The Afghanistan withdrawal left thousands of U.S. weapons behind. Now, they’re in the Taliban’s hands.
Nearly five years after President Biden’s disastrous withdrawal from Afghanistan, American-funded military equipment left behind is making terrorists more lethal across the border in Pakistan.
00:00
09:47
I recently traveled to Islamabad to meet with military boss Field Marshal Asim Munir to discuss the conflicts raging across the region, including more than 1,000 terrorist attacks in Pakistan last year — it’s now more affected by terrorism than any other country in the world is. Joining me on the trip was Representative Ryan Zinke. Neither of us approached the trip with illusions about the challenges of the region. Zinke is a former Navy SEAL Commander. I previously worked as an embedded adviser on an Afghan-government counternarcotics team in Helmand Province and occasionally lectured in the Afghanistan-Pakistan program at the U.S. National Defense University.
Field Marshal Munir predicted that Pakistan’s fighting with both terrorists and the Taliban government in Kabul is likely to grow. Last February, a suicide bomber attacked a mosque in Islamabad, killing 31 and wounding more than 200. A few weeks later, Pakistan responded by bombing Kabul in an attack that killed nearly 300. The Field Marshal also made clear his frustration that Pakistani counterterrorism forces are confronting the Pakistani Taliban (TTP) — fighters equipped with American-origin night-vision devices and sophisticated sniper weapons left over from the chaotic Biden pull-out.
Congressman Zinke and I both sit on the House Foreign Affairs Committee Foreign Military Sales (FMS) Task Force. The FMS process is mired in red tape that can make partner nations wait years to acquire U.S. weapons systems they’ve already paid for. The consequences are visible in Pakistan: China provided 81 percent of Pakistan’s major arms imports between 2020 and 2024. When America cannot deliver, we drive potential partners toward Russia and China, while weakening our industrial base. During our meetings in Islamabad in July, Munir noted a bitter asymmetry — that he has been unable to purchase U.S. attack helicopters to defend against terrorist forces using U.S. weapons to attack his troops and police.
This is not simply an allegation from Islamabad. United Nations monitors have reported that the TTP possesses NATO-caliber weapons obtained in Afghanistan and that its access to night-vision equipment has increased the lethality of attacks on Pakistani border posts.
The equipment is part of the dangerous military inheritance of the Afghan collapse. According to the Department of Defense inspector general, $7.12 billion in American-funded military equipment remained in the former Afghan government’s inventory when it fell in 2021. This was principally materiel previously transferred to Afghan security forces; departing American troops removed or destroyed nearly all the major systems they used directly.
More than 316,000 weapons, including specialized sniper rifles, remained in Afghanistan, along with approximately 42,000 pieces of specialized equipment, including night-vision, surveillance, biometric, and positioning devices. The Afghan air force had roughly 40 American-funded UH-60 Black Hawk helicopters, and the Taliban captured and returned several to service. Those aircraft are not being used in the terrorist attacks now confronting Pakistan, but their presence illustrates the extraordinary scale of the military arsenal that the Taliban now control. The condition and precise disposition of this arsenal remain uncertain, but there is now mounting evidence that some of the equipment captured after the collapse has migrated into terrorist hands.
00:00
02:00
During America’s war, the Afghan Taliban exploited sanctuaries in Pakistan to attack Afghanistan. Today, the conflict has partly reversed direction: The TTP operates from sanctuaries in Afghanistan and mounts increasingly lethal attacks inside Pakistan.
The TTP and Afghan Taliban are distinct but closely connected organizations. Their relationship operates through the Pashtun belt straddling a permeable border, where tribal, familial, and commercial ties long predate the modern frontier.
President Trump’s strong rapport with Munir — they met in person twice last year and speak frequently — creates an opening to broaden cooperation. The United States should negotiate a tailored counterterrorism and security-assistance framework, with Pakistan focused on mutually defined threats, particularly the TTP and ISIS-K. Washington should streamline access to carefully selected night-fighting equipment, intelligence and surveillance support, counter-drone systems, and border-monitoring capabilities. Such cooperation must be mission-specific, rigorously vetted, and subject to strong end-use monitoring. It should be conditioned on measurable Pakistani counterterrorism cooperation and structured to prevent diversion or misuse. It should also be limited to capabilities that do not materially alter the conventional military balance with India.
Congress must also confront the underlying equipment problem. The No Equipment Left Behind Act of 2026, for example, would require the Pentagon to prepare for the possibility that a partner government receiving American equipment could collapse, so a debacle like Biden’s Taliban weapons bonanza doesn’t happen again.
A more capable TTP threatens more than Pakistan. It strengthens a regional terrorist network in which the TTP, al-Qaeda, ISIS-K, and other groups maintain overlapping networks, compete for recruits, and exploit many of the same ungoverned spaces. Instability along the Afghan-Pakistani border also carries obvious dangers in a nuclear-armed country. Counterterrorism should be the beginning of renewed engagement with Pakistan, not its outer limit.
Pakistan’s 250 million people make it the fifth-most populous country in the world. Its relatively young population — about 60 percent of Pakistanis are younger than 30 — means that it will probably grow in economic importance. It’s also home to immense mineral wealth; a high-end estimate of $8 trillion of copper, gold, and critical technology minerals lie in Pakistan’s mountains. In September of last year, the U.S. and Pakistan announced a $500 million mining agreement, the first of its kind between the two nations, although actual production is still likely years away. By comparison, China is already actively mining in Pakistan but doing little value-add processing in the country as it prefers to ship bulk material straight back home. The challenge is that much of the mineral wealth downstream is located in the same border regions undergoing regular terrorist attacks by Baloch militants. So far, there is no evidence that left-behind American-origin weapons have been used in attacks on mineral projects, but this region borders Afghanistan, and if those weapons spread more widely, they could make an already dangerous operating environment even harder to secure.
The question is whether Pakistan can establish enough security and stability for American companies to invest, mine, and process minerals there. Surging demand for copper in an increasingly electrified world and critical minerals needed for the AI supercomputing race make Pakistan enticing. Biden’s $7 billion blunder leaving weapons to the Taliban certainly complicates any decision to invest in the region.
The central lesson is not just about cleaning up the past administration’s mess. It is that security is a necessary prerequisite of economic engagement. Terrorists may kill people and damage buildings, but their real target is the stability of society and government. America’s Pakistan policy should therefore begin with counterterrorism, but extend to the investments, trade, technology, and mineral partnerships that give both countries a stake in a growing, safe, and prosperous Pakistan.
Biden’s $7 Billion Taliban Weapons Tab Is Still Coming Due
Even in the face of appalling repression, girls yearn to fulfil their educational potential. We must set up a global fund to help them
Next week marks the fifth anniversary of the takeover of Afghanistan by the Taliban as US coalition troops were evacuated from the country. That’s five years for the terrorists to have consolidated their grip, so now is a good time to reflect on what the “coalition of the willing” left behind.
Through vindictive edict after edict, these five years have brought an ever-escalating repression of Afghan girls and women – with far too little done by any outside authority to speak up or stand up against the most egregious denial of girls’ rights in the world today.
Barely reported was the shocking massacre in June by troops who fired on a group of women’s rights protesters as they demonstrated against girls’ exclusion from education and the enforcement of strict dress codes. They were marching under the banner “Azadi”, meaning “freedom”. Two people, including a young boy, were shot dead and several were injured.
In the most medieval of ways, the Taliban are also imposing even harsher laws to legitimise child marriage and provide legal exemption for domestic violence perpetrated by husbands, including against school-age girls.
According to UN observers, these girls, often sold into marriage or forced to become child brides, are victims of a new form of crime: gender apartheid. Historians will look back and ask why it is that, after landing more than 1 million coalition troops, suffering more than 3,500 deaths and 23,000 injuries and spending in excess of $1tn, we have been unable to prevent the Taliban destroying the most basic of rights. But perhaps more important, and with the Taliban entrenched in Kabul and religious leaders regularly sending out instructions from Kandahar, the question for now is: what can we do immediately to improve the lives of girls and women?
Can we help them fulfil their potential? Globally, the proportion of women aged 20-24 who were married before 18 has declined over the past decade, and Unicef suggests at least 25m child marriages that could have involved school-age brides have been prevented. Yet an estimated 12 million girls under 18 are still married off each year when they could be at school.
The issue is acute in the Afghanistan the coalition left behind, where girls are banned from secondary schooling and Afghan women are banned from university, public sector employment and even work with NGOs and charities. They are forbidden to travel or to enter many public places, from parks to restaurants, unless accompanied. And with the Taliban confident that they can act with impunity, a dozen recent anti-girl, anti-women injunctions are tightening their grip. In one recent case, a 15-year-old Afghan girl is reported to have been killed, along with her mother, by a Taliban official after he tried to abduct her for a forced marriage.
It is appalling, and it does speak to the particular brutality of the Taliban. Pakistan’s Sindh province, by contrast, has enacted one of the strongest legal frameworks in the developing world against child marriage, criminalising marriage under 18 and introducing penalties for those who facilitate it.
Bangladesh, too, has enacted new laws. A stronger birth registration system has made it harder to conceal a girl’s age, closing off a common pathway into early marriage. At the same time, programmes providing small-scale financial support to poor families have enabled girls to remain in education. Save the Children reports that in one programme in Bangladesh, the offer of financial support helped more than 1,000 girls stay in school and avoid early marriage. Child marriage is not simply a cultural practice, as often portrayed. It is also driven by poverty, as much as weak enforcement of the law.
There are “child marriage-free zones” in parts of Pakistan and Bangladesh, where young people come together to support any school friend who is being married off against her will. Young people become known as “wedding busters” because of their willingness to intervene. With assistance and will, so much is possible.
It is no accident that the Taliban have focused so much attention not just on denying women rights but specifically on denying them an education, because they know, as we do, that schooling is the most potent enabler. Across the world, it is the single most powerful protection against early marriage. Organisations such as Girls Not Brides have established that every additional year a girl spends in secondary education significantly reduces the likelihood that she will be married as a child.
If we could open the doors to quality schooling, ensure girls had access to safe spaces and provide financial support for their families, tens of thousands more could get that education. Even in Afghanistan, that is no pipe dream. Through Unicef and Education Cannot Wait, and with secret, on-the-ground support, girls are learning in unconventional ways: often online, sometimes in underground schools or in family homes, unseen by the authorities.
But there is so much more to be done, not least because thousands of girls have had to leave the country to obtain schooling, and with tension rising between Afghanistan and Pakistan, one favoured route out of the country is fast closing.
Britain’s home secretary, Shabana Mahmood, has announced that under the new immigration and asylum bill, there will be two routes under a refugee resettlement scheme for students that could help girls get the education they have been denied. The first is through recognised charities sponsoring girls coming to the UK. The second is through colleges and universities offering scholarships.
That’s good, but we must go further. I believe a fund must now be set up in support of Afghan girls who are threatened with being married off against their will. It should offer them bursaries to continue their education, if necessary outside their home country. And as UN special envoy for education, I am happy to work with any charity or educational institution that wants to assist girls in defence of their human rights.
