Hazaras Under the Taliban: What Has Happened Since 2021
In the 1890s, Abdur Rahman Khan waged systematic war against the Hazara population of central Afghanistan. In 1998, the Taliban's first incarnation massacred thousands of Hazaras in Mazar-i-Sharif and Bamiyan. Both episodes are documented elsewhere on this site. The question this article addresses is what the Taliban's return to power in August 2021 has meant for the Hazara community since then - not as a single event, but as an ongoing condition unfolding across multiple dimensions simultaneously.
The pattern that has emerged is not a single massacre on the scale of 1998. It is something more distributed: targeted killings, sectarian attacks by affiliated militant groups, economic strangulation, the systematic removal of Hazaras from public life, and the slow dismantling of the gains - in education, employment, and civic participation - that the community built over the preceding two decades. The mechanisms are different from Abdur Rahman's campaigns. The compound of ethnicity and religious identity driving them is the same.
Why the Taliban's History With Hazaras Matters
Understanding what has happened since 2021 requires understanding what the Taliban have not forgotten.
The Hazara community was among the most organized forces of resistance against the Taliban's first rule. Hazara fighters held out in central Afghanistan for years; the Bamiyan valley held until the final weeks before the regime collapsed in 2001. In the republic that followed, Hazaras built a political presence, an educated professional class, and a security apparatus. They staffed ministries, won parliamentary seats, led universities, and ran military units.
Hazaras also carry a double vulnerability the Taliban have exploited before: they are ethnically distinct from Pashtun Afghans in ways that are visually legible, and they are Shi'a Muslims in a movement that treats Shi'ism as apostasy. This combination provides two separate ideological frameworks - ethnic and sectarian - for targeting them. Taliban commanders do not need to choose one over the other. The group's history shows they have used both simultaneously.
Targeted Killings and the ISIS-K Campaign
The most visible and documented dimension of violence against Hazaras since 2021 has come from two directions: Taliban-linked forces conducting targeted operations against former officials, soldiers, and community leaders, and ISIS-K (the Islamic State Khorasan Province) pursuing a systematic campaign of mass-casualty attacks on Hazara civilian populations.
ISIS-K's targeting of Hazaras is explicitly sectarian. The group regards Shi'a Muslims as apostates who must be killed, and has pursued that objective with sustained operational effort since the Taliban's takeover. The attacks have concentrated in areas of high Hazara density. Dasht-e-Barchi, the predominantly Hazara western district of Kabul, has been struck repeatedly. In August 2022, a suicide bomber killed at least 48 people at the Abdul Rahim Shaheed high school in Dasht-e-Barchi - one of several attacks on Hazara educational institutions. In September 2022, a bombing at the Kaaj Education Centre in the same district killed at least 53 people, nearly all of them young Hazara women and girls preparing for university entrance exams. In October 2021, a mosque bombing in Kunduz killed 46 Shi'a worshippers during Friday prayers. In April 2022, a mosque bombing in Mazar-i-Sharif killed at least 31 people.
These attacks are not random. They cluster on places where Hazara civilians concentrate in the largest numbers: mosques, schools, educational centres, and sporting events. A report by the New Lines Institute, published in September 2025 by legal scholar Mehdi J. Hakimi, documented at least 473 Hazaras killed and 681 wounded in 61 incidents over the first four years of Taliban rule. The report concluded there is a reasonable legal basis for regarding the conduct of both ISIS-K and the Taliban as meeting the criteria for genocide under the 1948 Genocide Convention.
The Taliban's own record with targeted killings operates differently but runs parallel. Human Rights Watch and Amnesty International have documented extrajudicial killings of former Afghan National Army soldiers, National Directorate of Security officers, and police - a population that is disproportionately Hazara, given the community's integration into republican-era security forces. Taliban commanders issued public amnesty assurances in August 2021. Documented executions of former security personnel followed within weeks.
Economic Strangulation
Before 2021, Hazaras were among the most economically active groups in urban Afghanistan. Two decades of stability had produced a Hazara professional and business class concentrated in Kabul, Mazar-i-Sharif, and Herat. The Taliban's return dismantled this rapidly.
Removal of Hazaras from public sector employment was systematic. By mid-2022, reporting by Al Jazeera's Ali Latifi and others documented Hazara civil servants dismissed, replaced, or denied return to positions that were not strictly political or security roles: teachers, hospital administrators, engineers in public utilities, and staff at UN-funded programs.
International aid pipelines - which represent a substantial share of economic activity in post-2021 Afghanistan - have compounded the exclusion. Taliban governance conditions on aid distribution have in documented cases restricted operations in Hazara-majority areas. UNAMA has reported differential humanitarian access in areas of high Hazara concentration. The cumulative effect is loss of formal employment, reduced aid access, and an economy contracting under financial isolation that falls hardest on communities already excluded from the public sector.
The Education Ban as Ethnic Policy
The Taliban's prohibition on secondary and higher education for women is formally a general policy. Its practical impact falls with particular force on the Hazara community.
Over the two decades of the republic, Hazara families made distinctive sacrifices to educate their daughters. Female literacy and educational attainment among Hazaras exceeded national averages by a significant margin. The Kaaj Education Centre attack in September 2022 - which killed 53 young Hazara women preparing for university entrance exams - was striking not only because of its death toll but because of what Kaaj represented: the concrete expression of that investment, a private institution serving Hazara girls from families of limited means.
