RASC News Agency: Local sources in Jalalabad, the capital of Nangarhar province, confirmed that agents of the Taliban’s so-called Ministry for the Promotion of Virtue and Prevention of Vice set fire to nearly 95 audio devices, musical instruments, and toys belonging to young people.
According to testimonies shared with the media, these items were forcibly seized from wedding ceremonies and local shops before being dumped into a pile and torched. The Taliban, cloaking their act of cultural vandalism in the language of “religious virtue,” dismissed these objects as “musical instruments,” insisting that their destruction was necessary to uphold what they described as “cultural restrictions.”
This incident is not isolated but part of a relentless campaign by the Taliban to suffocate Afghanistan’s artistic, musical, and social life. Over the past four years, the regime has carried out systematic raids in cities and villages, confiscating and incinerating thousands of instruments, speakers, and recording devices. In many cases, musicians and performers have been arbitrarily detained, humiliated, and beaten a campaign designed to erase entire traditions of Afghanistan’s cultural identity.
Reports further indicate that even deeply rooted traditions such as local folk celebrations, cultural festivals, and communal gatherings are subjected to strict Taliban surveillance. Weddings are stripped of music, public festivals cancelled, and once-vibrant spaces of artistic expression silenced under the regime’s heavy hand.
Civil activists and Afghanistani artists have repeatedly warned that these acts of destruction extend far beyond individual freedoms. They erode the very social fabric of the country, stifling the creativity, aspirations, and emotional well-being of a generation already scarred by war and economic hardship. “By destroying music, they are destroying hope,” one Kabul-based artist told RASC.
Cultural commentators stress that if such repressive policies continue, Afghanistan risks a mass exodus of its remaining artists and intellectuals. The long-term consequences, they caution, will not only diminish cultural activity but also hollow out the nation’s artistic soul, leaving behind a society deprived of music, color, and joy an Afghanistan deliberately stripped of its heritage and reduced to silence under the Taliban’s shadow.