It may be a small gesture, but five years after they were condemned to Taliban rule, isn’t it time to truly support all the girls who risk their freedom and their lives for an education, and the hope of a meaningful existence? They yearn for things we take for granted. It is our moral duty to help them.
Gordon Brown is the UN’s special envoy for global education and was UK prime minister from 2007 to 2010
On Thursday 10 September, join Hugh Muir and Gordon Brown to discuss the intricate connections between global instability and civic decline, as explored in Brown’s new book, The Future Starts With Us
Book tickets here or at guardian.live
After five brutal years of Taliban rule, Afghan women and girls need our help – and I have a plan
It’s five years this month since the chaotic retreat of US forces from Kabul. The Nato-backed invasion and occupation of Afghanistan, launched after the 11 September 2001 terrorist attacks on New York City and Washington DC, is now widely regarded as a failure. It cost the lives of more than 2,400 US and 450 British troops, and tens of thousands of civilians (the exact number is unknown). Although al-Qaida terrorists were routed, their Taliban hosts reimposed repressive, misogynistic Islamist rule after regaining power in 2021. Afghanistan became a byword for ill-considered western interventionism and nation-building. It was the archetypal “forever war”, a phrase first coined during Vietnam.
If this cautionary tale had any lasting value, it was as a deterrent to politicians and generals tempted to rashly embark on open-ended conflicts without just cause, defined, achievable aims, and an exit strategy. Dismayingly, the forever war lesson had to be learned all over again in Iraq, which the US and UK invaded in 2003 and departed, having caused huge harm for scant benefit, in 2011. “Never again!” was the passionate cry at the time and since. And yet, it seems, the same disastrous pattern is now repeating after Donald Trump’s incomprehensibly foolish decision to attack Iran. A war he termed a “little excursion” is entering its sixth month and has been escalating rapidly. It, too, has a forever feel.
The video player is currently playing an ad.
That this nightmare is happening again defies all reason. How can it be? Immediate causes of the war aside, answers may be found in persistent US exaggerations and misconceptions about the level and extent of external threats, mixed up with political dishonesty, national hubris, naivety and misplaced idealism. Recalling the harrowing US experience in Afghanistan, Carter Malkasian, a National War College professor who served as a civilian adviser to US forces in Helmand and Kabul, suggests the basic premise for keeping troops in Afghanistan for 20 years – a belief the country would otherwise revert to being a safe haven for international terrorism – was fatally flawed.
“Nothing of the sort occurred. Over the past five years, not a single act of terrorism against the US was carried out by a group based in Afghanistan,” Malkasian wrote. “Washington spent roughly $1tn on the war. More than 775,000 American service members were deployed … all to defend against a threat that turned out to have been exaggerated.
“Five years on, the greatest danger is not that a terrorist safe haven might once again emerge in Afghanistan. A graver threat comes from the risk of collective forgetting.” In short, “fears of the moment” should not cloud memories of the dreadful long-term costs – human, financial, geopolitical – of endless forever war.
If the Afghan war was prosecuted on the basis of a false assumption, so much more so was the invasion of oil-rich Iraq. George W Bush’s claim in 2002 that Saddam Hussein’s regime possessed stockpiles of readily usable chemical and biological weapons and was seeking a nuclear bomb proved untrue. Untrue, too, was the claim from the then vice-president, Dick Cheney, that Iraq “aids and protects” al-Qaida. The subsequent occupation and insurgency became part of an even larger forever war – Bush’s “global war on terror”. According to Brown University’s Costs of War project, an estimated 940,000 people were killed in direct post-9/11 violence in Iraq, Afghanistan, Syria, Yemen and Pakistan between 2001 and 2023. Up to 3.8 million died indirectly in post-9/11 war zones.
It’s easy to second-guess decisions about war and peace taken under the pressure of horrific events. The disingenuous pursuit of political, military and commercial agendas, and the manipulation of intelligence and public opinion, is harder to excuse. Yet was any war ever launched without ulterior motives? The much-discussed new film of Homer’s epic poem, the Odyssey, concerns the aftermath of the 10-year-long Trojan war, which was ostensibly triggered by the abduction of the beautiful Helen of Sparta. Yet, prosaically, the war may have been more about fair trade than a fair maiden. The US maintained it fought the Vietnam war to support democracy and halt the spread of communism – the discredited “domino theory”. But it was also very much about US exceptionalism and global hegemony. In that sense, little has changed.
What else makes American politicians risk costly entanglements in foreign wars they can’t control and usually lose? Insecurity – meaning fear – is a common denominator. Like Bush before him, Trump and Israel’s leader, Benjamin Netanyahu, have greatly and knowingly exaggerated the immediacy and existential nature of the Iranian threat. Like Iraq in 2003, Iran possesses no nuclear weapons and there is zero firm evidence it is trying, or has recently tried, to acquire them. There is a recurring paradox here: it’s the spectacle of the world’s most powerful country once again fearfully tilting at shadows.
Trump’s overbearing hostility to weaker neighbours such as Venezuela, Cuba, Colombia, Panama and Greenland has a forever aspect, too. It is rooted in the foundational myth that the US has a unique mission – and right – to oversee the western hemisphere, a view it later extended to the rest of the world. Likewise, greed is forever. Abandoning altruistic ideas of democracy promotion, Trump seeks to exercise economic as well as geopolitical dominance. He has tried to monetise the wars in Ukraine and Gaza. His focus on the strait of Hormuz shows how security policy and financial and commercial interests invariably intersect.
Lack of effective UN mediation and peacekeeping, the hollowing out of US diplomacy, which has accelerated under Trump’s lickspittle secretary of state, Marco Rubio, and a stubborn refusal to accept the militarily inevitable all play a role in turning US-led conflicts into intractable quagmires. In Trump’s case, ego is also a factor. It seems he would rather kill thousands more civilians, risk committing war crimes, set the Middle East ablaze and destroy Republicans’ electoral chances than admit he was wrong over Iran. Such extreme behaviour illuminates another pernicious aspect of the forever war phenomenon. Its utter pointlessness is fundamentally immoral. In its sheer un-reason, it offends against the laws of God and man. War without end is the death of hope.
As he frantically twists and turns over Iran, it’s plain that Trump perceives the bottomless pit on the edge of which, thanks to him, the US totters – and has no idea how to avoid it. One day, he talks about talks. The next, he hits out with massive, murderous violence. Careless of their people’s suffering, implacable Iranian hardliners relish his dilemma and turn the screw, mounting widening regional militia attacks and global economy-spooking drone and missile strikes. Lost in a maze of denial, Trump tries in vain to bomb his way out of trouble while desperate for a deal that can somehow be sold as a victory.
Neither option is going to work. This abysmal Iranian catastrophe is already defining Trump’s presidency. The bloody stain, the blame and the shame, if not the war, will last forever.
Simon Tisdall is a Guardian foreign affairs commentator
Decades on from the US’s disastrous campaign in Afghanistan, Trump is making all the same mistakes
Islamabad is using a domestic insurgency to justify its broader pursuit of strategic dominance.
Since October 2025, Pakistan has carried out multiple air strikes in Afghanistan, causing large-scale civilian casualties and destruction. The deadliest came on March 16, 2026, when a drug rehabilitation centre in Kabul was hit, killing 269 civilians and injuring 122, according to United Nations figures.
In a report released on July 21, Amnesty International called on Pakistani authorities to explain the strike and urged that it be investigated as a possible war crime.
Pakistan says its operations target the Tehreek-e-Taliban Pakistan (the Pakistan Taliban or TTP), which it accuses the Afghan Taliban of supporting. The Taliban authorities deny supporting the group and insist the insurgency is Pakistan’s internal problem. Yet the strikes have failed to eliminate any prominent TTP leader or commander. Is the TTP the true source of contention, or are there other dimensions to the conflict?
A crisis rooted in Pakistan
The roots of the TTP lie inside Pakistan. In November 1994, Sufi Mohammad led an armed uprising in Swat and Malakand to impose Sharia law, the first such campaign led by a cleric in the country. Thirteen years later, Baitullah Mehsud, from South Waziristan, united several militant factions under the TTP banner. Sufi Mohammad’s son-in-law, Mullah Fazlullah, led the group from 2013 until his death in a US drone strike in 2018. The movement from which the TTP emerged therefore predates the Afghan Taliban itself.
Over the past two decades, the Pakistani military has launched nearly a dozen major operations against the group. Yet the TTP survived not only because of its resilience or ideological appeal, but because of Pakistan’s distinction between “good” and “bad” militants. Islamabad’s covert support for the insurgency in Afghanistan, intended to weaken and ultimately bring down the former Afghan republic, sustained militant networks and infrastructure from which the TTP also benefitted.
Advertisement
Pakistan has long been accused of using militant groups to pursue geostrategic objectives in Afghanistan and against India. Following Afghanistan’s 1978 communist coup and the Soviet invasion the next year, it became a key Western ally, particularly for the United States, in containing Soviet influence. Pakistan was already hosting Afghan opposition figures, including Gulbuddin Hekmatyar and Ahmad Shah Massoud, who had fled during President Mohammad Daoud Khan’s rule.
With US backing, Pakistan became the main base for supporting the mujahideen. The indigenous Afghan resistance was increasingly dominated by Pakistan and Western-backed factions. The Pakistani military established training centres along the Durand Line, where local communities were exposed to systematic radicalisation. Thousands of madrassas were established, literature glorifying jihad distributed and local fighters encouraged to join the Afghan mujahideen. Many were later mobilised alongside the Afghan Taliban against the United States and the former Afghan government.
After the September 11 attacks, the Pakistani military under General Pervez Musharraf publicly yielded to US pressure and joined the “war on terror”, while continuing to support selected militant groups it considered useful. The discovery of Osama bin Laden near Islamabad, where US Navy SEALs killed him in 2011, remains a damning symbol of this double game.
Many analysts therefore question whether Pakistan genuinely intends to eliminate the TTP and other militant networks. They argue that Islamabad still regards some groups as strategic assets and seeks not to eradicate militancy, but to keep it below a manageable threshold as a controlled insurgency.
If the TTP alone does not explain Pakistan’s attacks on Afghanistan, what broader objective is Islamabad pursuing?
From strategic depth to strategic dominance
Pakistan has not abandoned its longstanding pursuit of “strategic depth” in Afghanistan. Traditionally, this meant cultivating a friendly government in Kabul that could provide political and military space in a conflict with India. Today, however, that policy appears to have evolved into strategic dominance: treating Afghanistan not as a fully sovereign neighbour, but as an extension of Pakistan’s security perimeter.
This attitude was reflected in a recent social media post by Pakistan’s former special representative for Afghanistan, Asif Durrani, who said the Taliban’s growing ties with India “at the expense of Pakistan’s interests”, while Afghan territory remained available to armed groups, would cross a Pakistani “red line”. He offered no evidence that India was using Afghan territory against Pakistan. His comments reflected Islamabad’s assumption that even normal diplomatic relations between Afghanistan and India constitute a threat.
Advertisement
Afghanistan has historically remained neutral in India-Pakistan disputes, including over Kashmir, and did not take sides in the wars of 1965 and 1971. Yet Pakistan expects Afghanistan to view India through its security lens and limit its foreign relations accordingly.
