Ethnic violence in Afghanistan

There are about a dozen ethnic groups in Afghanistan, they include: Tajiks, Pashtuns, Hazaras, Uzbeks and others who make up less than 2% each.[1] The most recent figures on the ethnic affiliations comes from a survey conducted by the Asia Foundation in 2014. According to the representative survey, 40% of the people identified themselves as Pashtun, 30% as Tajik, 15% as Hazara, 8% as Uzbek, 2% as Turkmen, 2% as Aimaq, 1% as Baloch, 1% as Nuristani, and 1% as Pashaye.[2]

After the Pashtuns Taliban rose to power in the mid 1990s, they began committing atrocities against their opponents, the Shias, Hazaras, Tajiks and Uzbeks.[3] In 1998, the United Nations accused the Taliban of denying emergency food by the UN's World Food Program to 160,000 hungry and starving people (most of whom were Hazaras and Tajiks) "for political and military reasons".[4] The UN said the Taliban were starving people for their military agenda and using humanitarian assistance as a weapon of war.[5] The colonisation of Pashtuns and Pashtun nationalism was one of the ideology of Taliban and this also lead in somehow major cause of the ethnic violence in Afghanistan.[6]

On August 8, 1998 the Taliban launched an attack on Mazar-i Sharif. Once in control the Taliban began to kill people based on their ethnicity, especially Hazaras and Uzbeks. Men, women and children were hunted by Taliban forces in response to between 1500-3000 Taliban fighters executed by the Uzbek Junbish-i Milli militia.[7] This ethnic cleansing left an estimated 5,000 to 6,000 dead.[8][9]

In 2001, Human Rights Watch voiced the fear that ethnic violence in Afghanistan was likely to increase due to the conflict between the different factions escalating.[10] Thousands of Pashtun people became refugees as they fled Uzbek Junbish-i Milli troops some of whom were reported as looting, raping and kidnapping when they were disarming Pashtuns accused of being former Taliban supporters in northern Afghanistan during the early stages of the War in Afghanistan (2001–present) which removed the dominantly Pashtun Taliban from power.[11]

In 2010 the Afghan President Hamid Karzai set up a panel to investigate continuing ethnic violence as he believes it is hampering the military efforts to contain the Taliban insurgency.[12]

• Crime in Afghanistan
• Pashtun colonization of northern Afghanistan

• Human Rights Watch Backgrounder