RASC News Agency: Local sources in Bamiyan have confirmed that Taliban authorities are systematically coercing villagers in Panjab district to abandon their ancestral homes and farmland. Reports indicate that families from Rashk, Tobak, Guli, Hoz-e-Mahmood, and several neighboring villages have been subjected to intimidation and compelled to sign documents surrendering their property to Kuchi nomads.
Displaced residents told Afghanistan’s exile media that Taliban commanders have not only seized their land but also issued arrest warrants against those who dared to resist. Villagers describe this campaign as a deliberate conspiracy orchestrated by local Taliban officials and Pashtun commanders, who use fabricated charges as a pretext to deepen ethnic division and silence dissent. Their only demand, they stress, is the preservation of their lawful rights.
One villager recounted how five villages are currently in dispute. In one case, under the mediation of the Taliban district chief of Yakawlang, entire plots were forcibly transferred to Kuchis. “The Kuchis harvested all our crops and sold them as if they were their own,” he said bitterly.
Residents of Rashk reported being violently driven from their homes by Taliban fighters working alongside Kuchi settlers. Today, many of these families survive in tents and on mountain slopes, exposed to the approaching winter. One displaced man lamented: “They took everything our livestock, our possessions, our food, even our clothing. Now, with the cold setting in, we are left with nothing but misery.”
According to local accounts, the campaign is being carried out under direct orders from Abdullah Sarhadi, the Taliban-appointed governor of Bamiyan, and has now spread beyond the original five villages. Observers note that this case reflects a much larger pattern. For the past four years, the Taliban have pursued a systematic policy of forced displacement and land expropriation targeting non-Pashtun communities particularly Hazaras and Tajiks across Bamiyan, Daikundi, Takhar, and Badakhshan.
Analysts argue that these actions go beyond opportunistic land seizures. They are part of a calculated strategy of demographic engineering designed to weaken Afghanistan’s social fabric, marginalize ethnic minorities, and entrench Pashtun dominance. What the Taliban present as “administrative disputes” are, in reality, the tools of a campaign of dispossession and erasure.
Despite repeated international condemnations of Taliban human rights abuses, the group continues to act with total impunity. Forced evictions, land confiscation, arbitrary arrests, intimidation, and violence have become instruments of Taliban governance. Human rights defenders warn that if such policies are allowed to persist, they will not only accelerate the collapse of Afghanistan’s fragile social cohesion but also set the stage for long-term ethnic conflict and instability.
The plight of the displaced families of Bamiyan stands as a stark reminder: under Taliban rule, justice is replaced by coercion, diversity by repression, and community by forced displacement.