The Central Asian dimension
Former Pakistani senator and political analyst Afrasiab Khattak argues that Pakistan is pursuing a Western agenda to contain Russian and Chinese influence. In his view, Islamabad supported the Taliban not only to seize power in Afghanistan, but in the expectation that militancy would spread into Central Asia. He attributes recent tensions partly to the Taliban authorities’ unwillingness to facilitate such destabilisation.
Khattak also argues that Pakistan is using the TTP as a pretext for attacks while seeking a renewed US military presence in Afghanistan. In September 2025, US President Donald Trump said Washington wanted to regain Bagram airbase, citing its strategic location near China. Days later, he warned that “bad things” would happen unless Afghanistan returned the base to the US.
The following month, Pakistani strikes in Kabul and Paktika sharply escalated the fighting. Khattak argues that Islamabad ultimately seeks a counterterrorism monitoring mechanism that would give it greater scope to intervene in Afghanistan and pursue its objectives in Central Asia and beyond.
Suppressing Pashtun and Baloch nationalism
According to Khattak and other regional analysts, Pakistan regards Pashtun and Baloch nationalism, rather than the Afghan Taliban or even the TTP, as the more fundamental threat. Khattak argues that the TTP weakens Pashtun nationalist movements in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa and that Pakistan has therefore left the province’s southern districts at the group’s mercy.
Pakistani intelligence agencies have also been accused of using militants to assassinate tribal elders, Pashtun nationalists and political activists who criticised state policies and demanded greater rights. According to the Human Rights Commission of Pakistan, nearly 1,200 tribal elders were killed in North and South Waziristan between 2004 and 2014. Rather than address legitimate Pashtun and Baloch grievances, the authorities have often portrayed those raising them as foreign proxies.
The same coercive logic shapes Pakistan’s approach to Afghanistan. Islamabad has used political, economic and military pressure to compel the Taliban authorities to act according to its wishes. The mass deportation and mistreatment of Afghan refugees, trade and transit closures, and air strikes that have killed civilians have all failed and proved counterproductive.
The roughly 2,600km Durand Line has been fenced, severing longstanding tribal and social ties. Entry point closures have disrupted trade and livelihoods, affecting millions in both countries. Yet militancy has intensified, with the TTP and Baloch armed groups continuing their deadly campaigns in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa and Balochistan.
Pakistan must put its own house in order
The tribal areas along the Durand Line once served as a buffer between Afghanistan and British India, and later Pakistan. They remained semiautonomous until their merger with Khyber Pakhtunkhwa in 2018. Decades of military operations have cost local communities lives, homes and livelihoods, deepening their alienation from a state many now regard as an occupying force. The TTP maintains a significant presence inside Pakistan from which it can organise and launch attacks.
Advertisement
Conditions in the tribal areas and Balochistan increasingly resemble the final years of the former Afghan republic, when the Taliban controlled large parts of southern and western Afghanistan while government authority was confined largely to provincial and district centres.
Rather than blame external actors, Pakistan must abandon its failed military strategy and address its domestic crises through political engagement and dialogue. Armed groups retain territory, manpower and some local support, while the suffering inflicted on tribal communities continues to fuel resentment and TTP recruitment.
Further military adventurism against Afghanistan will deepen regional instability, strengthen non-state armed groups and carry grave long-term consequences for Pakistan itself.
The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Al Jazeera’s editorial stance.
Zardasht Shams is a former Afghan diplomat. He served as Afghanistan’s deputy ambassador to Pakistan from 2017 to 2019 and as deputy minister of information and culture from 2015 to 2017.
Pakistan’s attacks on Afghanistan are about more than the TTP
A new book tells the story of the Taliban’s brutal silencing of women and the life of resistance of journalist Zahra Joya
Nearly five years after the Taliban took control of her country and she fled Kabul, Afghan journalist Zahra Joya is telling her story. Her book The Vanishing Girl of Kabul, written with British-American journalist Amie Ferris-Rotman, is a mirror not just for Joya’s life, but for millions of other Afghan women and girls, who she describes as currently living in “home prisons”.
The book tells the story of the Taliban’s brutal silencing of women and Joya’s own life of resistance. How she pretended to be a boy in the 1990s so she could go to school. How her family quickly packed up her grandfather’s handwritten Persian epic while the Taliban raided local villages for banned books. And how she feared for her life when the Taliban returned five years ago. Being a Hazara woman – Hazaras are a persecuted minority in Afghanistan – she grew up with extreme violence levelled at her people.
“It was important for me to record it, for people to understand, for the next generation and the history of Afghanistan,” Joya told Index.
The day before the Taliban returned, she recounts in her book, she had the freedom to go the beauty salon. The next day offered a stark contrast.
“Everything collapsed, including my own freedom,” she said.
As the Taliban drew further into Kabul, she and her colleagues at the women-led publication which she had founded, Rukhshana Media, continued reporting. As Joya saw it, she was standing up for her rights and for freedom of expression, and was making sure the world knew about what was unfolding.
“We never imagined that the Taliban would come to power so quickly, and everything would vanish very soon. We never thought that one day journalism would be a huge risk for the whole team,” she said.
Joya had set up Rukhshana Media only a year before, and even then she was doing something courageous. In Afghanistan’s patriarchal society, the media space was dominated by men, who often held leadership positions.
Now, Joya continues to run Rukhshana Media from London. Her journalists across Afghanistan work underground, protecting their identities by remaining anonymous and never meeting each other. Joya feels she has a heavy responsibility on her shoulders.
Just before she spoke with Index, she received a voice message from one of her journalists describing how she wakes up every morning afraid of what she is going to lose on that particular day. Women and girls are banned from secondary and university education, and most jobs are closed to them. They must cover their bodies completely and even visiting a doctor requires a male chaperone.
“The reality of Afghanistan under the Taliban regime is a complete gender apartheid system,” Joya said.
Since she’s been in the UK, Joya has received a vast number of direct messages on social media from Taliban supporters, threatening her directly for her work and sending her videos of sexual abuse.
But she has received supportive messages too. Now, she hopes readers of her book will reflect on the story, perhaps even take a photo of themselves with it and send her a message.
Writing about her own life has been a difficult experience, and she has had to be careful around details of her relatives who are still in Afghanistan. But Joya said that remaining silent is not a solution.
“It is part of my struggle against the misogyny, discrimination and injustice that is ongoing in Afghanistan,” she said. “The Vanishing Girl of Kabul. Maybe it’s me because I have had to disappear many times and find myself again, but I feel like she could just as easily be the millions of women of Afghanistan.”
In the past decade, Afghans aged 14 to 23 have become the single largest group of migrants in the Western Balkans. More than 2.5 million people – a fifth of them Afghans – are estimated to have crossed through this region since 2015 on their way to Western Europe. Over that time, Afghan migrant-smuggling networks have become ‘professionalised’, transnational and in some locations, violent criminal organisations. To understand how they have evolved and adapted over time, and how they operate now, AAN’s Jelena Bjelica and Fabrizio Foschini visited Serbia’s capital, Belgrade, and the country’s northern border with Hungary in June this year – for the third time in the last ten years. In this report, they synthesise a brief history of the Afghan migrant-smuggling networks in the Balkans, based on interviews with smugglers, migrants, government officials and organisations providing aid to people on the move. Their report begins in a migrant squat in Serbia.
In the heat of a Belgrade summer afternoon, the makeshift migrant squat – hidden by groves of wild acacia bushes in one of the capital’s suburbs that dot the southern bank of the Sava River – was buzzing with activity. Pakistani folk music crackled out of a wireless speaker in an improvised kitchen, kitted out under an electric-blue tarpaulin. A squat young smuggler crewman was cooking chicken karahi with rice over a firepit for a group of seven or so migrants and as many of his fellow smugglers.
Most of the smugglers were trying to pass the time by enticing others into a game of volleyball on an unlikely pitch, interspersed, as it was, with thorny acacias. One was napping in a tent, resting after a work shift that had seen him take a group of migrants to the northern border with Hungary a couple of days earlier. He had then been caught by the Serbian police and sent to a government centre for migrants in Preševo, far to the south on Serbia’s border with Northern Macedonia, from whence he had just returned. Two other smugglers suddenly stopped their volleyball game, saying they were going to shower in the flat they rented in a nearby neighbourhood; the rest stayed where they were, casually keeping a watchful eye on the ‘passengers’,[1] a prized asset, sometimes in short supply these days.
In the shade of a nearby shrub, a couple of worried-looking migrants were quietly chatting. They looked uneasy and often turned to us visitors, as if to determine, from our expressions more than from our words, what our real assessment of their current situation was and of their chances of reaching their destination. It was time for the group to have one last warm meal before they ‘hit the game’,[2] that is, try to illegally cross from Serbia into Hungary and the European Union.
Like many others, the group of migrants we encountered in Belgrade was forced to rely on smugglers. The days of ‘DIY migration’ for Afghans to Europe have all but disappeared in the face of the more aggressive posture of security forces and, now also, of smuggling networks. Fewer people travelling – IOM estimated that in 2025, 35,000 migrants passed through the Western Balkans compared, in 2022, to more than 192,000 – has also made for tough competition between the different groups of smugglers, often involving gun violence.
Although we did not see any weapons during our visit to the squat, they have become a staple item with smugglers and deadly clashes among groups for control of turf have become common. For example, a few weeks before our visit, on 12 May 2026, in a makeshift squat in Obrenovac, another suburban municipality of Belgrade city, two rival groups shot at each other, leaving one person dead and one wounded, both Afghans (Vreme). In 2022 and 2023, gunfire between rival migrant groups was often exchanged on the outskirts of the northern Serbian town of Subotica on the Serbian-Hungarian border (Al Jazeera) and sometimes even on Serbia’s western border with Bosnia (Nova.rs). There have also been news reports of migrants being kidnapped and held for ransom, robbed or abused by rival groups of smugglers, or even by their own travelling groups.
These developments point to new smuggling patterns in the Balkans. With DIY migration to Europe no longer really possible, migrants moving on the Balkan route really have only one choice – which smuggling group to opt for. Indeed, despite the increasing sophistication of the smuggling networks and their boasts of the high success ratios of their operations – at least if one is to believe what they consistently advertise on TikTok and other social media – it became evident on our trip that ‘good’ smugglers these days are hard to find.
This report opens with a brief history of migrant-smuggling networks in the Balkans, divided into two periods: 2001 to 2015 and 2016 to 2026. The period between October 2015 and March 2016, during which the route functioned as a humanitarian corridor for migrants, including Afghans (more detail in this earlier AAN report), was chosen as the cut-off between the two longer phases. This is followed by an account of how the route functions today, in 2026, as witnessed by the authors during their visit to Serbia. The two final sections discuss the crucial role of hawala as a secure money-transfer system, which functions like an escrow account, ensuring there is trust between the migrant/their family and the smugglers; and the innovative role of social media as a platform for smugglers to advertise and commercialise their ‘services’ and to recruit.
The information and insights in the report are synthesised from interviews with smugglers, migrants, journalists, government officials and organisations providing aid to people on the move, as well as published literature and the authors’ own long experience covering migration, especially in the Balkans.
