History  

The Kart-e-Se Massacre of 1993: What Happened and Why It Matters

On February 11, 1993, forces of the Islamic State of Afghanistan moved through the Hazara neighborhoods of Afshar and Kart-e-Se in west Kabul. Within hours, they had executed scores of civilians in the streets, abducted hundreds more, and subjected women and girls to systematic rape. The men taken captive were transported to a militia base in Paghman, where they were forced to dig trenches and bury the dead. At night, groups were taken from containers and shot. Most of the abducted were never returned.

The principals responsible for these events - documented in rigorous detail by Human Rights Watch and the Afghanistan Justice Project - went on to become government ministers, defense chiefs, and members of parliament. None were prosecuted. A 2007 Afghan amnesty law, advocated in parliament partly by one of the documented perpetrators, put a legal seal on the impunity.

For Hazara communities, February 11 is a day of annual remembrance. For most of the world, the events it marks remain entirely unknown.

Kabul, 1992–1993: A City Being Destroyed

To understand what happened in Afshar, it is necessary to understand what Kabul had become by early 1993. The Soviet-backed government of Najibullah fell in April 1992. In its place, mujahideen factions that had fought a common enemy turned almost immediately on each other. The Peshawar Accords established a nominal power-sharing arrangement under the Islamic State of Afghanistan, but Gulbuddin Hekmatyar's Hezb-e Islami refused to participate and began shelling the capital. This triggered multi-faction fighting across the city. In 1993 alone, more than 10,000 people died in Kabul from the fighting.

The principal factions that would conduct the Afshar offensive were Jamiat-e Islami, the Tajik-dominated party that held formal government power under President Rabbani and Defense Minister Ahmad Shah Massoud, and Ittihad-e Islami, a Saudi-backed militia under Abdul Rasul Sayyaf. Opposing them in west Kabul was Hezb-e Wahdat, the Hazara Shi'a political and military party formed in 1989 by consolidating nine previously separate Hazara resistance organizations. Hezb-e Wahdat held its headquarters at the Academy of Social Sciences in the Afshar district, which was also a densely populated Hazara civilian residential area.

West Kabul - including Afshar and the adjacent neighborhood of Kart-e-Se - was not simply a military frontline. It was where Hazara families lived. That reality is essential to what followed.

Ittihad's hostility toward the Hazara Shi'a population of west Kabul predated February 1993 by months. Amnesty International documented that Sayyaf's forces had rampaged through the Afshar area beginning in May 1992, slaughtering inhabitants, raping women, and burning homes. The February 1993 offensive built on a pattern that was already established.

The Military Objective and the Decision to Strike

The stated objective of the February 1993 offensive was to capture Hezb-e Wahdat's headquarters at the Social Science Institute in Afshar and to link government-controlled territory from west to east Kabul. According to Human Rights Watch's 2005 report "Blood-Stained Hands," the operation was "the largest and most integrated use of military power undertaken by the ISA up to that time" and was "planned and approved by senior leadership of Jamiat-e Islami, Ittihad-i Islami, and the Rabbani government." This was a planned state military operation, not an opportunistic rampage by rogue troops.

Afghan intelligence chief Mohammad Qasim Fahim - who would later become Defense Minister in the post-2001 government - had his personnel work specifically to secure commander cooperation ahead of the assault. The operation had a chain of command that reached to the highest levels of the Islamic State of Afghanistan.

The Night of February 10–11: Bombardment

The offensive began on the night of February 10-11, 1993, with a generalized bombardment of west Kabul. Artillery positions were established at multiple strategic points: Aliabad hill, Mamorine mountain, Qargha, Television Mountain, the Hotel Intercontinental, and Kabul Zoo. The weapons deployed included BM-40, BM-22, and BM-12 rocket launchers, Sakr 18 rocket launchers, 120mm and 82mm mortars, and D30 105mm cannons.

According to testimony cited in "Blood-Stained Hands," the rockets, tank shells, and mortars "predominantly struck civilian residential areas rather than military targets." The Social Science Institute - the stated military objective - was never hit during the bombardment. The bombardment was so intense that residents sheltered in place. Many did not attempt to flee.

