On August 15, 2025, Afghanistan entered the fourth year since the Taliban’s return to power. For the country’s Hazara community this period has been marked by a complex mix of insecurity, shrinking civic space, economic freefall, and steadily tightening religious and social controls. The headline story is familiar: the Taliban consolidated territorial control and reduced battlefield violence. But zoom in on Hazara districts—from Kabul’s Dasht-e-Barchi to the central highlands of Bamiyan and Daykundi—and a different pattern emerges: a grinding attrition of rights, safety, representation, and land, punctuated by deadly attacks from the Islamic State Khorasan Province (ISKP) and frequent administrative or coercive measures by Taliban authorities.
This article takes stock of year four through five lenses that matter on the ground:
- Physical Security: A “peacetime” of targeted terror
- Religious Freedom and Cultural Life: Shrinking spaces, managed rituals
- Land, Displacement, and the Return Squeeze
- Humanitarian Need and Access: Less aid for more people
- Political Visibility and Representation: Near-zero inclusion
1) Physical Security: A “peacetime” of targeted terror
Afghanistan’s overall war-related civilian casualties dropped after August 2021, but realities show an elevated share of attacks hitting places of worship and Hazara/Shia communities. That pattern persisted into year four. In Kabul, ISKP bombings in the Hazara-majority neighborhood of Dasht-e-Barchi continued to strike the most quotidian spaces—buses, gyms, and small shops. On January 6, 2024, a minibus exploded in Dasht-e-Barchi, killing at least five and wounding more than a dozen; ISKP claimed the attack as part of an explicit campaign to target Shia Hazaras. (1)
The message embedded in these bombings remains chillingly consistent: everyday Hazara life is deemed a soft target. This lethality exists alongside official Taliban claims of defeating ISKP—a narrative repeatedly belied by sporadic but persistent attacks, especially in urban Hazara areas. UNAMA’s earlier trend reporting underscored the way IED attacks, once focused on state and military targets, shifted toward sectarian sites, with Hazara/Shia mosques and community spaces disproportionately affected. That underlying risk set has not meaningfully changed through 2024–25. (2)
Even outside Kabul, Hazaras have faced targeted violence. In September 2024, Human Rights Watch (HRW) drew attention to killings in Daykundi, underscoring the ongoing vulnerability of Hazara civilians in rural areas where state protection and independent monitoring are thin. (3)
The net effect is a paradox: the “end of war” has not delivered peace to Hazara streets, classrooms, or buses. For a generation of Hazara students and workers, risk is simply distributed differently—fewer front lines, more sectarian bombings; fewer firefights, more fear on the commute.
2) Religious Freedom and Cultural Life: Shrinking spaces, managed rituals
The Taliban’s de facto authorities have rolled out dozens of religious edicts and restrictions since 2021. These measures affect all Afghans who diverge from the Taliban’s interpretations, but the constraints land hardest on religious minorities and on women—two identities that overlap substantially within the Hazara community. Multiple rights monitors, including Amnesty International and the U.S. Commission on International Religious Freedom, have documented the erosion of religious freedom and the intensification of gender-based restrictions; the UN Special Rapporteur on Afghanistan has described a system of institutionalized discrimination. In year four, none of those trajectories reversed. (4)
In 2024, Taliban authorities restricted Muharram and Ashura commemorations—the central rituals of Shia public religious life—by limiting the days, confining ceremonies to specific venues, and discouraging or banning public processions. Independent researchers verified orders in Kabul that curtailed rituals to a four-day window and required events to be held behind closed doors. While 2025 saw some Taliban figures attend mourning gatherings and call for “unity,” reports from 2024–25 point to a continuing policy of tightly managing Shia expression under the banner of security. The result is a narrowing of public space for Hazara religious identity, even when ceremonies proceed without incident.
This religious squeeze overlaps with a broader regime of gender restrictions—bans and limits on education, work, movement, and public life for women and girls. For Hazara women, who had leveraged post-2001 openings to become teachers, students, doctors, journalists, and activists, the rollback has been particularly punishing and devastating. UN and EU analyses throughout 2024–25 reaffirm that women’s rights are constricted across Afghanistan; within Hazara communities, where education was embraced as a path to safety and social mobility, the bans strike at the core of communal resilience strategies. (5)
3) Land, Displacement, and the Return Squeeze
If bombings erode physical safety and edicts shrink identity, the third pressure point is territorial: who controls Hazara land?
Reports of land seizures and forced evictions in Hazara-majority areas have surfaced regularly since 2021. In July 2024, local media reported forced evictions in Daykundi; in July 2025, Taliban authorities forcibly cleared an entire Hazara village in Bamiyan after siding with Kuchi claimants in a land dispute. Whatever the merits of individual cases, the visible pattern—accelerated adjudications that result in Hazara dispossession—feeds a deeper communal anxiety: that legal procedures and coercive power are converging to reverse decades of incremental land security.