Chicken karahi cooking in improvised kitchen, kitted out under an electric-blue tarpaulin. Photo: Jelena Bjelica/AAN, 5 June 2026
Migration in the new century: 2001 to 2015
In the first decade of the twenty-first century, smuggling activities were largely organised through Afghan diaspora networks concentrated in Iran, Turkey and Greece, rather than through permanent operational structures in the non-EU Western Balkans (comprising Serbia, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Montenegro, Kosovo, Albania and North Macedonia). Facilitators commonly came from the same family, clan, ethnic group or geographic area as the migrants themselves and functioned primarily as brokers who connected migrants with people who could provide transport and fake documents and with other intermediaries further along the route.
Norwegian sociologist Kristian Berg Harpviken argued in his seminal 2009 work on Afghan migration that it was fundamentally shaped by social networks, which provide information, financial resources and security.[3] Rather than acting independently, smugglers were embedded within these wider networks of relatives, friends and diaspora communities. Trust and reputation were essential, with migrants typically choosing facilitators recommended by family members or previous migrants whom they knew, rather than unknown brokers. This network-based organisation reduced both the perceived risks of migration and the transaction costs associated with illegal travel.
In those early days, Afghan smuggling networks were generally smaller, less visible and more clearly oriented towards facilitating transit, rather than, as is the case now, criminal groups bent on exercising territorial control.[4] They operated primarily to enable smuggling and were embedded in Afghan communities, linking people in Afghanistan with Afghan diasporas in Iran, Turkey, Greece and Western Europe. At this stage, however, the Western Balkans had not yet emerged as the dominant migration corridor it would later become. Most Afghans seeking to reach Europe travelled through Iran and Turkey before entering Greece or Italy, or accessed asylum systems through other means.
By 2010, Greece had become the principal gateway for Afghan migration into the European Union. The Evros/Maritsa River between Greece and Turkey emerged as a major entry point and Afghans constituted one of the largest groups seeking asylum in Greece. During this period, Athens developed into an important staging area for Afghan migration networks. Smuggling activities remained highly fragmented, with migrants frequently purchasing journeys in stages rather than through a single organisation. Routes typically followed the sequence Afghanistan–Iran–Turkey–Greece–North Macedonia–Serbia–Hungary–Austria and then going on to Germany and other Western European destinations. Afghan smugglers generally did not control movement within the Balkans directly, but instead relied on Turkish facilitators, Kurdish intermediaries and local people for transport and to provide fake documents. Their principal role was managing the gangs’ access to Afghan migrant communities and coordinating their relationships with migrants.
However, after the European Border and Coast Guard Agency (Frontex)[5] deployed its first-ever Rapid Border Intervention Teams (RABIT) to the Evros region in November 2010, the situation changed and in the years that ensued, the current incarnation of the Balkan migration route emerged. Although the RABIT mission ended in March 2011, Frontex has maintained a permanent operational presence and continued surveillance and border management activities along the Evros border to date. These increased controls, including the construction of fencing along the Evros River, encouraged route diversification, north, through Bulgaria, Serbia and Hungary. During this period, migrant smuggling expanded significantly in the Western Balkans, although the organisational infrastructure remained relatively informal compared with later developments. Afghans appear to have operated mainly as recruiters, brokers, payment coordinators and providers of information, while local Balkan facilitators managed transport, accommodation and border crossings.
In 2015, migration from Afghanistan increased sharply, driven by deteriorating security in Afghanistan, combined with the opening of the Balkan humanitarian corridor for refugees from Syria (later to include Afghans) and Germany’s asylum policy and perceived openness.[6] According to UNHCR, more than 213,000 Afghan asylum applications were lodged in Europe in 2015, making Afghans the second-largest nationality of asylum seekers after Syrians that year.
Afghan smuggling networks had, by this stage, accumulated considerable experience in moving migrants through Turkey and Greece, but the large-scale movements of 2015 transformed the system primarily because of their volume. The opening of the Western Balkan ‘humanitarian corridor’ for migrants between September 2015 and March 2016 provided certain nationalities, including Afghans, with transportation to the outer fringes of the European Union and temporarily reduced migrants’ dependence on smugglers, as governments themselves facilitated transit by registering migrants, organising transport and showing a degree of official tolerance (AAN). Afghan smugglers did not disappear, but their role diminished considerably as legal or semi-legal transit opportunities became available.
Overall, Afghan smuggling networks before 2015 were closely linked to Afghan diaspora communities in Istanbul, Athens, Tehran and functioned as migration-support systems as much as illicit enterprises. Turkey served as the principal centre of coordination for Afghan migration logistics, while the Western Balkans remained, primarily, a transit space. Unlike the more recent period, there is little evidence prior to 2015 that Afghan smuggling groups maintained any territorial control, employed violence or resembled conventional organised crime groups.
Towards ‘professionalisation’: 2016 – 2026
The closure of the humanitarian corridor in March 2016, as AAN reported (for links, see footnote 7), revived demand for clandestine facilitation services and gave new importance to Afghan smuggling networks as organisers of onward movement toward Western Europe. This was true especially at the most critical border crossings, such as those between Turkey and Greece/Bulgaria or between Serbia and Hungary/Bosnia/Croatia.
Between 2016 and 2020, Afghan smuggling networks in the Balkans could still be predominantly characterised as decentralised and facilitating migration, rather than hierarchical criminal organisations. Afghans acted as brokers, intermediaries and guides embedded within Afghan migrant communities, often connected to their ‘customers’ through family, village, ethnic and diasporic ties. At this time, Serbia, particularly Belgrade, emerged as a major logistical hub where migrants regrouped, arranged payments, received instructions and organised onward travel toward Hungary, Croatia, Austria and Germany.[7] Smuggling operations functioned through segmented chains of facilitators, rather than through vertically integrated transnational organisations, with different actors specialising in transport, accommodation, border crossings and communication. Migrants still largely relied on word-of-mouth recommendations and telephone contacts to access these networks.
From approximately 2021 onwards, a change becomes evident, as reported by the Global Initiative Against Transnational Organized Crime (GI-TOC), Europol and the Balkan Investigative Reporting Network (BIRN).[8] While Afghan networks were still community-based and flexible, parts of the smuggling operations appear to have become more professionalised, territorial, transnational and violent. They also became more visible on social media platforms, which they were increasingly using to promote their services and recruit new low-level smugglers.
In 2022, Europol described migrant-smuggling groups (of all nationalities) in Europe as dynamic transnational enterprises, operating through compartmentalised cells. It described their exploitation of digital communications, encrypted applications and online recruitment methods and said:
Criminal networks involved in migrant smuggling are adaptable and responsive to changes in their environment, and are flexible in the routes and modi operandi used. Furthermore, criminals plan their routes by capitalising on existing infrastructure such as availability of transport logistics, travel restrictions, law enforcement presence or weather conditions.
The GI-TOC also reported on the transnational nature of these groups, saying that foreign nationals “often collaborate with Balkan smugglers to navigate complex borders.” As an example, the report cited the case from November 2024, when the Bosnian police arrested an Afghan citizen on suspicion of human smuggling and organising a criminal group for this purpose. According to the report, the arrested individual allegedly had, with help from Balkan smugglers, smuggled more than 250 illegal migrants, primarily of Turkish or Kurdish origin, and unlawfully earned more than 100,000 euros (USD 114,000).
Most significantly, there has been the emergence of violence as a defining feature of parts of the migrant-smuggling economy in northern Serbia and Bosnia and Herzegovina. Investigations by BIRN describe Afghan groups as among the principal actors competing for control over profitable crossing corridors near Subotica, Horgoš and the Hungarian border fence.[9] Armed confrontations between Afghan and Moroccan groups were reported in 2023, with reports of automatic weapons, territorial disputes and clashes over access to migrants and border routes.[10]
Some Afghan-linked networks evolved beyond facilitation into more coercive forms of criminality, including extortion, kidnapping and ransom demands. They include the BWK (usually understood to stand for ‘Balkan Warriors Kabul’), which emerged in late 2024 in the Pirot area along the Bulgarian-Serbian border. After that, it shifted its activities to the Bihać/Gradiška area in Bosnia for approximately six to twelve months before relocating or expanding its centre of operation to the Loznica area on the Bosnian border in Serbia in early 2025. The group is primarily seen to kidnap migrants travelling with rival groups to demand ransoms from their relatives in Afghanistan. Their victims have included entire families, including women and children. The alleged activities of the group represent perhaps the clearest example of this shift in the nature of Afghan smugglers, with researchers describing practices involving detention, physical abuse and the extraction of ransom from migrants’ families.[11] According to a BIRN journalist, Saša Dragojlo, the change in the way the smuggling networks operate has brought a shift in the nature of violence: “Violence shifted from primarily inter-gang conflicts to more violence against migrants themselves, as a model of smuggling changed from smuggling fees to extortion and kidnapping as revenue streams.”
The significance of Afghan smuggling networks has been bolstered by the fact that, in the last ten years, Afghans aged 14 to 23 became the single largest group in the Western Balkans.[12] That strength in numbers helped lead to achange in the way Afghan smuggling networks and groups operate. The networks themselves have also demonstrated high adaptivity, responding rapidly to changes in migration policies, border controls and law-enforcement pressure. Yet it would be inaccurate to describe Afghan smuggling in the Balkans as controlled by a unified ‘Afghan mafia’. Afghan migrant-smuggling networks more closely resemble a fragmented ecosystem of numerous networks of varying size, sophistication and criminal orientation. Even so, there is a broad trajectory of Afghan smuggling networks in the Balkans since 2015 that reflects a broader paradox: the restrictive border policies outlined earlier in this report – the fences, the crackdowns, the expansion of Frontex to deal with unauthorised migration – have not eliminated smuggling. Rather, they have, as an unintended consequence, altered its organisational structure and in certain areas driven its criminalisation.[13]
Nowadays, the role of smugglers is especially prominent in Serbia and Bosnia and Herzegovina as these two countries are often used as respite points on the route, mainly due to relatively lax anti-immigration policies there. Smuggling networks have an entire infrastructure based in those countries – people who manage squats and flats, rendezvous with migrants arriving from Bulgaria and Greece and get them to the next border, as well as navigators, ie the people who get migrants across the borders using GPS coordinates.
In the following section, we describe a network as we witnessed it operating in Belgrade in June.
Migrant movements along the Balkan Route in 2026. Map: Roger Helms for AAN; Graphics: Žolt Kovač for AAN, 2026
Higher costs, fewer travellers: the Balkan Route in 2026
The group of seven Afghan migrants introduced at the beginning of the report had just arrived in Belgrade or rather had been delivered straight to the makeshift squat, with no chance to see the city or get their bearings. They were all Pashto speakers, comparatively young lads in their mid-twenties, from a broad range of provinces, from Kandahar to Kunar. They had all, without exception, recently embarked on the second leg of their journey from Turkey to Europe. Most had spent several years in Turkey, working in textile factories or livestock farming, earning enough to travel onwards. A couple had spent a year in detention for being undocumented migrants in Turkey. They all wanted to reach faraway countries to the north and west of Europe – the UK, Ireland, France and Germany – but were all heading first to Italy, from where they would embark on the rest of their journey. They had arrived in Belgrade in different groups. Some had come through Greece and North Macedonia; the others through Bulgaria where Bulgarian drivers had picked them up for short lifts to pre-set stages, then directed them on how to proceed over the border. Once they crossed into Serbia, the drivers on the Serbian side of the border, a local transport provider, had brought them to the Belgrade square where we met them.