The education ban eliminates a pathway the Hazara community had invested in disproportionately. It does not land on a community where female education was marginal. It lands on a community where it had become central to family economic strategy and generational mobility, concentrating long-term damage where the gains were greatest.
Mass Displacement
Population displacement since 2021 has been substantial, and Hazaras are disproportionately represented among those who have fled. Within Afghanistan, UNHCR and UNAMA have tracked significant internal displacement from Hazara-majority areas - from parts of Hazarajat where land seizures have accelerated, and from Dasht-e-Barchi, where repeated bombings have driven residents out of the district.
Externally, the primary routes have been to Iran and Pakistan, with secondary flows to Turkey and onward to Europe. Both Iran and Pakistan - which together hosted several million Afghan refugees before 2021 - have since tightened border policies and, in Pakistan's case, pursued mass expulsions of undocumented Afghans. Hazara communities in Quetta had already endured a sustained ISIS-K bombing campaign before 2021; the post-2021 arrivals compounded pressure on a community already under siege. For those who have reached Europe or Canada, processing backlogs are long and border pressures have in some cases produced expedited procedures that do not account adequately for the specific risk profile of Hazara applicants.
Land Seizures in Hazarajat
Land seizures in Hazara-majority central Afghanistan represent a slower and less-reported dimension of the post-2021 situation.
Journalists and researchers - including reporting by the Afghanistan Analysts Network and documentation by human rights organizations - have tracked Taliban-affiliated commanders seizing agricultural land, pastures, and grazing rights in Bamiyan, Daykundi, Uruzgan, and Ghazni provinces. In some cases, the seizures are carried out directly by Taliban units. In others, Kuchi nomads armed and emboldened by Taliban support have occupied Hazara pastureland that has been subject to seasonal conflict for decades, now with the balance of force decisively shifted.
The pattern echoes the post-1890s period, when Abdur Rahman's campaigns were followed by systematic redistribution of Hazara land to Pashtun settlers and tribal leaders. Land seizure is not simply an economic injury. In an agricultural economy, it is an attack on the conditions of survival and a tool for forcing permanent displacement of rural populations.
Cultural and Civic Erasure
The Taliban destroyed the Bamiyan Buddhas during their first period of rule. Since 2021, the pattern has continued. The statue of Abdul Ali Mazari - the Hazara political leader killed by the Taliban in 1995 - was removed from Bamiyan by Taliban authorities in August 2021. Mazari carries considerable symbolic weight for the Hazara community; his removal was understood as a deliberate signal.
Civic institutions that operated during the republic - community organizations, cultural centers, civil society groups - have been closed or made impossible to operate. Hazara-language media and Hazara-run outlets have largely disappeared. Journalists reporting on Hazara affairs have faced arrest, threats, and forced exile. As Lynne O'Donnell and others have documented, the disappearance of civil society from Afghanistan's urban centers falls hardest on communities that invested most heavily in building it.
The International Response and Its Limits
The international response has involved substantial documentation, significant political attention, and limited concrete protection.
UNAMA's annual reports have documented attacks on Hazara populations with increasing specificity. The UN Special Rapporteur on Afghanistan, Richard Bennett, identified patterns of persecution he characterized in April 2022 as carrying "hallmarks of persecution amounting to crimes against humanity." Human Rights Watch and Amnesty International have published field reports documenting specific incidents, killings, and displacement patterns.
At the political level, Canada's House of Commons passed a motion in October 2022 recognizing the genocide against the Hazara people. Australia's House of Representatives passed a similar motion in October 2023. These are political acts of real symbolic value, not legal determinations - the distinction is explained in the genocide recognition article on this site.
What has not followed is binding legal accountability. The ICC's examination of the Afghanistan situation is ongoing. No state has initiated ICJ proceedings. Taliban governance has not faced consequences proportionate to the documented conduct. The states with most leverage over the Taliban - China, Russia, Pakistan, Gulf states - have interests in Afghan stability that do not align with Hazara protection, and Western governments are managing domestic political constraints that limit their appetite for sustained engagement.
Where This Leaves Things
Across the three articles on this site tracing the modern arc of Hazara history - the 1890s, 1998, and post-2021 - a consistent pattern runs through every political dispensation Afghanistan has passed through. The mechanisms change. The compound of ethnic and sectarian targeting does not.
What has changed is the documentation infrastructure. There are field researchers, UN monitoring bodies, legal analysts building the evidentiary record, and Hazara communities abroad with the resources and connectivity to sustain international attention. The New Lines Institute analysis by Mehdi J. Hakimi is the most detailed legal examination yet produced of the post-2021 period - different in kind from what existed when the first Taliban massacred thousands in Mazar-i-Sharif in a single day.
What that record does not yet produce is a decided legal case. The gap between documentation and binding accountability remains wide. Understanding it clearly is a precondition for closing it.
Sources
- Mehdi J. Hakimi, "The Hazara Genocide: An Examination of Breaches of the Genocide Convention in Afghanistan since August 2021," New Lines Institute (September 2025)
- Human Rights Watch, Afghanistan country reports (2021–2025)
- Amnesty International, Afghanistan reporting (2021–2025)
- UNAMA Annual Reports on the Protection of Civilians in Armed Conflict (2021–2024)
- UN Special Rapporteur on Afghanistan, Richard Bennett, reports to the Human Rights Council (2022–2025)
- Afghanistan Analysts Network, field reporting and analysis (2021–2025)
- Canada House of Commons motion recognizing the Hazara genocide (October 2022)
- Australia House of Representatives motion recognizing the Hazara genocide (October 2023)