Weronika Strzyżyńska

Hazara communities in Afghanistan are being targeted in violent attacks by the Islamic State Khorasan Province (ISKP), Islamic State’s affiliate in Afghanistan, with more than 700 people killed in 13 attacks in the past year, according to a report by Human Rights Watch.

In the report, Human Rights Watch (HRW) accused the Taliban of doing little to protect Hazara and other religious minorities from suicide bombings and deadly attacks, and failing to provide adequate medical care and assistance to victims and their families, despite pledging to do so when they took power in August 2021.

A Taliban spokesperson said that the government had taken the “necessary measures” to protect the Hazara and that the report did not reflect the reality on the ground.

The ISKP have been behind attacks on Hazara mosques, schools, and workplaces across Afghanistan, said HRW.

“The issue isn’t that the Taliban is responsible for the violence. They’re responsible for not providing adequate security to their own people,” said John Sifton, Asia advocacy director at HRW. “If they’re going to act as the governing authorities, their first priority should be protecting their own people from violence by this insurgent group.”

The Hazara, a predominantly Shia Muslim ethnic minority group in Afghanistan, have been historically persecuted by the Taliban and other groups.

Sifton said that while the new Taliban government has become comparatively more accepting of the Hazara and other religious minorities, the ISKP, who have been rapidly gaining power in some areas of the country, continue to view all Shia groups as heretics and “enemies of Islam”.

On 19 April, six people were killed and least 20 injured in a suicide bomb attack at Abdul Rahim Shahid high school in west Kabul. “There were dead bodies everywhere,” said a survivor.

Two days later, 31 people were killed and 87 injured when ISKP bombed Seh Dokan mosque in Mazar-e Sharif, one of Afghanistan’s largest Shia mosques, which has now shut down.

Later that month, 14 people were killed and 13 injured in multiple attacks targeting Hazara at their workplaces and in public in Samangan province and in Mazar-e Sharif city.

In Kabul, 120 people were killed and injured on 7 August while celebrating the Shia holiday of Ashura, UN Assistance Mission in Afghanistan reported.

The ISKP attacks on Hazara and other Shia and Sufi communities have become more systematic, Richard Bennett, the UN special rapporteur on the situation of human rights in Afghanistan, said in May. He added that they reflect “elements of an organisational policy” and bear “hallmarks of crimes against humanity”.

Taliban troops continue to fight ISKP forces, however no security measures have been implemented to protect Hazara from further attacks, Human Rights Watch said.

“We are not contesting that the Taliban is fighting ISKP. We’re simply asking that they do more to protect the community that is most at risk,” said Sifton.

The attacks have also effectively excluded Hazara from participating in public life, practising their religion or accessing education. “Most of my classmates have stopped attending school after the tragedy,” said an 18-year-old survivor of the Abdul Rahim Shahid high school bombing. “When the Taliban took power, instead of a class of 50, there were only 25. Now, only 10 to 15 kids are attending classes.”

One of his injured classmates is determined to return to school, but bullet shards in his feet have made it difficult to walk even a short distance. “If I am supposed to die, I will die, but so long as I am alive, I will go to school,” he said.

A Taliban spokesperson said: “As per the current government policy, all Afghans are equal in the sight of the law; there is no discrimination. The government has taken necessary measures for the security of Hazara and they are free to perform their rituals. Some individual incidents have taken place in all mosques, whether they belonged to Sunni Muslims or Shias. The Human Rights Watch should correct its report; it doesn’t reflect ground realities.”

The Tajikistan authorities are rounding up Afghan refugees and forcing them to cross the border back into Afghanistan, despite some having been granted asylum in other countries.

According to reports from Tajikistan’s 10,000-strong Afghan refugee community, people are being picked up off the street and houses raided in a spate of recent round-ups of Afghan families, who have been sheltering in the country since the Taliban seized power in August 2021.

The UN’s refugee agency, UNHCR, confirmed that 80 Afghan refugees and asylum seekers had been deported from Tajikistan since 16 August.

The UNHCR has appealed to the Tajikistan authorities to stop the forced deportations. It is not clear what the motivation or policy is behind them; until a few weeks ago the Tajikistan government was cooperating with the UNHCR to shelter and resettle Afghans fleeing the Taliban authorities.

Elizabeth Tan, UNHCR’s director of international protection, said: “We are asking Tajikistan to stop detaining and deporting refugees, an action that clearly puts lives at risk.

“Forced return of refugees is against the law and runs contrary to the principle of non-refoulement, a cornerstone of international refugee law,” she said, referring to the legal tenet that forbids a country receiving asylum seekers from returning them to somewhere they would be at risk of persecution.

The UN documented a case of five Afghans forced back on 23 August. They included “a family comprising three children and their mother, [and] were returned to Afghanistan through the Panji Poyon border checkpoint in southern Tajikistan, despite UNHCR’s interventions to halt the deportations”, the UN agency stated.

Afghans in Tajikistan who spoke to the Guardian say that the numbers being forced back over the land border into Afghanistan is running into the hundreds, with forced deportations increasing over the past fortnight. They said that many Afghan refugees were being sent back without passports or identity documents and left to fend for themselves, with no way of getting to a place of safety.

For nearly a week, no one in Samira’s family has dared to step out of their flat in a small town in northern Tajikistan. Her children have not been to school and they have not felt safe enough to get groceries or medical supplies.

All around them, they say, other members of the Afghan refugee community are being detained and forcibly deported back to their home country without clear reason or justification.

“We are living with a lot of fear that we might be detained by the police and deported at any minute,” said Samira*, a former security official who escaped Afghanistan after repeated attempts on her life.

“We will be arrested by the Taliban the moment we enter Afghanistan. I spent years fighting them, they will seek their revenge.”

“Even those with proper documents and ongoing asylum cases in western countries are being picked from the streets and dropped off at the border between Afghanistan and Tajikistan … which is why we stopped going outside,” said Ejaz*, Samira’s husband.

“With one of the families we know, the husband was deported without even being allowed to appeal against the decision or see his wife and kids. The family had a flight scheduled for 12 September to Canada, where they were emigrating. But now the husband is back in Afghanistan, while the wife and two kids are struggling to survive here.”

Maryam, a former Afghan media personality who fled to Turkey to escape the Taliban, is frantic with worry for the rest of her family, who are refugees in Tajikistan. They have locked themselves inside their home and are living in terror.

“They told me that it started with Afghans being rounded up from the streets, so they stopped leaving their homes. But then they [authorities] started raiding homes and picked up people from their places of work,” she said.

“I am afraid to talk to them on the phone or to check in with friends. Everyone is afraid they will be tracked and deported.”

While Samira and her family are also in the final stages of emigrating to Canada, she is racked with dread over the deportations. Her concern is mainly for her children, who have already experienced immense trauma. “The refugee life has been hard on children. They deserved a better future,” she said.

The Tajikistan authorities have been contacted for comment.

* Names have been changed to protect their identity