The smugglers looked roughly the same age as their customers, most of them possibly even younger. They are no big shots in the smuggling industry: a couple of them looked like tough guys, one slightly more senior with a sterner, more conservative attitude, and one youngish and boastful. The rest were just sidekicks and helpers, ranging from ‘squat hands’ and housekeepers to bag carriers, ladder carriers and GPS navigators. Such segmentation and professionalisation is a long way from the pre-2016 system where one of the migrants would adopt a temporary role as jelaw-ro or guide.[14] All claimed to be Afghan except for a single Pakistani Pashtun. A few of the smugglers had quite clearly returned via the Balkan Route after spending time – and obtaining asylum papers – in Italy.
Some markers, mostly clothing items, differentiated the smugglers from migrants. Those going westwards, who were constantly on the move, could hardly afford the luxury of donning a traditional piran wa tomban (long shirt and baggy trousers) or a glittering, embroidered chamani cap. Such markers were hardly needed in a small and half-empty camp like the squat we visited; however, being easily spotted can be useful for meeting arrivals at the border, or at night, when smugglers need to first gather larger groups of migrants together before splitting them up again to try and ensure they cross unnoticed.
The fact that they, the smugglers, were as numerous as their customers, and that there were few more incoming migrants in the coming days, did not seem to over-concern them. Their earnings were apparently guaranteed. A trip from Turkey to Italy can now cost between 6,000 and 8,000 euros (USD 6,850 to 9,100), although in some instances, migrants might be asked to pay additional sums along the route.[15] So although migrants are fewer, the cost of the journey has increased significantly – ten years ago an entire trip from Kabul to Germany would cost around 4,000 euros (USD 4,550);[16] now only one leg of the journey, the trip through the Western Balkans, costs more than that. The smugglers in the Balkans region seem to be making good profits.
Migrants and smugglers walk along a railway track in one of Belgrade’s southern suburbs. Photo: Jelena Bjelica/AAN, 5 June 2026.
On the subject of fewer migrants, there is some discussion about the magnitude of that reduction. Frontex estimates that between 2024 and 2025 there was a 42 per cent reduction in the number of illegal crossings on the EU external border – into Croatia and Hungary – from the Western Balkans. The IOM, which does not measure the number of illegal crossings, but estimates the migrant population in selected regions, also recorded a decline in the number of people on the move in the six countries of the non-EU Western Balkans. According to IOM, the number of people on the move dropped from over 192,000 in 2022 to around 163,500 in 2023, then declined further to around 56,200 in 2024 and to about 35,300 in 2025. The estimates for further into the EU, in the Italian city of Trieste, which is now a major terminal of the Balkan route, also show a decline, although somewhat differently. The Italian Consortium of Solidarity, an organisation working with migrants there, told AAN it estimated the reduction in arrivals in Trieste last year at about 15 per cent and argued that in the first months of 2026, there was actually an increase. The IOM in Serbia also recorded an increase in the number of migrants in the Western Balkans in the first quarter of 2026 – a 37 per cent increase compared to the same period in 2025.
At the border
When AAN visited the border area between Serbia and Hungary in the Subotica region in June 2026, the change in the ‘smuggling landscape’ was clear. It was once dotted with small migrant camps, both informal and government-run. It is still a major transit point for migrants – as it has been for 15 years now – but they are no longer visible. Instead, migrants are brought to the area at night from Belgrade, split into smaller groups to cross under a cut in the fence at strategically selected points, and are over the border before dawn. One such transit point that we visited, an abandoned property near the Horgoš 2 border crossing, bore signs of both a long-term migrant presence dating back some years and of a recent, hurried passage. Access to such places still constitutes a bone of contention between smugglers, something to be fought for control of.
The need to secure favourable border crossing spots and the competition surrounding them have brought some groups of smugglers to develop favoured routes on which they specialise. The camp in the southern outskirts of Belgrade that we visited was, for example, managing mostly the crossings into Hungary. A parallel group, affiliated to the same gang but based in a separate camp, was more oriented towards leading migrants into Bosnia. Getting into Bosnia is easier compared to Hungary, despite the need to cross the River Drina, with its unpredictable whirlpools and fast currents. Boats and bridges are used, arguably with some level of connivance from local border authorities. Other gangs specialise in crossing into Croatia; indeed, AAN heard reports that crossings of the Serbia/Croatia border near Šid have resumed in recent months, after having been nearly abandoned for years due to tight controls. Some reports point to a laxer attitude also among Croatian police since its accession to Schengen, but crossing from Serbia or Bosnia into Croatia still carries significant risk.[17] However, most of the Western Balkan countries seem to be underreporting arrivals and transits to showcase success in repressing migrants on behalf of the other EU countries.
Stables on the abandoned property near the Horgoš 2 border crossing. Photo: Jelena Bjelica/AAN, 7 June 2026
The role of hawala
One key part of the infrastructure for smuggling migrants is not controlled by the smugglers and their gangs. Indeed, it is one of the few ways that there are checks on the smugglers and their gangs. This is hawala, the informal money transfer system used across South Asia and the Middle East. One of the people we met during our trip explained why it is of such pre-eminent importance. Saqeb (name changed to protect his identity) arrived in Belgrade in 2017 as a 13-year-old minor and over the past ten years has completed primary and secondary school in Serbia, eventually finding a job as a translator with an international organisation. Drawing on what he has learned from translating for Afghan migrants, he explained how hawala oils the machinery of migrant smuggling: “Smugglers often film the migrants crossing a border,” he said, “or just sitting in a squat, doing everyday things.” They then send the video to the hawaladar, the broker located at the point of departure or at another stage along the route, as proof that a migrant has arrived at a certain destination. Only after that will the hawaladar authorise payment to the smuggler.[18] “Some of the videos,” said Saqeb, “are then re-used in social media for promotion and recruitment.”
In academic literature as well, hawala has been identified as a critical enabling mechanism of Afghan migrant smuggling, for example, in a paper about Afghan migration authored by Mahadevan, Khoruk, and Mohmanzaï.[19] The authors argue that it should not be understood merely as a method of payment, but rather as a core component of the migrant smuggling infrastructure. They said that their investigations had established that “hawala networks are the lifeblood of irregular migration from Afghanistan.” The paper explains that hawala plays an important trust-building role within the migrant smuggling economy. Afghan migrants and their families frequently rely on hawaladars as intermediaries who hold funds until migrants successfully complete a stage of their journey or reach an agreed destination. In practice, hawala therefore functions as an informal escrow system, reducing the risk of fraud for migrants while increasing confidence in smuggling services. This mechanism is particularly important in irregular migration, as migrants often travel in stages, dealing with multiple facilitators and brokers operating in different countries. Hawaladars provide the financial continuity that links these otherwise fragmented transactions.
Hawala networks are deeply embedded in Afghan economic and social life and are widely used for remittances, trade and family support. Because hawaladars possess reputational capital and are viewed as trusted actors, their involvement in migration-related transactions enhances migrants’ confidence in particular facilitators or smuggling arrangements. The fact that funds can be deposited in Afghanistan and subsequently released in Iran, Turkey, Serbia, or Western Europe without physically moving cash across borders allows settlement between hawaladars to occur later through trade transactions, debt balancing, or other informal financial mechanisms. This flexibility allows smugglers to coordinate operations across multiple jurisdictions while reducing their exposure to regulatory scrutiny and financial monitoring.
In major Afghan migration hubs, like Istanbul and Belgrade, hawala has become integrated into the broader architecture of migrant smuggling. Hawaladars effectively function as financial intermediaries, guarantors and settlement agents within the Afghan migrant-smuggling economy. Further research is needed to look into who the hawaladars are, what nationality for example, and how they fit into networks back home in Afghanistan and elsewhere.
The role of social media
While hawala is more than a thousand years old, a very modern innovation is now also facilitating smuggling. The networks have innovated new usages of social media to advertise the illicit services they offer. Recent studies suggest that social media platforms are becoming increasingly important as tools for advertising migration opportunities, disseminating information and connecting migrants with facilitators. This is a change from when AAN researched Afghan smuggling through the Balkans in reports published in 2015 to 2017 (see footnote 7 for links) which then described the heavy dependency on interpersonal networks of trust. Migrants generally found facilitators through family members, village contacts, friends, previous travellers and recommendations circulating within Afghan communities in Afghanistan, Iran, Turkey and Europe, and communication relied primarily on mobile phones, messaging applications and personal referrals.
As a joint 2021 Europol and Frontex intelligence notification titled “Digitalisation of migrant smuggling” found, that has changed: “smuggling services are heavily advertised on social media platforms, particularly Facebook or Instagram pages, but recently also TikTok.” Advertising, it said, “is carried out on personal profiles or generic/business pages, but also on chat groups in messaging platforms like WhatsApp or Telegram,” adding that, “social media pages, groups and platforms offering smuggling services contain instructions, maps, photos, videos and prices for smuggling, updated on a regular basis.” Occasionally, it said, “the content posted by smugglers is complemented by information contributed by numerous other users, in the form of comments or notifications.”
Videos frequently show border crossings, advertise transport arrangements and depict successful arrivals in Europe, portraying migration as an achievable pathway to economic security. Such content serves the smugglers in both advertising and making sales, helping them build credibility and attract clients beyond their immediate social networks. Contemporary smuggling networks increasingly incorporate digital tools, including TikTok, Facebook, Telegram and encrypted messaging applications.
AAN reviewed several TikTok accounts identified by NGOs providing services to migrants in Serbia. TikTok is a global short-form video platform where users create, share and discover videos ranging from 15 seconds to 10 minutes. It is renowned for its highly personalised ‘For You’ algorithm and features videos with a primary active lifespan of 24 to 48 hours. On these accounts, we identified several recurring features in the video messaging. The most common is the portrayal of smugglers as victorious fighters, a parallel reinforced by their posing in army fatigues and camouflage gear – be it on the Bosnian hills or at a bus stop in Bayern, Germany – or as martial arts practitioners, and by their nicknames referring to military ranks such as Toran (captain) or athlete titles such as Pahlawan (champion wrestler). This show of strength is not only intended to suggest that the smuggler in question is the strongest around – and so the safest to travel with (something to be considered these days), but also to facilitate identification with his persona among future migrants.
Some promotional videos feature smugglers in expensive clothes and big cars, shot in front of famous landmarks in sought-after European capitals (Tour Eiffel in Paris, Tower Bridge in London), largely coinciding with the dreams of a younger generation of Afghans who are on the move, hoping to attain in Europe the ‘high life’ they feel they are unable to attain in their own country. These social media campaigns are obviously aimed at young men. Although, traditionally, the decision to migrate is taken by the family, AAN has been hearing how in Afghanistan, as in Europe, young men are more commonly making their own decisions and then either convincing or forcing their families to comply with their choices. Moreover, midway through what are usually two-phase migration paths, that is, in Istanbul or other Turkish cities, these youngsters likely have even more say over which group to connect with to try to complete their trip.
