RASC News Agency: The Taliban has announced the launch of a national land distribution program for over 87,000 returning refugee families from Iran and Pakistan, claiming the initiative is aimed at addressing housing shortages and the burden of soaring rents, particularly in Kabul. However, local sources and human rights monitors warn that beneath the surface of this resettlement campaign lies a more troubling objective: a systematic, state-sponsored attempt to alter the ethnic composition of northern Afghanistan by settling Pashtun families loyal to the Taliban in historically non-Pashtun provinces.
Mullah Najibullah Hayat Haqqani, the acting Minister of Urban Development under the Taliban regime, stated on Sunday, July 20, during a press conference in Kabul that the group had begun allocating land to returnees in residential townships, citing “urgent humanitarian needs.” According to Haqqani, detailed planning has already been completed for 21 migrant townships, with work underway on 13 additional sites. He also highlighted progress on several construction projects in Kabul, including the “Nila Bagh” project in Darulaman and a Qatari-funded development in District Five of the capital.
But on-the-ground reports from multiple provinces including Takhar, Faryab, Baghlan, Badakhshan, and Kunduz tell a sharply different story. Local sources indicate that a large portion of the distributed lands are being granted to Taliban loyalists, many of whom are not native to the areas in question but are falsely registered as “returning refugees.” Independent residents and local observers claim that under the guise of humanitarian relocation, the Taliban is deliberately relocating Pashtun communities its primary ethnic support base into lands confiscated from local Tajik and Uzbek populations. Human rights advocates have raised alarms, warning that the Taliban’s opaque and politically motivated distribution process may lead to irreversible demographic engineering in strategically sensitive regions. These policies, they argue, not only violate property rights but also risk deepening ethnic divisions and sowing the seeds of future conflict.
This is not the first instance of such practices. Reports in recent years have documented forced evictions and arbitrary seizures of homes and farmland in the north by Taliban commanders and affiliated militias. In many of these cases, locals particularly ethnic minorities were expelled with little or no legal recourse. In the absence of a transparent, impartial, and justice-based framework for land allocation, there is growing concern that the Taliban is weaponizing the label of “returnee” as a pretext for cementing its ethno-ideological dominance across Afghanistan. Analysts warn that such actions not only undermine the rights of displaced citizens but also entrench the Taliban’s project of authoritarian consolidation through ethnic favoritism and systematic dispossession.