February 11: The Ground Assault

Troop movements began at approximately 5:00 AM on February 11. Jamiat forces seized the peaks of Afshar mountain. Ittihad troops entered the Afshar neighborhood itself. Hezb-e Wahdat's forces withdrew southward, leaving the civilian Hazara population in place.

By approximately 1:00 PM, Wahdat's main defense line had collapsed. By 2:00 PM, ISA forces occupied the Social Science Institute. The military objective - such as it was - had been achieved. What continued after that point was not warfare against a military adversary.

Human Rights Watch's characterization, based on over 150 in-depth interviews with witnesses, victims, faction members, health workers, and journalists present at the time, is unambiguous: the "search operation" that followed "rapidly became a mass exercise in abuse and looting." Soldiers were warned by radio "not to start fighting over the loot" - indicating organized, command-level awareness of what was happening on the ground.

What Happened to Civilians

The primary perpetrators of civilian atrocities documented by HRW were Ittihad forces - Sayyaf's men. The report states clearly: "the vast majority of testimony regarding the Afshar operation suggests that the abuses were carried out by Ittihad forces and not Jamiat forces."

Killings

Virtually every witness interviewed by HRW described seeing bodies. Witness "G," anonymized in the report, recounted seeing 30 to 35 bodies while fleeing. One survivor described her father beaten to death inside their family compound. Mrs. Gol, whose account is preserved via Hindupost drawing on HRW documentation, saw "more than 70 dead people lying on the street in our alley" when her family fled. She lost two brothers. Two of her sons were taken as captives.

HRW's 2015 Dispatches piece, published on the massacre's 22nd anniversary, documented approximately 80 summary executions over three days. One year later, when Hezb-e Wahdat forces retook parts of the district, 58 bodies were found in mass graves.

Abductions

Civilian men and suspected combatants were arrested in large numbers throughout February 11 and the days following. One witness described being placed "into a container with about 60 to 65 men." HRW documented approximately 700 to 750 people abducted by Ittihad who were never returned. Of these, 80 to 200 were eventually freed after ransoms were paid to Ittihad commanders. The rest are presumed killed. Abdullah Khan, 67, was arrested during the operation and remains missing.

The abducted men were transported to Sayyaf's Ittihad base in Paghman. During the day they were forced to dig trenches and bury the dead in groups of 10 to 20 men. At night they were held in metal containers. Periodically, men were removed from the containers at night and did not return. Gunshots were heard. Survivors understood they were being executed in the trenches they had been made to dig.

One man held at Paghman for 45 days was eventually released with permanently damaged hearing from beatings and difficulty recognizing people. Another was held for six months, forced to dig trenches and perform domestic labor for his captors, and was released, in the words documented by HRW, "half-paralysed and mentally ill."

Sexual Violence

HRW documents multiple accounts of rape. One woman stated that soldiers assaulted her in her basement while she was wounded - "while I was still bleeding they raped me." Two girls aged 14 and 16 were raped; one was stabbed by a bayonet while resisting. Four girls were raped in a single residential compound. HRW notes that "the numbers of women raped is not known" and that "few families would report it" due to shame and fear. Documented cases almost certainly undercount the actual scale. Women and girls were specifically targeted; the commission confirmed that sexual violence was widespread.

Additional Documented Abuses

Multiple sources - hazara.net drawing on S.A. Mousavi's "The Hazaras of Afghanistan" (1998), as well as Hindupost documentation - record beheadings of elderly men, women, and children; bodies placed in wells; homes burned; and soldiers reportedly making statements about wanting to "drink the blood of the Hazaras." Prisoners were forced to carry looted household goods. The looting was systematic.

A command meeting on February 12 ordered a halt to the massacres and looting. That such an order was necessary - and that it came the day after the assault rather than before - means that senior command knew what was happening and chose to issue a stop order only after the atrocities had already occurred.

The mass civilian exodus from Afshar took place on the night of February 11-12. The area remained largely flattened as of mid-2005, when HRW researchers visited. Afshar residents did not return until after 2001.

The Casualty Record

The verified baseline from Human Rights Watch is approximately 780 to 830 people killed or disappeared: roughly 80 summary executions combined with approximately 700 abducted and presumed killed in detention. HRW's 2015 Dispatches summary states "some 80 summary executions and more than 700 kidnappings in three days." The 58 bodies found in mass graves one year later represent additional confirmed deaths beyond the initial street killings.

