taliban figures, including Mullah Abdul Ghani Baradar, who established al-Jamiah al-Islamiyyah Dar-ul Uloom Kandahar following the Taliban’s return to power, from which approximately 1,000 students graduate annually.
Religious taxation provides another funding stream. The Emirate takes what in most Muslim countries are private charitable donations as state taxes. They are ushr – a tithe of approximately ten per cent levied on the harvest – and zakat – a tax on increases in livestock. In 2023, the Taliban reported collecting approximately one billion dollars through these taxes – funds flowing directly to the Supreme Leader’s office for distribution at his discretion. The scale of investment required to sustain a network of 23,000 madrasas cannot be explained by the Taliban’s domestic revenue base alone and the sources, mechanisms and governance of madrasa financing remain inadequately documented.
The institutionalisation of gender persecution
The madrasa network has become the primary infrastructure through which the Taliban’s gender persecution is being institutionalised and internalised. The system of gender discrimination – characterised by leading human rights organisations and a growing number of governments as gender apartheid – is being encoded in doctrine, enforced through surveillance and deliberately designed to outlast the current political moment.
A survey involving 8,245 women across all 34 provinces found that 56 per cent identified the Taliban’s ban on girls’ secondary education as the primary reason families enrolled daughters in madrasas.[2] Today, between 1.4 and 2.2 million girls are barred from attending school beyond primary level.
Field interviews documented that female madrasa students are consistently taught that men are permitted four wives, that women should accept and not question their husbands’ remarriage and that early marriage – particularly to fighters and those involved in jihad – is to be sought and celebrated. One girl, interviewed in Kandahar, noted that three of her friends had already married at age sixteen.[3] Physical compliance with Taliban gender norms is enforced within madrasa settings with notable rigour: girls are monitored not only for hijab observance, but for the colour of their nail varnish, the shape of their eyebrows and the colour of their clothing. This pervasive surveillance of female bodies normalises a culture of control that extends well beyond madrasa walls.
The social consequences are immediate and visible beyond the classroom. Field interviews documented stories of brothers pressuring sisters to marry early and abandon education, armed with religious authority derived from their madrasa instruction (see the report below). Children are being taught that their loyalty to the Emirate takes precedence over family bonds and that monitoring and reporting the behaviour of parents and relatives is not a betrayal but an obligation. The report also documents parents withdrawing sons from madrasas specifically out of fear that their children had become informants within their own households. As one community elder in Kandahar recounted, after speaking with the head of provincial intelligence: “Be aware that we now have informants in each one of your households.” The madrasa system, the elder observed, was the ideal training ground for this kind of conformity.
The long-term implications are profound. A generation educated exclusively within this framework will inherit and enforce a social order in which gender persecution is not policy but doctrine – normalised, naturalised and sanctified by religious authority. This is, by design, self-perpetuating.
The ideological threat
In July 2022, following criticism from ulama regarding the ban on girls’ education, Supreme Leader Akhundzada warned that criticism of Taliban authorities was “not permissible” in Islam, framing dissent as fitna – a state of social disorder incompatible with Muslim duty, to be eradicated by all means necessary. The acting Minister of Higher Education stated that those who undermine Taliban order “by speech, pen, or in practice” are considered wajeb ul-qatl – permitted to be killed. Meanwhile, our research found that non-Hanafi religious minorities are increasingly characterised in madrasa teaching as guilty of bid’aa – illegitimate innovation from the correct path of Islam – and legitimate candidates for conversion. Dissenters, women and religious minorities inside Afghanistan are the first targets of a doctrine that treats disagreement as a religious offence.
The primary concern is not that jihadi madrasas are systematically producing battlefield combatants – available evidence does not support that conclusion at this stage. The more consequential threat is ideological: the annual production of tens of thousands of graduates formed within a framework that treats religious authority, political loyalty and militant identity as inseparable.
The full report, including sourcing, methodology and the HAMRAH Network’s recommendations, is available here.
*Timor Sharan is Executive Director of HAMRAH Network and a former Senior Policy Analyst for Afghanistan at the International Crisis Group (ICG). He is the author of Inside Afghanistan: Political Networks, Informal Order and State Disruption.
Organization for Policy Research and Development Studies (DROPS)/BISHNAW, Community Tracking Poll on Women’s Experiences and the Shift toward Madrasa Enrolment in Afghanistan, 2024.
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Statistical modelling released by UN Women projects that the ongoing ban will trigger a 25 per cent increase in the rate of child marriage, putting 37.5 per cent of all Afghan girls at immediate risk of forced underage marriage.
A Parallel Education System: The Taliban’s madrasa expansion and its implications for gender, society and regional security
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