Year four also collided with a historic surge in cross-border returns. Since late 2023, Pakistan’s deportation drive has intensified in phases, while Iran dramatically escalated deportations in mid-2025, reportedly pushing daily forced returns from around 5,000 to as high as 30,000. The International Organization for Migration and independent outlets report that over four million Afghans have returned from Iran and Pakistan since September 2023, including more than 1.5 million in 2025 alone. Among them are many Hazaras who had sought safety, schooling, or livelihoods across the borders and now re-enter a country where jobs are scarce and gender/religious restrictions tight. (6)
These mass returns collide with the local land picture. Families coming home to central highland provinces face not only drought and diminished services but also contested tenure in districts where land disputes with nomadic or neighboring groups stretch back generations. Even where evictions aren’t occurring, uncertainty about rights—combined with pressure from returning relatives seeking shelter—creates a combustible social mix that can disproportionately burden Hazara households with fewer political connections to the authorities adjudicating claims.
4) Humanitarian Need and Access: Less aid for more people
The fourth year of Taliban rule also witnessed a contraction in humanitarian funding, even as needs stayed stubbornly high. The UN’s 2025 Humanitarian Needs and Response Plan (HNRP) estimated that 22.9 million people—nearly half the country—require aid. By April 23, 2025, OCHA announced an “urgent reprioritization,” shrinking the appeal from targeting 16.8 million people with $2.42 billion to reaching roughly 12.5 million with $1.62 billion—an adjustment driven by funding shortfalls, not improved conditions. UNICEF’s own 2025 appeal echoed the scale: 12.4 million children need assistance. (7)
In practical terms, this means thinner rations, fewer protection services, and rationed cash assistance. For Hazara communities already navigating sectarian insecurity and land stress, the aid squeeze amplifies vulnerability. Rights groups and journalists have also reported allegations of Taliban interference and politicization of aid access, with concerns that minorities and women are sidelined in distribution. While the Taliban publicly deny diverting assistance, the operating environment for neutral, needs-based delivery remains fraught—especially in localities where security organs and vice-and-virtue authorities are powerful arbiters of civil life.
The gender bans compound these barriers. Restrictions on Afghan women working with NGOs and, at points, with the UN, have led to service gaps—especially in sectors like health, nutrition, and protection, where female staff are essential. For Hazara women, already squeezed by religious and ethnic marginalization, the loss of female-staffed services is particularly acute.
5) Political Visibility and Representation: Near-zero inclusion
Under the pre-2021 republic, Hazaras gained modest representation in government, universities, media, and civil society. Those gains have largely evaporated. Research by the UN Special Rapporteur and rights organizations describes systematic exclusion: Hazara and Shia participation in the Taliban’s governance structures is minimal to nonexistent, while public life is increasingly policed by edict. The cumulative effect is a political landscape in which Hazara voices—especially those of Hazara women—have few formal channels to be heard or to contest decisions on land, security, or education. (8)
That loss of representation matters because it weakens nonviolent dispute-resolution mechanisms precisely when land conflicts and return pressures are rising. It also erodes confidence in national institutions—courts, police, provincial administrations—perceived as neither impartial nor accessible to marginalized communities.
How year four looked on the ground?
Education and youth: In Hazara districts that once produced some of Afghanistan’s highest female enrollment, secondary and higher education bans for girls persisted into 2025. Sporadic, informal home-schooling exists, but it’s risky and insufficient. Boys’ schooling continues but with anxiety: school routes in urban Hazara neighborhoods have been repeatedly targeted in recent years, and the memory of prior atrocities shadows every term.
Religious commemorations: Muharram in 2024 illustrated the “managed tolerance” model: ceremonies allowed, but overshadowed by restrictions—limited days, controlled venues, and heightened surveillance. In 2025, some Taliban officials made public overtures at Ashura events, but the underlying framework of control remained.
Livelihoods and land: In parts of Daykundi and Bamiyan, land cases tipped against Hazara residents, including a mass eviction in Bamiyan in July 2025 that ignited fears of broader dispossession. Meanwhile, returnees from Pakistan and Iran swell household sizes, stretching food and housing. The agricultural economy remains drought-sensitive, and labor migration options have narrowed as neighboring countries clamp down.
Security and Mobility: Men continue to face arbitrary stops and identity checks; women’s mobility is constrained by mahram rules and local edicts. In some provinces, female health workers have been required to travel with male guardians, making service delivery in Hazara areas more fragile—particularly when clinics rely on Hazara women staff to reach female patients.
Civil Society and Media: Hazara activists, educators, and journalists—once prominent in civic life—are quieter or in exile. Arbitrary arrests and intimidation have fostered self-censorship, and the social bandwidth to organize around community concerns (security, land, education) has thinned. The UN Special Rapporteur’s 2025 report catalogues the broader pattern of arbitrary detentions and ill-treatment of activists, which chills civic action in Hazara localities as elsewhere.
What’s changed since the Taliban’s third anniversary?