The videos uploaded by TikTokers associated with a brand like B.W.K., a serial number (such as 20…60 or 400/59),[20] or seemingly more individualised labels such as Jabar Mujrim (Jabar, the Criminal) or Farhad Rahbalad (Farhad, the Guide), serve to both promote their operations and familiarise prospective customers with some of the landscapes and events they will meet on the road. By featuring groups of young men marching through woodlands, resting and warming themselves around a campfire, or cutting or climbing border fences, the videos offer practical tutorials for future users. Some even show the tools of the trade, such as alternating clips of maps with pinpointed locations and Google Street View images of rendezvous; these are what smugglers provide their customers with to navigate those sections of the trip that they have to do on their own.
Some videos are used to recruit workers to the local labour force. For example, a TikTok account ‘Transport.555’ advertised for local drivers in Croatia, promising high pay of 4,000 to 10,000 euros (USD 4,560 to 11,400). Similarly, the Instagram account for ‘Transport Balkan’ (also Croatia-based) promises drivers willing to transport migrants from Nova Gradiškain Croatia to the Slovenian border for 500 euro (USD 570) per migrant, or, if they feel like braving it, onto Trieste, in Italy, at 1,000 euro (USD 1,140) per person.
Other features reinforce the conceptual link between migrating along the Balkan route and ‘the game.’ All videos are sprinkled with emoticons of ninjas, ladders or skulls, alongside the flags of Greece, Bulgaria, Albania or other countries to be crossed; the emoticons turn into crowns on the heads of successful voyagers or smugglers once the destination is reached. Slogans, poetry or lines from songs, or at the very least the words, “Insh’allah, very soon,” appear on screen. The music in the background is, inescapably, the heavily reverberated and synthesised sound of today’s Pashto pop, but the lyrics of some of the tarana-style[21] songs are pertinent, centred on travel to Europe, the reasons for leaving one’s homeland, the hardships and cold faced in the Bosnian mountains, and so on.
Altogether, most of the material available in TikTok videos is pretty basic, but detailed information vital to the organisation as to the route can be shared on this and other social media. The presence and welfare of the customers/travellers is publicised in the videos, incidentally, showing that travellers other than Afghans – South Asians or Africans – occasionally rely on Afghan outfits to be smuggled to Europe (the same applies to Afghans, who may travel with Pakistani smugglers, for example). The profile of a smuggling group can also be raised by videos that are not strictly promotional: they may be uploaded by smugglers and migrants for private reasons, but feature the smugglers’ identifying attributes (like a series of numbers) and enhance their name recognition.
It is evident that a digitalisation of migrant smuggling services points to an expanding ecosystem in which smugglers use digital platforms to circulate information, establish reputations and reach prospective clients. Irregular migration has become a competitive online market in which visibility, trust and accessibility are increasingly mediated through social media channels.
Game on
In the face of a diminished appetite by European governments to take high numbers of Afghan migrants[22] and the increased hurdles and controls on migration routes, the activity of smuggler networks in the Balkans has become more and more pivotal and profitable. This has led to an increased role on their part in managing all aspects of migrants’ movements in this part of the world – though it is a role they now play with more discretion and without deploying or risking themselves in person whenever avoidable. This development has also brought about the disappearance of independent migrant travel and border crossing and led to unbalanced power relations between migrants and smugglers. Migrants are now heavily dependent on the smugglers, but also in greater danger from them, as seen in the frequently reported cases of abuse and violence driven by inter-gang competition.
These changing patterns, together with the increased profits available, might be reshaping the profile and status of smugglers. Despite the ruthless and questionable side of their operations, they strive to present themselves as positive, successful role models to a broader section of their community of reference – young Afghan men who are on their way to Europe or have already arrived there. The appeal of the smuggler’s career would explain the presence of many Afghans, even very young ones, who have returned to the Balkans to work with the groups after receiving protection in one of the EU countries. It would also justify the style of the TikTok videos, in which top smugglers pose as a new class of military commanders, surrounded by their aides and deputies.
It would not take much for young Afghan men who make it, say, to Italy, and are waiting in reception camps for their documents, feeling bored and seeking economic opportunities, to seize such a seemingly golden chance to earn some money and achieve a higher status. Young migrants also have the flexibility and skills to adapt to European societies and learn languages that older smugglers, the nominal bosses of the organisations, often lack. Still, it is a shortcut on a tricky route, where rules keep changing, nothing stays the same and the game is afoot.
Edited by Kate Clark
References
References
↑1
While we use ‘migrants’ and ‘smugglers’ in this report, terminology used for them varies depending on who speaks. Some NGOs providing aid to migrants refer to migrants as ‘people of the move’ and to the smugglers as ‘facilitators’. Smugglers call migrants ‘passengers’ and ‘travellers’. Migrants themselves call a spade a spade, that is, for smugglers, they use the Pashto/Dari term – actually of Turkish origin – qachakbar (more commonly transcribed by Western media as kachakbar), which can be rendered exactly as ‘smuggler’.
↑2
The expression ‘the game’ (and ‘to hit/play the game’) refers to an attempt to cross one or more international borders irregularly, in order to continue the journey towards Western Europe. Used widely among Afghan and other migrant communities, the term reflects the uncertainty, danger and repeated nature of these attempts, which often involve travelling on foot through forests or mountains, evading border authorities and risking apprehension or pushbacks. Rather than describing smuggling itself, ‘the Game’ refers to the migrant’s attempt to make an irregular crossing, which may be organised or facilitated by smugglers through the provision of guides, transport, GPS coordinates or other logistical support. See, for example, Martine van Bijlert and Jelena Bjelica, The Aftermath of an Exodus: The Balkans’ Old Smuggling Routes and Europe’s Closed Borders, AAN, 14 June 2017 and Fabrizio Foschini, Keep on Moving on the Balkan Route: No quarter for Afghan asylum seekers in Croatia and Serbia, AAN, 26 September 2023.
Frontex is the European Union agency responsible for supporting EU and Schengen countries in managing the Union’s external borders, coordinating joint border operations and combating cross-border crime. It was established in 2004 and became operational in 2005.
↑6
In 2015, Germany’s welcoming stance toward refugees, together with widespread media coverage, contributed to a perception among Afghans that they would have a reasonable chance of obtaining asylum or protection in Europe, even though recognition rates varied by nationality. See also Thomas Ruttig, Afghan Exodus: Afghan asylum seekers in Europe (3) – case study Germany, AAN, 17 February 2017.
These are IOM and Serbian Commissariat for Refugees and Migration of the Republic of Serbia estimates.
↑14
As we reported previously, some migrants opted to become a jelaw-ro (lead-the-way), a person who informally takes charge of a group of migrants and keeps in touch with the smuggler network, in order to enhance the group’s success of arriving at the next destination. See Fabrizio Foschini, Keep on Moving on the Balkan Route: No quarter for Afghan asylum seekers in Croatia and Serbia, AAN, 26 September 2023.
↑15
Transport in each Western Balkan country is provided mainly by its residents, but a number of third-country nationals or former migrants with EU documents join in. In fact, among the people detained recently while trying to smuggle migrants across the border into Italy near Trieste, there were quite a few residents of Italy and other European countries who had gone to fetch their passengers deep into Croatia or even further afield (TriestePrima, Il Piccolo).
It remains to be seen how the Common European Asylum System (CEAS) which came into effect on 12 June 2026 will affect asylum applications for Afghans (InfoMigrants). For the moment, increased deportations of Afghans from countries such as Germany aim to act as a deterrent (Bild am Sonntag). A Taliban delegation travelled to Brussels on 23 June for talks with the European Commission and representatives of 15 EU member states on consular services and the deportation of Afghans who have been convicted of crimes or whose claims for asylum have been rejected. (Al Jazeera, Amu TV). In May 2026, Austria negotiated a deal with Tashkent to use Uzbekistan as a transit hub for charter flights carrying rejected asylum-seekers, following Poland’s lead. In April 2026, Poland deported three Afghan men via Uzbekistan despite an interim ruling by the European Court of Human Rights ordering a halt (Times of Central Asia).
A Good Smuggler is Hard to Find: The evolution of Afghan smuggling networks in the Balkans
Rising Anti-Taliban Activity: The Afghanistan Freedom Front (AFF) and a newly emerged group, Sepahian-e Mihan (Patriotic Soldiers Front), have conducted successful attacks in Badakhshan, including an AFF operation on July 23, 2026, that killed 21 Taliban fighters and captured weapons in Zebak District.
Internal Taliban Fractures: The Taliban are actively disarming local fighters and managing tensions with dissident Tajik commander Juma Khan Fateh, whose forces have been linked to land seizures, extortion, and control of gold mines; high-level Taliban officials have intervened with mixed results.
Resource and Ethnic Tensions: Ongoing disputes over gold, lapis lazuli, and other mineral resources, combined with the Taliban’s mistrust of non-Pashtun local commanders, are fueling protests by miners, internal clashes, and broader instability in the predominantly non-Pashtun province.
Badakhshan Province is in the midst of severe disorders, experiencing violent anti-Taliban rebellions, intense internal mutinies within the Taliban structure, and crises over the mining of natural reserves.
On July 23, 2026, fighters of the Afghanistan Freedom Front (AFF) killed 21 Taliban fighters and injured another 37, in a series of targeted operations against Taliban bases, units, and military detachments in the Zebak District of Badakhshan Province. One AFF fighter was also killed. During the fighting, AFF fighters captured ammunition, light and heavy weapons, military equipment, and other war materials, from the Taliban.
On the other hand, as reported on July 22, 2026, the Taliban ordered gunmen loyal to dissident local commander Juma Khan Fateh to surrender their weapons as soon as possible in the Shekay and Nusay Districts.
On July 21, 2026, Taliban fighters stationed in the Nusay District of Badakhshan Province ordered 350 armed men affiliated with the group, who did not hold positions within the Taliban regime’s structure, to surrender their weapons. The notice warned that if any individual refused to hand over his weapons, Taliban fighters would use military force to seize them.
On July 17, 2026, Taliban authorities claimed that they had retaken the Yaftal-e Payin District in Badakhshan Province after an overnight attack claimed by anti-Kabul forces. Police Spokesperson Ehsanullah Kamgar stated that the attack occurred while several Taliban fighters and commanders were on leave, adding that Taliban authorities had arrested seven people in connection with the incident and seized weapons and military equipment.
On July 13, the 2026, Taliban begun disarming their local fighters in the Shahr-e Buzurg District of Badakhshan Province. Taliban’s special forces have also been deployed in the area, alongside Mawlawi Saifuddin Tayeb, the Deputy Chief of the Taliban Administrative Affairs Office. The disarmament process began after the noon prayer in the district.
According to partial data compiled by South Asia Terrorism Portal (SATP), since the Taliban takeover on August 15, 2021, 216 people, including 57 civilians, 14 militants, and 145 in the Not Specified (NS) category have been killed in Badakhshan Province in 73 incidents (data till July 25, 2026).
