Weeks after video of Taliban members executing National Resistance Front fighters drew the United Nations to call for justice, the Taliban continue to engage in similar violence. But the Taliban are also indiscriminately targeting members of the Tajik community, conflating their ethnicity with allegiance to the NRF.
According to a doctor working with American volunteer Leslie Merriman to provide healthcare services to Afghans, the Taliban searched in Kapisa province, this week, for Afghans who cannot speak Pashto. Pashto is the dialect spoken by the country’s Pashtun majority. The doctor told Merriman that the Taliban shot 10 Tajik boys and young men outside their homes while their families watched. Merriman said Taliban fighters removed the bodies of their victims in order to hide evidence of their crimes.
Another victim of the Taliban’s door-to-door raids was a Tajik teenager who recently escaped weeks of captivity and gang rape at the hands of two Taliban fighters, who abducted her after learning she did not speak Pashto. Merriman said the 15-year-old was killed because she was arguing with the Taliban members who arrived at her home and attempted to arrest her brother. Merriman had been helping the girl obtain medical care after her ordeal left her pregnant and in need of extensive medical testing and medication. During the deadly overnight raids, Merriman also told me that one of her special immigrant visa applicant contacts was killed while hiding on his roof to evade the Taliban. For Merriman, the losses have been devastating. “Just when I think my heart can’t break any more, it manages to keep breaking,” she said.
The Tajik minority has been a Taliban target since the group rose to power. In early 2022, the Taliban excised the Persian language from government documents and removed the Farsi word for “university” from a banner in Balkh province. One source has indicated that the Taliban killed 600 Tajik men and boys they took as hostages from three northern provinces in September 2021 and February 2022. The victims were then buried in mass graves.
It remains impossible to gain accurate information from the Taliban’s mendacious leaders and media apparatus. But despite these difficulties, the international community must respond to rising evidence of the Taliban’s ethnic genocide.
Beth Bailey (@BWBailey85) is a freelance writer from the Detroit area.
