The Taliban’s cruelty on the descendants of Genghis Khan

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The Hazaras, owing to their linguistic, cultural and moral differences, have eternally been the target of the Taliban. They bear somewhat Asiatic facial features that distinguish them from other Afghans. It is believed that they are descendants of Genghis Khan, the founder of the Mongol empire. Writes Ashlyn Davis

The progressive media whitewashes the misdeeds of the Taliban, even as the good jihadis put a bullet in someone’s head, splattering blood all over. To say, however, that all their hate is targeted at non-Muslims would be wrong: the Taliban have slaughtered Muslims also, that is, the Muslims who were not Muslim enough for the Taliban’s liking.

Between the 4th and 5th of July this year, nine men from Afghanistan’s Haraza community were slaughtered by the Taliban in Afghanistan. Six of them were shot dead, while the other three were tortured to death. Thirty families fled and took shelter in their summer grazing land in the mountains. This brutality is just the latest example of the longstanding discrimination against this ethnic minority in predominantly Sunni Afghanistan and parts of Pakistan, as the Hazaras belong to the Shia Muslim group. “The cold-blooded brutality of these killings is a reminder of the Taliban’s past record, and a horrifying indicator of what Taliban rule may bring,” said Amnesty’s secretary-general Agnès Callamard.

The Hazaras, owing to their linguistic, cultural and moral differences, have eternally been the target of the Taliban. They bear somewhat Asiatic facial features that distinguish them from other Afghans. It is believed that they are descendants of Genghis Khan, the founder of the Mongol empire.

Until 1880, the Harazas made up 67% of the total population of the region and owned lands that were collectively known as Hazaristan. They were a prosperous and self-sufficient community that grew their own food, fruits, and grains, and engaged in other farm activities. In 1889, Abdur Rahman Khan emerged as the Emir of Afghanistan. Though history books credit him with uniting Afghanistan after years of internal clashes, Khan was a Sunni fundamentalist with the firm belief that all Shia and non-Muslims must be given extreme punishment for the sin of simply existing.

Beginning in 1890, the Emir commended the well-deliberated massacre of the Hazaras; some were slaughtered while some were captured and turned into slaves. Officials were given permission to torture the Hazaras as they liked, which resulted in unspeakable atrocities being perpetrated upon the victimized community. They were banned from owning properties or weapons; their lands were systematically depopulated and its ownership transferred to the Pashtuns. Large portions of the Hazara demography disappeared from the face of the earth during this time. But in 1892, the community staged their first action against the Afghans, after a Hazara woman was raped by 33 Afghani soldiers. But the Afghans came down heavily in retaliation. Men and children of the Hazara community were captured and traded as slaves. In 1893, 47 Hazara women chose to jump off a cliff to their deaths than being taken away as sex slaves by the Afghanis.

This legacy of jihad against the Harazas has been inherited by the Taliban, who do not consider the Hazaras to be Muslims and therefore believe that killing them is not morally wrong. After the Islamic group seized power in Afghanistan in 1996, they again declared jihad on the Hazaras, who were subjected to subjugation and severe oppression in the years that followed. Thousands of them were compelled to flee their homes to save their lives after a series of mass slaughters in northern Afghanistan killed innumerable Hazaras.

On August 8, 1998, the Taliban entered Mazar-i-Sharif and carried out one of the deadliest Hazara massacres of recent times. They drove up and down the narrow streets of the city randomly shooting at shopkeepers, cart-pullers and pedestrians. Even goats and donkeys were not spared. They went from door to door hunting for young males, and killed them by shooting them or slitting their throats in front of their families. Some were shoved into trailers and left to die of suffocation or heat. World Hazara Council Chairman Akram Gizabi claims that close to 20,000 Hazaras were murdered by the Taliban in the genocide of 1998. The dead were denied a burial for days; the corpses rotted in the heat and street dogs feasted on them until the stench became unbearable and the jihadis started fearing an outbreak of epidemics.

Right after returning to power in 2021, the Taliban jihadis blew up the Hazara leader Abdul Ali Mazari’s statue in Bamiyan. Mazari was a Shiite political leader of the Hezb-e-Wahdat party who was abducted and tortured to death by the Taliban in 1995. His mutilated body was recovered in Ghazni.

Though the apologists of Islam swear by the principle of equality among their various sects, reports of gory incidents speak otherwise. The treatment of the Ahmadiyya in Pakistan is just another proof of the infighting within Islam, but that is a discussion for another day.

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