Some of the major incidents include:
On March 29, 2026, AFF fighters carried out a planned attack targeting a watchtower of the Taliban’s 219th Division, located in the Qalatak area of Baharak District in Badakhshan Province, killing four Taliban fighters and injuring three.
On November 29, 2025, AFF fighters carried out a rocket attack on the Taliban’s Police District (PD) 7, in Faizabad, the capital city of Badakhshan, killing three Taliban fighters and injuring two.
On October 12, 2025, at least 10 Taliban fighters were killed in fighting between rival factions of the group at Yalor village in the Yaftali Sufla District of Badakhshan Province, over control of a gold mines.
On May 26, 2025, a local Taliban commander, Zaidullah, was killed along with his wife and child, during an internal armed clash in the Shahada District of Badakhshan Province. At least four Taliban members were also seriously wounded, including Abdul Saboor, the deputy head of the Taliban’s intelligence unit in Shahada District, and Mahmood, another intelligence officer.
On May 8, 2024, at least three Taliban fighters were killed and another six were injured in an Improvised Explosive Device (IED) blast. Later, on the same day, the Islamic State-Khorasan Province (IS-KP) claimed responsibility for the blast.
On June 8, 2023, a Taliban senior commander identified as Mawlawi Safiullah and 15 others were killed in a bomb blast inside the Nabawi Mosque in the provincial capital of Faizabad.
On September 30, 2022, four Taliban fighters were killed when the National Resistance Front (NRF) attacked them in the Payan Mor area of ??Shahr Buzurg District of Badakhshan Province.
Amidst this chaos, a new anti-Taliban group, Sepahian-e Mihan (Patriotic Soldiers Front) has appeared on the scene. On July 17, 2026, the group claimed responsibility for an attack in the Yaftali Sufla District and declared that its forces had controlled the district administration building for several hours. Following this attack, the Taliban sent Army Chief Fasihuddin Fitrat to the District, to lead operations. Fitrat claimed that the assault had been foiled and that the attackers had failed to achieve their objectives. Nevertheless, on July 22, 2026, Qayum Malang, Commander of the Sepahian-e Mihan, released his first audio message, declaring that he and his fighters were safe: “I am in full health. Do not follow the enemy’s propaganda. We are all safe and well.” He also stressed that the front “has its own plans and objectives” and that its members desire freedom above everything else. The group reportedly consists of people from different sections of society, including residents of Badakhshan, who came together in response to growing dissatisfaction with Taliban rule in the province. The official logo of the group includes symbolic elements such as the Simurgh (a giant bird of Persian mythology), the sun, the Hindu Kush mountains, lapis lazuli, a sword and the golden star of Bactria. The Hindu Kush mountains are seen as a symbol of the group’s geographical roots, while the sword and star may represent its military and defensive character.
Further, Juma Khan Fateh, the influential and disgruntled Tajik commander of Badakhshan Province has become a festering wound for the Taliban leadership. Fateh, his relatives (including brothers Mohammad Musa Shahryar and Abdul Fattah), and his loyalist gunmen, have been linked to land seizures, extortion, and illegal control of gold mines in Badakhshan. As reported on June 27, 2026, increased movements and a military build-up by Juma Khan was reported in the Darwaz area of Badakhshan Province. He had organised his forces over the preceding days and held extensive meetings with residents in Nusay District.
The Taliban however, initiated a few official interventions to assess the situation. On June 25, 2026, Taliban Defense Minister, Mullah Yaqoob Mujahid travelled to Badakhshan, following unsuccessful negotiations between a special Taliban commission and Juma Khan Fatah. Taliban officials said Mullah Yaqoob’s visit was to evaluate the security situation along the Wakhan, Ishkashim, and Shughnan border areas. However, sources suggest that he was also calculating military capabilities for a possible confrontation with Fatah. Later, as reported on July 9, 2026, Fasihuddin Fitrat, Taliban’s Chief of Army staff, and Mawlawi Amanuddin, Taliban Governor of Helmand, travelled to Nusay District to meet with Juma Khan, in an effort to ease ongoing tensions. Thereafter, on July 10, Juma Khan was transferred to Faizabad, capital of Badakhshan, after receiving ‘guarantees’ from Taliban Army Chief Fasihuddin Fitrat. No details of the talks or any agreement between the two sides have yet been released. A day later, Juma Khan Fateh returned to the Darwaz region of Badakhshan after pledging loyalty to the Taliban administration.
In parallel to these ongoing ‘negotiations’ at the administrative level, Zabihullah Mujahid, Taliban Spokesperson, announced on June 22, 2026, that Juma Khan had been removed as Zabul Deputy Governor, without being assigned a new role. Mujahid added that Taliban Supreme Leader Hibatullah Akhundzada had reshuffled several senior positions across government institutions. Moreover, as reported on July 9, Taliban forces established several checkpoints in the Shekay, Nusay and Maymay Districts in Badakhshan to monitor the movement of locals.
Badakhshan is a rugged and rocky, pre-dominantly non-Pashtun province in northeastern Afghanistan, rich in gold, silver, aluminum, limestone, lapis lazuli, etc. After their takeover in 2021, the Taliban leadership has been mistrustful of the local Taliban commanders of Tajik and other ethnic backgrounds. A major point of dispute has been the control of Badakhshan’s rich mineral resources and mines. There have been frequent disputes between Taliban and local miners. For instance, on July 21, 2026, a number of mine workers gathered in front of Taliban’s mining department building in Badakhshan, protesting against the Taliban’s continued closure of mining sites, and saying that Taliban forces threatened and beat some workers and ignored their demands. According to the protesters, the situation had left hundreds of families facing serious financial hardship. Earlier, on May 9, 2026, eight people were injured after local miners and residents clashed with Taliban-affiliated forces over control of the Qatqati gold mine in the Shirin Nazm village of Shekay District in the province. The tensions began after Taliban beat several miners. Crucially, in order to take full control of mining sites, as reported on February 19, 2026, Hibatullah Akhundzada approved the deployment of 1,000 fighters to protect gold mining operations in Badakhshan. Subsequently, on July 23, 2026, Taliban’s Ministry of Interior stated that it had signed an agreement with the Taliban’s Ministry of Mines and Petroleum to provide security for four of Afghanistan’s key economic projects, including the lapis lazuli mine of Badakhshan.
Badakhshan is in turmoil, substantially due to highhandedness and ethnic biases of the Taliban’s central leadership. The perennial mistrust of non-Pashtuns, untamed greed in exploiting local resources without paying heed to the common people, the emergence of anti-Taliban forces, and the unapologetic nature of the Taliban is pushing Badakhshan deeper into distress and violence.
About the author: Sanchita Bhattacharya, Research Fellow, Institute for Conflict Management
L-R: Hannah Abdoh as Amina and Sara Taheri as Nooria.Domniki Mitropoulou – Cinétévé – 24 25 Films – France Télévisions
The BBC has acquired the upcoming series Kabulset against the backdrop of the terrifying real-life events in Afghanistan from 2021, one of the last shows to star the late Eric Dane.
The Mediawan drama for the European Alliance of broadcasters kicks off as American troops withdraw from Kabul and the Taliban enters the city. The Nazany family, like many civilians, is forced to flee, fearing retaliation. In this desperate and chaotic situation – shadowed by the looming threat of an attack by ISIS – French police officers, Italian diplomats, German military personnel, and American intelligence services must somehow coordinate to manage the influx of civilians.
Dane plays Martin. The supremely talented Euphoria and Grey’s Anatomy star died earlier this year. The international cast also includes Darina Al Joundi (The New Look), Shervin Alenabi (Tehran), Vassilis Koukalani (Kandahar), Hannah Abdoh, Jonathan Zaccaï (Le bureau des legends), Gianmarco Saurino (L’estate piu Calda) and Jeanne Goursaud (Pax Massilia).
The show, which lands on the BBC next month, is produced by Mediawan and sold by Mediawan Rights is for the European Alliance of broadcasters which comprises ZDF, Rai and France Télévisions. The BBC isn’t technically part of the Alliance but has previously been involved with shows like the adaptation of Around the World in 80 Days.
Nick Lee, Head of BBC Programme Acquisition, said: “Kabul is a tragedy of the highest stakes. A warzone story which is propelled by the real ticking clock of the evacuation that was just five years ago this summer. Global politics remain complex, but Kabul dramatises the biggest view of history through the smallest window of a human family.”
Kabul was directed by Kasia Adamik (No Escape) and Olga Chajdas (Imago) and written by Olivier Demangel (Class Act), Thomas Finkielkraut (Baron Noir) and Joey Lavy (The Shift). The series was produced by Fabienne Servan-Schreiber and Charlotte Ortiz at Cinétévé, Matthias Weber and Thibault Gast at 24 25 Films, and executive produced by Sandrine Paquot. Global sales are handled by Mediawan Rights.
BBC Buys ‘Kabul’ Drama Series About American Withdrawal From Afghanistan Starring The Late Eric Dane
Thomas Gibbons-Neff is a former New York Times reporter who covered the wars in Afghanistan and Ukraine. He traveled to Kabul, Afghanistan, in May.
The New York Times
July 23, 2026
First as a Marine and then as a journalist, I spent years tied to Afghanistan. I returned one last time to speak to a former enemy in search of answers, and perhaps closure.
I’ve had a hand in killing around six people. Maybe seven. I don’t know if one man bled out on the side of the road or was taken to a doctor. I think about him often.
The killings occurred in the winter and spring of early 2010, during one of the largest operations of the Afghanistan war: the battle of Marja. I was the 22-year-old leader of a scout sniper team of seven Marines and one Navy corpsman.
It is a strange thing, having killed people in a conflict that spanned 20 years and was ultimately lost. The sum of such an intense expenditure of human lives and trauma left Afghanistan much as it was in 2001, before any American boots touched the ground.
Killing in war often boils down to an us-or-them mentality, a defensible position common to infantry combat. But we were also directed to “win hearts and minds,” the U.S. strategy meant to earn the population’s trust and isolate the Taliban. Trying to build good will while engaging in gunfights beside people’s homes was profoundly confusing. The killing wasn’t detached; it felt deeply personal.
Patrols required a constant assessment of friend or foe, and long hours staring through high-powered optics trying to determine the intent and mannerisms of our enemies. Rarely did we see them with a rifle in their hands. Killing fell on our own instincts and an ever replenishing set of fears. Should we shoot this man? Should we not? What if we don’t? Will our friends die because of our hesitation?I
We also had a twisted culture in which killing earned you respect, as if shooting Afghans was the ultimate proof that you were competent. So we killed people. I killed people. These decisions to pull the trigger were the final steps of our part in a strategy that was doomed before I even deployed.
The Taliban, with their exclusion of women from public life and violent treatment of ethniminorities, fractured Afghan society. During its 20-year occupation, the United States often used this as a justification to prolong the war, even as it rarely addressed its strategic and moral failures or the pain and loss it was causing so many Afghans.
My journalism career — which began after I left the Marine Corps — revolved around trying to understand why this bloody cycle continued. Reporting was a way to roll back time and understand what I had done and what role I played in a conflict that was far from over. The more I saw, the more I learned, the more my contribution to this mess in my early 20s left me with a sense of shame.