Community sources place the figures considerably higher. Hazara International and hazara.net document figures of 1,000 or more killed and disappeared. The nasimfekrat.com source, drawing on additional documentation, cites 1,500 to 2,000. General Mohammad Nabi Azimi - a high-ranking official of the Rabbani government itself, writing in his 1998 memoir "Army and Politics in the Last Three Decades in Afghanistan" - described "hundreds, even thousands" of deaths.

The true total is not knowable. Official investigation documents were destroyed when the Taliban captured Kabul in 1996. No forensic investigation of the Paghman mass grave site has been conducted. The HRW figure of approximately 800 is the most rigorously documented floor. The actual number of people killed is likely higher.

Perpetrators and Command Responsibility

Human Rights Watch's "Blood-Stained Hands" is explicit about who bears responsibility and why. The following is drawn from that report and the parallel investigation by the Afghanistan Justice Project.

Abdul Rasul Sayyaf was the senior military commander of Ittihad forces, the faction whose troops conducted the overwhelming majority of documented civilian atrocities. HRW documents that he coordinated military operations before the assault, met with sub-commanders ahead of the attack, attended strategy meetings at the Hotel Intercontinental during the offensive, and was "directly in touch with senior commanders by radio" throughout the operation. He "knew or should have known about Ittihad abuses during the campaign." HRW concludes that Sayyaf is "directly implicated in the abductions and the indiscriminate and intentional targeting of civilians." Key Ittihad commanders named in the documentation are Shir Alam and Zalmay Tofan.

Ahmad Shah Massoud, as Defense Minister of the Islamic State of Afghanistan, held overall authority for the military operation. The offensive was "planned and approved by officials at the highest levels" of the Rabbani government. According to General Nabi Azimi's 1998 account - an internal government source - Massoud personally "watched, directed, and managed the attacks" from TV Hill. The fighting occurred "barely two kilometers from the general command post with radio communications," and HRW argues that "the general commander must have known of the abuses taking place as soon as they started." HRW states he "failed to take effective measures to prevent abuses" and that Jamiat forces "intentionally targeted civilians and civilian areas in western Kabul for attack, or indiscriminately attacked such areas." HRW called for Massoud's "role and that of his commanders to be fully investigated," noting he was assassinated in September 2001 before any such investigation took place.

Mohammad Qasim Fahim, head of Afghan intelligence at the time, is identified by HRW as "entirely responsible for the special operations." His personnel contacted commanders to coordinate the assault. Fahim subsequently became Defense Minister of Afghanistan from 2001 to 2004.

HRW's overall finding: the attacks on civilians "were war crimes committed by troops within military structures with command-and-control mechanisms." The ethnically targeted killings and abductions "meet the threshold for crimes against humanity."

Impunity: The Aftermath

None of the principal commanders were prosecuted. Not one.

After 2001, the international community made a deliberate choice. The U.S. and coalition partners working to build the post-Taliban government required the cooperation of the warlord networks that had fought the Taliban. Those networks included the same commanders implicated in the Afshar atrocities. The Afghan government under Karzai systematically blocked accountability efforts. The Afghanistan Independent Human Rights Commission completed a conflict-mapping report and a nationwide consultation - "A Call for Justice" (2005) - that found 70 percent of more than 6,000 Afghans interviewed across 32 of 34 provinces had personally suffered or had family members who suffered war crimes or human rights violations. That report recommended vetting mechanisms, criminal trials, and reparations. Its recommendations were not implemented.

In 2007, the Afghan parliament passed the National Reconciliation, General Amnesty and National Stability Law, providing blanket amnesty for human rights abusers. The law was published in the official gazette in November 2008 and came into force in January 2010. Among those who advocated for its passage was Abdul Rasul Sayyaf - by then a member of parliament. The very person HRW identified as directly implicated in the abductions and civilian targeting helped write the legal instrument that absolved him of accountability.

The amnesty law placed a legal seal on what political calculation had already accomplished.

Why the Outside World Does Not Know

The near-total absence of international awareness of the Afshar atrocities is not accidental. Several factors produced it.

