KABUL, AFGHANISTAN – Hibatullah Akhundzada, the Taliban’s leader, has approved a new law under which land in residential townships that has been officially designated as state-owned will be sold to current residents at prices to be determined by the authorities.
The Taliban’s Ministry of Justice announced on Tuesday, May 12, that the Law on the Sale and Distribution of State-Owned Land Plots and the Granting of Construction Permits had been endorsed by Akhundzada.
The law consists of an introduction, four sections, six chapters, and 38 articles addressing matters related to the recovery, acquisition, distribution, sale, and management of state-owned land in both planned and unplanned residential and commercial areas.
Article 15 of the law specifically addresses land in townships that has been confirmed as state-owned by the Commission for the Prevention of Land Grabbing and the Recovery of Usurped Land.
According to the article, land that has been reviewed and formally designated as state-owned within official township projects will be redistributed to current occupants within the same project in exchange for fixed prices, based on detailed planning maps and the provisions of the law.
The law further states that if a landowner is determined by a court to have unlawfully occupied land, that individual will not have the right to repurchase it.
It also stipulates that each individual may own no more than four residential land plots in recovered townships. If a person possesses more than four plots, the Taliban authorities are authorized to confiscate the additional plots.
The law further clarifies that any excess plots beyond the four-plot limit cannot be redistributed to the individual’s immediate family members and will instead be seized and allocated to other eligible recipients.
The pricing of land that has been designated as state-owned will depend on the land’s location and on a separate pricing framework to be introduced by the Taliban.
This comes as the Taliban’s Ministry of Justice says that over the past four years, the Commission for the Prevention of Land Grabbing has officially designated more than four million jeribs of land as state-owned.
Two weeks ago the Taliban announced a series of land classifications as state-owned (Emarati). According to a statement published by the Ministry of Justice, the group’s special court declared more than 12,500 jeribs (25 square kilometers) of land in the Ismail Khil and Mandozai districts of Khost province as state-owned.
Similarly, it said that 1,507.49 jeribs of land (approximately 3.01 square kilometers) in Omid Sabz Township had been reviewed, with the court concluding that the entire area—covering five cadastral sections—was registered and surveyed in the name of the state and had not been transferred to any individual or legal entity.
In addition, the group has initiated a process of reviewing townships in various cities and provinces and has declared several large townships as “state-owned.” However, township owners say that Taliban courts do not pay attention to their documents during the case review process and that these documents are not examined carefully or impartially.
In many residential townships that the Taliban have classified as state-owned, including in Kabul, Herat, Balkh, Ghazni, Nangarhar, Bamiyan, and other provinces, the current landowners are ordinary citizens who purchased their land during the 20 years of the former republic government.
The new law advises affected landowners who purchased recovered land from other individuals to file legal complaints against those sellers in an effort to recover their money.
The implementation of this law is expected to raise concerns among property owners and legal observers, particularly regarding property rights, due process, and the legal certainty of land ownership in Afghanistan.
