Tenants in Their Own Homes Under the Shadow of Guns: A New Taliban Instrument for the Gradual Genocide and Ethnic Cleansing of Hazaras
What is happening today in Omid Sabz (Haji Nabi) Township and throughout western Kabul is neither an administrative revision of urban plans nor impartial enforcement of law. These actions continue a historical strategy of ethnic cleansing against the Hazara community, now implemented through engineered economic desperation under the cover of the Taliban Ministry of Justice. If this tragedy is compared with events in the West Bank or Gaza, it is because, in contemporary conflicts, extorting monthly rent from the original owners of homes on the basis of ethnic identity is an unusual form of collective torment and systematic deprivation of the right to life.
The Taliban have turned land and shelter into weapons for emptying strategic areas of Hazara residents; the ultimate objective of this project is forced displacement, alteration of the capital's demographic composition, and destruction of this community's social foundations.
Eyewitness Account of the Omid Sabz Township Tragedy: Directly Targeting People's Existence
The ongoing events in Omid Sabz Township clearly exemplify collective pressure against a specific ethnic group:
- Systematic extortion (4,000 afghanis per room): Taliban forces have raided residential homes and set a monthly rent of 4,000 afghanis for every room. For an average family with a four- or five-room home, this amounts to 16,000–20,000 afghanis per month. In a city where most families earn less than 10,000 afghanis on average, such a demand amounts to a sentence of bankruptcy and homelessness. The Taliban know people cannot afford these sums; the objective is precisely to make people surrender under imposed poverty, abandon their homes, and leave the city.
- Armed men entering family homes and counting rooms: Armed personnel associated with the Taliban Ministry of Justice enter private homes without any judicial process, count rooms, and use threats with weapons to force heads of households to sign a “commitment to pay rent” or an “acknowledgment of eviction.”
- Locking homes and seizing property: Homes belonging to families who are traveling or absent for security reasons have been sealed, and relatives or tenants ordered to vacate immediately. People attempting to object or present their legal ownership documents have been detained and humiliated as “rebels” or “usurpers.”
A Unified Pattern of Ethnic Cleansing: From Uruzgan to Western Kabul
These actions cannot be understood separately from the historical and ethnic context of the ruling authorities:
- Treating ethnic identity as a crime: No comparable mechanism of armed entry into homes and demands for rent on residents' bedrooms has been applied in areas associated with the ruling group's identity. These pressures focus on Dasht-e Barchi and townships that have symbolized Hazara demographic concentration and civic progress over the past two decades.
- A chain of further targeted townships: The simultaneous targeting of Mahdia Township, Jaghori Township, Ata Abu Zar Township, and Surkh Abad demonstrates a comprehensive plan to encircle and demographically transform western Kabul.
- Overlap with Kuchi incursions in the provinces: Just as fabricated Kuchi disputes in Ghazni, Daykundi, Bamyan, and Ghor are used as leverage for multimillion-afghani fines and seizure of Hazara agricultural land, the Ministry of Justice pursues the same mission in Kabul using administrative terminology.
Why Must This Process Be Documented as a “Crime Against Humanity”?
Under international law and Article 7 of the Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court, deliberately imposing impossible living conditions to drive out or gradually destroy a population group clearly constitutes a crime against humanity and gradual genocide (Slow-motion Genocide).
By stripping families of psychological security, imposing extortion, and confiscating everything they possess solely because of their ethnicity, the Taliban are carrying out silent demographic cleansing. International institutions and conscientious people must break their silence and document and pursue this case not as a “land dispute” but as a systematic and organized attack on the existence of the Hazara community.