The first is the absence of any legal process. Atrocities that reach international tribunals - the Srebrenica massacre, the Rwandan genocide - become globally known in part because legal proceedings force sustained documentation into the public record. The Afshar massacre has never been the subject of any international criminal proceeding. There is no trial record, no judgment, no named conviction. The International Criminal Court has jurisdiction over Afghanistan (the country joined the Rome Statute in 2003), but no ICC proceedings focused on the 1993 events have been opened.

The second is the destruction of records. The Afghan government had collected official investigation documents related to the Afshar campaign. When the Taliban captured Kabul in 1996, those documents were destroyed.

The third is political interest. The post-2001 international community worked closely with figures implicated in the Afshar massacre. Fahim was Defense Minister. Sayyaf was a parliamentary figure courted for political stabilization. Western governments were invested in maintaining the reputations of these men. As Just Security documented in 2021, the "failure of transitional justice in Afghanistan" was not passive neglect - it was the product of choices made by the Afghan government and by its international backers who prioritized short-term political accommodation over accountability.

The fourth is the particular way Ahmad Shah Massoud has been framed in Western discourse. Massoud's assassination on September 9, 2001 - two days before the World Trade Center attacks - occurred at a moment that made him instantly legible in the West as an anti-Taliban martyr. His image was on the wall of the White House Situation Room. His role in the Afshar offensive has been systematically minimized in Western media and political commentary even as Human Rights Watch explicitly names him and calls for his role to be investigated. The "good warlord" framing provided political insulation.

The fifth is simple geography and access. Afghanistan in 1992-1993 was extremely difficult for foreign journalists to operate in. Coverage of the Afghan civil war was thin compared to contemporaneous conflicts in the Balkans, where international journalists were far more numerous and where Western political attention was more concentrated.

Memory and Commemoration

February 11 is observed annually in Hazara communities in Afghanistan and abroad - in Australia, the United Kingdom, and across North America - as a day of remembrance for the Afshar events. The gathering is not ceremonial. It is the act of communities maintaining witness to something the wider world has refused to reckon with.

A 2026 piece on nasimfekrat.com, reflecting on the massacre's significance, noted that "we commemorate this tragedy only once a year - and even then, often only in words," and called for the building of systematic oral history archives so that survivor testimony does not disappear with the generation that witnessed it. The survivors and witnesses of February 1993 are aging. The first-person record of what happened in Afshar and Kart-e-Se will not be available indefinitely.

The neighborhood itself stood largely flattened for more than a decade after 1993. Residents did not return until after 2001. The physical erasure of the district was of a piece with the political erasure of what was done there.

Why It Matters to Name It Now

The Afshar massacre does not stand in isolation in the Hazara historical experience. It belongs to a longer pattern - one that the Afghanistan Independent Human Rights Commission and human rights scholars have connected explicitly across decades. The Mazar-i Sharif massacres of 1998, in which Taliban forces killed thousands of Hazaras in a deliberate campaign of ethnic extermination, occurred in a country where the precedent of Afshar had already demonstrated that mass killing of Hazara civilians carried no cost to those who ordered it. The targeted killings of Hazaras that resumed after the Taliban recaptured Afghanistan in 2021 - bombings of schools, mosques, and community centers - take place in the same atmosphere of impunity.

The connection is not merely rhetorical. When accountability never comes, when perpetrators gain power rather than face it, the political landscape absorbs a lesson: that certain populations can be targeted without consequence. Historians and human rights practitioners who have traced Hazara persecution have argued, and the evidence supports, that the impunity established in the 1990s shaped the calculus of those who perpetrated subsequent atrocities.

For Who Are the Hazara to be understood as a complete picture, the history of what has been done to them cannot be selective. The 1993 massacre sits at the center of Hazara political consciousness not as a distant historical grievance but as an unresolved injustice - unresolved because the men responsible ascended to positions of power, and because the international actors who might have insisted on accountability chose not to. As explored in The Case for Genocide Recognition, the question of how to name and account for patterns of mass violence against Hazaras is one that remains open and contested.

The Afshar offensive was a planned state military operation that also became, as Human Rights Watch documented, a campaign of ethnically targeted murder, mass abduction, and systematic rape against the Hazara civilian population of west Kabul. The scale was not incidental. The impunity was not accidental. Both were the products of choices made by identifiable people and institutions, in real time and in the years that followed.

Naming it plainly is not sensationalism. It is the minimum obligation of historical record.

Primary Sources