Rights Group Documents Systematic Exclusion of Religious Minorities Under Taliban Rule

The Afghan human rights organization Rawadari released its annual Afghanistan Human Rights Situation Report in March 2026, documenting what it describes as "widespread and systematic" discrimination against ethnic and religious minorities under Taliban rule throughout 2025. Based on interviews conducted across 30 provinces, the report identifies Hazara Shia communities and the Ismaili Shia minority as among the most severely affected groups, facing exclusion from jobs, public services, economic resources, humanitarian aid, and basic religious freedoms.

Among the report's most striking findings is evidence of forced religious conversion pressure applied to the Ismaili Shia community specifically. In Badakhshan province, Ismaili Shias reported threats, detentions, and coerced instruction in Hanafi jurisprudence — the Sunni legal school followed by the Taliban — with some families' access to humanitarian aid reportedly made conditional on agreeing to this religious instruction. Rawadari characterized this practice as among the most severe violations documented in the report, describing it explicitly as a violation of religious freedom rather than a matter of general discrimination.

The report also documents restrictions imposed on Shia religious practice more broadly. In Ghazni province, the Taliban's Promotion of Virtue and Prevention of Vice department detained three Shia religious scholars for holding Eid prayers a day after the Taliban's own official announcement of the holiday's timing — an enforcement action that effectively criminalized a minor scheduling discrepancy in religious observance. In the Jaghori and Malistan districts, Shia residents observing their own religious fasting practices were reportedly forced by authorities to break their fast and drink water, directly overriding their choice to observe fasting according to their own community's traditions.

Beyond religious practice specifically, the report documents a pattern of economic and administrative discrimination that disproportionately disadvantages minority-populated regions. Rawadari found that development projects and humanitarian aid distribution were directed disproportionately toward Pashtun-majority districts aligned with the Taliban, citing specific examples where minority districts received markedly less assistance than comparable Pashtun-majority areas during the same period. The report also documents employment discrimination, noting cases where qualified applicants from Hazara and Tajik backgrounds were rejected from government positions once their ethnicity became apparent to hiring officials, with one applicant recounting being told directly that officials needed someone "aligned" with the Taliban rather than simply qualified for the role.

This report adds to a growing body of documentation — including from Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch, and the U.S. Commission on International Religious Freedom — describing the severe deterioration of religious freedom conditions in Afghanistan since the Taliban's return to power in 2021. USCIRF has previously stated that religious freedom has been effectively eradicated in the country, warning that all Afghans, including religious minorities, face severe risk of persecution if forced to return from abroad. Afghanistan's small remaining communities of Hindus, Sikhs, and Christians face particularly acute risk, given the Taliban's interpretation of apostasy under Sharia law as a capital offense for converts away from Islam, alongside ongoing attacks against Shia and other minority communities by the Islamic State Khorasan Province (ISKP), an extremist group operating independently of, but adjacent to, the Taliban's own restrictive policies.

For SARFO, Afghanistan represents a distinctive case within South Asia's religious freedom landscape — not a matter of specific laws being selectively enforced against minorities within an otherwise pluralistic legal system, but rather the near-total absence of institutional protection following the collapse of the country's prior constitutional order, leaving religious minority communities dependent entirely on the Taliban's own discretionary treatment, with limited avenues for legal recourse or international accountability.

Source: Kabul Now — Read the full report