The New Lines Institute for Strategy and Policy will soon release a report assessing whether Afghanistan’s Hazara community has been subjected to genocide since the Taliban’s return to power in 2021. An exclusive copy obtained by KabulNow concludes there is a “reasonable basis to believe” that recent and ongoing attacks against Hazaras by the Taliban, Islamic State-Khorasan Province (IS-KP), and Taliban-backed Kuchis meet the 1948 UN Genocide Convention’s definition of genocide.
Titled The Hazara Genocide: An Examination of Breaches of the Genocide Convention in Afghanistan since August 2021, the report argues that killings, bombings, forced displacements, and the systematic deprivation of basic resources inflicted on the Hazaras constitute prohibited acts under the Convention. These atrocities, which have intensified since the Taliban takeover, include killing members of the group, inflicting serious physical and psychological harm, and imposing conditions of life calculated to destroy the group.
The study documents how the Hazaras have faced the destruction of livelihoods, expulsions from ancestral lands, denial of food and medical care, and repeated attacks on health facilities—including maternity wards—as well as schools, learning centers, places of worship, transportations, social gatherings, and their neighbourhoods. Humanitarian aid has also been withheld or restricted in Hazara-populated areas.
The authors stress that intent is crucial to determining genocide, and they say the intent to destroy the Hazara can be seen through official statements, policies, nature and patterns of attacks, forced displacement, and other systematic acts targeting them because of their identity.
Hazaras, a distinct ethnic group and predominantly Shia, remain among Afghanistan’s most vulnerable communities. The report notes that they qualify as a protected ethnic group under Article II of the Genocide Convention, defined by their shared culture, language, and religion. As Shia Muslims, they are also a protected religious group in a country where Sunni Islam is the dominant faith.
Despite the country’s commitments to international human rights treaties, the community has faced unrelenting violence with little protection or accountability.
The report accuses the Taliban, as the de facto authorities, of breaching their responsibility to prevent atrocities and argues that the group’s complicity—sometimes through direct involvement in attacks—deepens its culpability. It also warns that under international law, other state parties to the Genocide Convention are obliged to act.
“Given the long-standing reality of systematic violence against Hazaras and the concomitant culture of impunity in Afghanistan, it is time for the international community to heed the Convention’s object and purpose to ‘prevent and to punish’ acts of genocide against this group,” the study states.
The report situates the ongoing attacks against Hazaras in a broader history of persecution. In the late 19th century, Amir Abdur Rahman Khan launched a campaign that deliberately killed or displaced most of the Hazara population. His forces carried out mass executions, sexual violence, enslavement, and forced marriages. Decrees of jihad and promises of spoils fueled the violence, while towers of skulls displayed in bazaars symbolized the terror. Women and girls were forcibly married or enslaved, and tens of thousands of Hazaras were bought and sold in slave markets, with the Afghan state profiting from the trade. Scholars estimate that more than half of the male Hazara population perished in those campaigns.
“Such past atrocities targeting communities, especially when met with impunity, are an early warning sign and risk factor of further atrocities in the future,” the report said. “They should be used to identify and predict the serious risk of genocide, which in turn should trigger the duty to prevent.”
The report underscores that atrocities against the Hazara continued through the 20th century, with the community subjected to persistent discrimination and persecution. It highlights particularly brutal episodes after the Soviet withdrawal in 1989 and during the Taliban’s first regime in the 1990s.
By framing the Hazara case squarely within the Genocide Convention, the report provides one of the strongest arguments yet for urgent international action.
Among its recommendations, the report calls for the creation of a UN mechanism to document and preserve evidence of crimes against the Hazara, referring the Hazara case to the International Criminal Court as has already been done in the case of gender persecution, and initiating proceedings before the International Court of Justice for the Taliban’s violations of the Genocide Convention.
At the domestic level, the report urges governments worldwide to open structural investigations into Hazara atrocities, pursue prosecutions under universal jurisdiction, and impose sanctions on individuals responsible for crimes against the community.
The timing of the report comes as Afghanistan’s ruling regime faces renewed scrutiny from international bodies. In July this year, the International Criminal Court issued arrest warrants against two senior Taliban leaders for crimes against humanity on gender grounds.
Yet, the New Lines Institute report warns that international bodies have remained largely silent on the plight of the Hazara, despite thousands of deaths and injuries from targeted attacks since 2021. The authors argue that the ICC should look into the persecution of the Hazara “more broadly, and as crimes against humanity of religious and ethnic persecution and the crime of genocide.”