Covering war also meant sustained proximity to violence, victims and trauma, and from time to time the public dishonesty that all but inevitably accompanies conflict. I had lived through enough in the Marine Corps. I was already past my fill of that. I resigned from my job, exhausted.
But in May, with a little over two weeks remaining at The New York Times before returning to school to become an English teacher, I landed in Afghanistan. I had come to speak with the people I once fought against: the Taliban.
My thinking was straightforward. Even if the Pentagon would not undertake any significant reflection for these recent decades of war, I could, at a minimum, hold myself accountable for my part in a half-baked strategy that left tens of thousands of Afghans and Americans dead.
I brought souvenirs from a gift shop near my home in Rhode Island, which I would present to a few Taliban officials whom I have known for nearly a half decade now. Hearts and minds, after all, though this time as a guest not an occupier.
Ultimately, I wanted to talk to Mullah Abdul Rahim Gulab, a Taliban commander whom I met by chance in 2021, just months after Kabul fell to the Taliban. But we had also fought against one another in February 2010 in southern Afghanistan.
I knew he would have a version of the battle in Marja that was different from mine. Maybe he had stories with his own heroes and dead friends that I could appreciate and respect, ones that he also couldn’t stop thinking about. Maybe I could feel bad for him and not just feel bad for living while my friends died.
Read Thomas’s dispatch from when he first met Mullah Abdul Rahim Gulab.
The Right Side
When I landed in Kabul in May, a Taliban deputy minister at the ministry of information and culture named Muhajer Farahi wanted to talk to me after he saw the request I submitted to speak to Mr. Gulab.
We had not met before. But sitting across from me in his office, Mr. Farahi told me his reasons for fighting the United States were simple: He wanted the Americans out of his home.
He spoke slowly and quietly, and avoided eye contact. His English was good. He made clear that his time in Farah Province in southwestern Afghanistan during the war, or jihad, as the Taliban refer to their 20 year military campaign, was difficult.
“We were on the right side,” he said. “We were fighting for our faith.”
I apologized for his dead friends and the innocent people killed in the war. He looked at me and thought for a moment before reminding me that I was a soldier, a cog in a machine that decided to invade his country and stay. It was as close as I would get to a pardon.
He wanted to discuss other things. Mostly he was curious about the number of Americans he had killed, and was still perplexed that even though he watched roadside bombs detonate under our armored vehicles, our casualty announcements from the Pentagon were relatively low. He assumed the United States lied about its death tolls.
I explained the complicated web of emergency care that was a quick helicopter flight away. He didn’t seem convinced. Instead he said something that most Talibs have echoed when discussing my time as a Marine: Don’t try to invade again.
I assured him that the United States appeared to have moved on, but he raised the latest wars in which the country had embroiled itself.
“You haven’t learned,” he said. “Look at Iran and Gaza — you are fighting for the Israelis. You don’t care about human rights.” He blamed the American people for voting a long line of presidents into power who started and continued the so-called forever wars.
As I walked into the blinding light of downtown Kabul, I felt what could only be described as a strange sense of relief. I had been lectured, yes, but on the edges it felt as if there was some acknowledgment of our humanity.
That felt like enough, for now. It was time to talk to Mr. Gulab.
Hard Facts
When I interviewed Mr. Gulab in 2021, I didn’t disclose that I had been a Marine. I questioned him as a reporter about his fighting days. He confirmed things I knew: how he and his peers would drop their weapons and greet us as friends on the streets, and that they relied on children to track our footprints to our makeshift outposts.
These had been hard facts for me to confront back in 2010, and still resonated when spoken in hindsight by a victorious insurgent, a hometown fighter who leveraged cunning to defeat us, even though we were far better armed than his band of 20 men. His tactics had formed a puzzle I navigated on every patrol so that I could survive the day. Some of my friends didn’t.
When I first met Mr. Gulab, I walked to a mud brick wall in Marja as a journalist. As a Marine more than a decade before, I had shot a young man in the head in this exact spot. I remembered the last glimpse of his face before the crack of my bolt-action rifle. My brain didn’t compute that I had killed him until later, when someone told me they had found his body dragged behind a corner with his weapon.
Mr. Gulab and I are roughly the same age, in our late 30s. He joined the Taliban because two of his brothers were killed fighting. One of them is his WhatsApp profile picture.
I joined the Marines because my dad was a Vietnam veteran who rarely spoke about the war, and because I was a short kid who grew up in a nice town and went to a nice public high school and wanted to prove myself.
In May, when I reached Mr. Gulab again, this time by phone, I told him the truth about my background: I wasn’t just a journalist, I had fought in Marja as a Marine. He said he had realized that when we first met, given the specificity of my questions.
He wondered what I wanted now: “What’s the point in talking again?”
Mr. Gulab had won his war and closed that chapter with the United States long before I did. Now he was preparing to fight another conflict, this time against Pakistan. He led a large Afghan Army unit from a base that is still known as Camp Dwyer, where I had flown from in 2010 to fight him and his mujahedeen troops.
The base was named after a British soldier: Lance Bombardier James Dwyer, who was 22 years old when his vehicle ran over a mine two days after Christmas in 2006.
Our conference call began with pleasantries before his reticence lifted, and he was willing to talk about the beginning of the Marja operation. I was curious about his side of our shared experiences, including the fate of a Taliban sniper whom Mr. Gulab would have known, or at least heard about.
That sniper had shot two of my Marines, including my assistant team leader, on the first day of the battle. It was dusk. We were on the roof of a two-story building, the only structure that high for miles. I remember what sounded like a baseball bat hitting uncooked meat. I looked up to see my friend Matt screaming. He had been shot in the arm. A week or so later we drove that sniper into an orchard, where a drone strike presumably killed him. But 16 years later, I still wanted to know for sure.
Mr. Gulab started to speak but was cut off by his minder, who said curtly that sharing such details was illegal. Instead, Mr. Gulab had questions of his own, involving that same sniper. He said he was nearby when my teammates were hit and remembered reports that two “foreigners” had been shot on that roof and fallen off.
“Did they die?” he asked.
“Why do many American soldiers who fought in Afghanistan and later returned to their country commit suicide?” Mr. Gulab asked. “I have heard this many times. What is the reason?”
It was a question that haunts many of us. I tried to explain how we carried the crushing weight of our own shattered expectations: We had grown up on the nostalgia of World War II, then done something we were supposed to be proud of. Instead, what we got from our politicians and generals were evasions and lies. Our commanders could never articulate how our deployments, and all the violence we committed and the losses we suffered, made anyone safer in the United States.
We were left to figure everything out on our own while they landed lucrative jobs at defense companies and collected big fees on speaking circuits. For some people, it was too much to handle.
Mr. Gulab’s years after the war had been nothing like that, he said. “Our mujahedeen are the opposite, because of the jihad they carried out and because of the friends they lost, they are very happy, because our jihad had a clear goal.”
While the Taliban had won the war, winning the peace had brought its own difficulties: Afghanistan remained in an economic crisis and isolated from much of the world.
“Regarding your apology,” he said, “I should say that at that time our jihad was for the sake of Allah, and we were not worried about being killed or wounded. We are also not upset about our friends who were killed or wounded, because all of us wished to be martyred or injured on the path of jihad. Since the conditions at that time were wartime conditions, civilians were often killed or wounded.”
I wished that I, too, could accept the deaths of my friends and the results of my own actions instead of inhabiting a fog of anger and bitterness over wasted youth. Mr. Gulab let me know that such sentiments existed in Afghanistan, too.
“Regarding the mujahedeen who were killed by your side, I do not know whether they or their families would forgive you,” Mr. Gulab said. “Those civilians may not forgive the foreign forces, but for me personally, I have my own authority and I have forgiven you.”
I first set foot in Afghanistan as a 20-year-old lance corporal in 2008. The Taliban were shadows in a tree line then, and characters that appeared in my nightmares as I tried to stay alive. In August 2021, I watched them shake hands with a squad of U.S. Marines as the Afghan Army evaporated, Kabul fell and my war was finally, fully lost.
Now my one-time enemy generously offered a kind of coda to a line I wrote in my journal on that first deployment 18 years ago: “It’s hard to explain this place and I feel it’s going to take the rest of my life to figure out what happened here.”
Boarding my flight back to the United States, I realized a pervasive sadness lingered in the corners of my mind. I was tired, as if litigating my war again had somehow restarted it. Mr. Gulab and I were, at one point in our lives, two people, barely men at the time, fighting for vastly different reasons. Maybe it was enough that I saw him now more, in some twisted way, as a friend than my enemy.
Some days later in Rhode Island, as I walked my dog on a muggy New England night, my phone vibrated.
Mr. Gulab had texted me in Pashto: “Have you arrived at your home?” he asked.
You can preview the report online and download it by clicking here or the download button below.
Since the crash following the collapse of the Republic in August 2021, Afghanistan’s economy has witnessed a modest recovery, although many households have not. In a new longitudinal study, AAN has followed a number of families across Afghanistan and over time, to better understand how the country’s economic trajectory has played out for individual households. When we first spoke to our interviewees in late 2021, all of them, including those who had previously been wealthy, were struggling and living off the dwindling resources they still had or the credit they managed to secure. A few weeks later, in early 2022, some were already doing a little better, but it was difficult to predict what their individual trajectories would be. This year, Martine van Bijlert and the AAN Team decided to revisit the original interviewees – the ones who could still be reached – to see how they had fared.
The picture that emerged from four rounds of interviews is one of starkly diverging paths. Households that had been better placed before the economic crisis hit – with multiple assets, solid employment and strong networks of trust – were much more likely to recover. Those with less valuable assets, weaker networks and, most importantly, a narrower range of resources, often saw their situation degrade, simply because it did not improve. For them, the economic decline has tended to be cumulative and self-reinforcing, often trapping the individuals and their families in a cycle of debt, forcing them to defer necessary maintenance or sell off belongings they would need in the future. It became increasingly difficult for them to plan, save and invest and, as a result, many of them saw their chances of economic recovery dwindle.
At the heart of the economic survival of all households were countless small and large acts of informal support that each had experienced over the years. Although these acts were often insufficient to turn their situation around, they were crucial in preventing the decline from accelerating further. This informal welfare system is vital, but also dangerously strained and often comes at a considerable cost to all involved.
Afghanistan’s economy has, over the years, witnessed a modest recovery, even though many households have not. This is also borne out in the current study. The households in our sample would, ‘in normal times’, have been considered middle or lower-middle class, with enough income to cover not only their basic needs, but also savings, repairs and investments. A few had been notably wealthy. Most of them owned or co-owned a house and many a piece of land and most were, or aspired for their family to be, part of the educated class. They were the people who could, normally, be expected to both benefit from and undergird a country’s economic growth. Instead, many have depended for their survival on their informal networks of support, which have been crucial, but drawing on them has come at a high cost. Taken together, these accounts show the limitations of both Afghanistan’s modest economic growth, and of what pure macroeconomic data can tell us.
Edited by Roxanna Shapour and Kate Clark
You can preview the report online and download it by clicking here or the download button below.
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