Two trends define the fourth year:
- Regional Squeeze on Afghan Migrants: Pakistan’s multi-phase deportation campaign continued into 2025, while Iran undertook mass expulsions following regional security crises. These returns are transforming the social and economic landscape in Hazara heartlands and urban enclaves alike, potentially raising the stakes of land disputes and straining communal safety nets.
- Austerity in Aid: Even as humanitarian indicators remain dire, the aid footprint is shrinking. OCHA’s April 2025 reprioritization cut targets by roughly a third; fewer households will receive food or cash, and protection programs—vital for minority communities—are among the first to be scaled back. For Hazaras, who often rely on community-based coping mechanisms, the combination of less aid and more returnees is particularly destabilizing.
What next? Paths that could actually reduce harm
1) Minority-sensitive security measures without repressing identity. The Taliban’s security organs, if serious about countering ISKP, need to pair intelligence-led prevention with visible, neutral protection of Hazara/Shia public spaces—especially in Kabul’s west and provincial town centers. That means better perimeter security at peak times (school start/finish, public transport nodes), consistent investigations, and public reporting that builds trust, not fear. Independent monitors have long criticized the absence of accountability after sectarian attacks; year five must be different.
2) Safeguards for religious processions and cultural life. Restrictions that effectively privatize Muharram diminish social cohesion and signal second-class status. Practical arrangements—agreed routes, time-bound closures, mixed police/community marshals—can allow Ashura processions and other rituals to proceed safely without blanket bans, and would reduce the sense of siege many Hazaras feel each year.
3) Fair adjudication of land disputes, with transparent records. The July 2025 Bamiyan eviction is a warning sign. Land commissions should publish reasoned decisions and provide independent appeal windows, especially in cases involving historic Kuchi–settler claims. Without transparent processes, every eviction risks being read as ethnic punishment, further entrenching mistrust. (9)
4) De-politicize aid access and restore women aid workers. To reach Hazara neighborhoods and female beneficiaries, Afghan women must be able to work safely in humanitarian roles. The bans and harassment drive up unserved needs and fuel perceptions of discriminatory delivery. Clear guarantees—publicly stated and locally enforced—would immediately expand lifesaving coverage. Donors, for their part, should sequence funding to agencies that demonstrate principled access and robust safeguards against diversion.
5) Support safe, voluntary returns and local integration. With millions returning from Iran and Pakistan, communities need targeted support: shelter kits, land mediation, temporary learning spaces (including for girls), and livelihood grants that don’t exclude women-led households. These are not luxuries; they’re the only way to prevent return-driven destitution and exploitation.
The stakes for the Hazara community—and for Afghanistan
The Taliban’s fourth year underscores a hard truth: stability without inclusion is brittle. The daily realities for Hazaras—sectarian bombings, managed religious life, contested land, constrained aid, and exclusion from power—are not only moral failures; they are strategic liabilities. When communities feel unprotected, marginalized, and unheard, they disengage or flee; when they cannot flee, they calcify into quiet opposition. Either outcome undermines social order and economic recovery.
This is not inevitable. Afghanistan’s history is filled with moments where accommodation, however imperfect, reduced bloodshed and allowed communities to breathe. Year five could be one of those moments if three conditions are met: (1) the de facto authorities make visible, credible, and genuine moves to protect Hazara/Shia spaces and to adjudicate land fairly; (2) regional states temper deportations and coordinate with humanitarian actors to manage returns safely; and (3) donors re-gear funding to sustain truly lifesaving work, insisting on access for female staff and equitable coverage in Hazara districts.
Hazaras have demonstrated remarkable resilience across generations: rebuilding schools after bombings, organizing community scholarships, defending heritage sites, and sustaining women’s learning against the odds. But resilience is not a substitute for rights. In the fourth year of Taliban rule, the gap between what Hazara communities can endure and what they should be expected to endure has grown too wide. Closing that gap is the measure by which Afghanistan’s next year—and the world’s response—should be judged.
Sources
- https://apnews.com/article/islamic-state-claims-kabul-minibus-explosion-8e99f158da8d0f53835c5592d74433e0
- https://unama.unmissions.org/unama-report-records-heavy-toll-afghan-civilians-ied-attacks
- https://www.hrw.org/news/2024/09/13/afghanistans-hazara-community-needs-protection
- https://www.hrw.org/world-report/2025/country-chapters/afghanistan
- https://www.amnesty.org/en/location/asia-and-the-pacific/south-asia/afghanistan/report-afghanistan/
- https://kabulnow.com/2025/08/over-4-million-afghans-returned-from-iran-and-pakistan-in-two-years-says-iom/
- https://www.securitycouncilreport.org/whatsinblue/2025/06/afghanistan-briefing-and-consultations-11.php
- https://www.hrw.org/world-report/2025/country-chapters/afghanistan
- https://kabulnow.com/2025/07/taliban-evicts-entire-hazara-village-in-central-afghanistan-after-ruling-in-favor-of-nomadic-kuchis/