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A cruel new era of Taliban rule is turning the clock back in Afghanistan. Angelo Calianno reports from Bamiyan, where more than the world-famous giant Buddhas were destroyed
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The news last month that women between the ages of 12 and 19 in Afghanistan will no longer be allowed to go to school was a disastrous step back towards what the Taliban regime was 20 years ago and a far cry from the modern image the Taliban had previously wanted to show to the West.
However, for those who had never believed in the Taliban’s claims to have changed, the news was less surprising. Across the country, there are people who have never stopped being persecuted and who have been cut off from the new society that the Taliban have claimed to be building.
These are people who do not even have access to aid from the West, as it is filtered out by the regime. They are the Shiites, the Hazaras, the internally displaced people (IDPs), the rural poor and all those who have not had, and will never have, the means to escape or seek asylum in other countries. They are people who have been forced to live under an extreme regime, without even the faint hope of escape.
Bamiyan is the city with the highest concentration of Hazara people in Afghanistan. The Hazaras, Shiites, are one of the most historically peaceful ethnic groups in this area. Victims of a real genocide perpetrated since 1880 by the Sunnis, the Hazaras have always been the main target of the Taliban because they don’t belong to the Sunni current of Islam.
The events of March 2, 2001, when a group of Taliban arrived in Bamiyan and blew up the giant Buddhas, a UNESCO heritage site, linger long in the memory here.
On the same day, in front of those ruins, 20 Hazaras were executed as a warning to the rest of the city. Even after the fall of the Taliban regime, the attacks against the Hazaras have never stopped. Almost all the targets of terrorist attacks in these years have been against them and Shiite schools, mosques, hospitals and markets.
So now that the Taliban are in power, what can these people expect?
In Dasht-e-Barchi, the Shia neighbourhood of Kabul, I met with Faiz (not his real name). Faiz previously had a business in Bamiyan, which the Taliban had shut down. He told me his story:
