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Thousands of families from the Hazara ethnic group in Afghanistan, forced to flee their homes after a Taliban military campaign in the countrys Balkhab district last month, are now in a dire humanitarian crisis without access to basic necessities like water, food and shelter.

As [the Taliban] entered the region, they sought retaliation on people, Jafar, a Balkhab resident whose name has been changed here due to safety concerns, told HuffPost in a WhatsApp voice message. They killed and mistreated innocent people, looted and torched shops.

Jafar and his family fled the area, seeking safety in a neighboring province.

Hazaras account for about 20% of Afghanistans 38 million people, making them the third largest ethnic group there. In a Sunni-majority country, Shiite Hazaras are a religious minority that have historically endured widespread persecution.

Before the Taliban took control of Kabul last August, Hazaras already faced an increasing campaign of violence by the Taliban and Islamic State Khorasan, an affiliate of the Islamic State militant group. Hazaras also had to contend with systemic discrimination from the government in Kabul. Since the Taliban came to power, Hazaras have remained the principal victims of IS-K attacks and Taliban atrocities and forced evictions.

Afghanistans Etilaatroz newspaper reported that the Taliban had killed at least 50 civilians in Balkhab by late June. The number has since gone up, the paper reported, citing sources in the region.

A Hazara woman told Hasht-e Subh Daily, an Afghan newspaper, that the Taliban intended to capture and abuse young women in Balkhab. Hasht-e Subh also published a video that appeared to show a Balkhabi woman saying she left the area to avoid being abused by the Taliban.

The Afghanistan Independent Human Rights Commission said in a statement last month that there was evidence the Taliban had fired some of defenseless civilians accommodation places, murdered many of the captives and the surrendered, bombarded on civilian venues, caused many families to get displaced and move out towards impassable mountainous areas, disconnected phone and internet lines, [and] blocked connective routes towards this district.

As a result, its been challenging for the media to verify information or get a full view of what is happening in the region.

Reports of executions of some civilians in Balkhab are extremely worrying, as they seem to be part of a pattern of the Taliban failing to distinguish between civilians and combatants or imposing collective punishments in areas where there has been armed resistance, said Patricia Gossman, associate Asia director at Human Rights Watch.

Since the hard-line Islamist insurgents assumed power last summer, not a single country has formally recognized the Taliban government or actively engaged with it on a diplomatic level, largely because of serious human rights violations against women and minorities.

Working with our allies and partners, we have consistently made clear that we want to see the rights of Afghanistans women, its girls, its minorities, including its religious minorities, protected, U.S. State Department spokesperson Ned Price said earlier this month. And of course we have seen very little from the Taliban to indicate that they are prepared to make good to that public commitment, to make good to what they have conveyed in private as well.

But Ali, a local journalist whose name has been changed for this story, told HuffPost that the Talibans massacre of Hazaras, and the dire humanitarian needs of the thousands of displaced people, have received no attention from the international community.

Rahmat Gul via Associated Press

The Balkhab conflict

The Talibans campaign on Balkhab was focused on capturing Maulawi Mehdi, a Hazara commander whod recently spoken out against the Taliban. Mehdi was the intelligence chief in Bamyan, a Hazara-majority province in central Afghanistan, until he was dismissed in early June for unspecified reasons. He was the Talibans only Hazara military figure in the ethnic Pashtun-dominated Taliban government after the group came to power.

After several days of fighting between the Taliban and locals loyal to Mehdi, the Taliban were able to break through and enter the area.

We only had legitimate demands for the Taliban, a Mehdi associate told HuffPost, speaking on condition of anonymity due to security concerns. Hazaras are a reality in Afghanistan, and should be given equal opportunities to participate in government and society.

He said the Taliban waged an unjustified and unbalanced war on the Hazara people in Balkhab.

Foreign Policy noted that a cash-strapped Taliban also hopes to seize control of the coal mines in the Balkhab region. Recently increased coal exports to Pakistan could be a promising revenue stream for the group, which has been in need of money due to international sanctions. Balkhab is home to five operational coal mines.

The Taliban is on an intense campaign to consolidate resources. As part of it, they removed taxation by local Taliban actors to centralize it. Thats where the issues with Mehdi began, Ibraheem Bahiss, an Afghanistan analyst at the International Crisis Group, told Foreign Policy. He wanted to continue operating under the insurgency model of taxing local resources.

QAIS USYAN/AFP via Getty Images

Some children starved to death

With the Talibans takeover of the Balkhab district, thousands of families have been displaced. Some have made it to the neighboring Bamiyan and Balkh provinces, but many are in the barren mountains with no access to food, water or shelter.

Many people in Balkhab were caught off guard by the fighting, and had to flee the area without any supplies. The Taliban had closed roads to neighboring safe provinces, so people had to travel for days on foot or by donkey without knowing their destination they simply wanted to end up anywhere the Taliban could not follow them.

I met a Balkhabi woman who had escorted 31 members of her family to safety in the mountains, most of them being children, recalled Ali, the local journalist. Her husband was killed by the Taliban because he refused to leave Balkhab with the rest of the family, as he was sure the Taliban wouldnt harm an old and feeble man.

On the way, some children starved to death, and some aged and sick people could not survive the cold of the mountains, Ali said. Families had to feed their kids dirt to keep them alive.

The United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs believes the number of displaced individuals to be around 27,000, but Ali estimates the actual number is much higher.

Aid workers are struggling to reach the mountainous area through which people are now scattered, and the Taliban has blocked supplies from reaching displaced families, according to local media reports.

The displaced families have immediate needs, Ali said: Without assistance, they will likely soon die of starvation or thirst. Without a roof over their heads, they must spend hours each day gathering wood and bushes for a fire to keep them warm.

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Taliban Displaces Thousands Of Afghanistan's Hazara Population With No Food Or Shelter - HuffPost

Local sources in the northern Afghan province of Samangan say that Taliban forces are still searching homes door to door in Aybak, the provinces capital. Additionally, 25 young people are said to have been arrested as a result of these searches, according to some domestic news sources.

On Sunday, July 17, the Taliban reportedly began house-to-house searches in various areas of Aybak city and carried them out until late at night, with 25 young individuals reportedly detained during these searches.

According to sources, a door-to-door search was resumed this morning in the Karte Sulha neighborhood, which is near the city of Aybak.

This is despite the fact that the Taliban had already searched peoples houses in Kabul calling it a search and clear operation, in the capital of Afghanistan.

Regarding the search of peoples houses in Samangan, the local Taliban authorities have not yet made any comment.

Afghans have been terrified by the house searches, which have brought up terrifying memories of previous house searches by previous governments.

The Afghan people have been forthright in posting images and videos of the chaos the Taliban forces have wrought on social media, criticizing what they call violations of privacy, intrusive behavior, and suppressing dissent.

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House-to-House Search and Alleged 25 Arrests in Northern Afghanistan - The Khaama Press News Agency - The Khaama Press News Agency

Christopher Booker:

Judge Qayoumi and her family made it out of Afghanistan and landed in Doha, Qatar. From there, they went to a U.S. military base in New Jersey, where they would stay for four months, and now are in temporary housing in the suburbs of Washington DC.

All this time later, the family is a portrait of what has been lost in the new Afghanistan. They're also a bright spot in this terrible story, part of a global rescue effort to find safe passage for Afghanistan's 250 female judges.

In August of last year, NewsHour reported on the frantic effort to get the country's judges out of the country as the Taliban closed in.

Judge Vanessa Ruiz, International Association of Women Judges: Everything that a woman judge is, is anathema to the Taliban ideology.

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Afghan women who used to be judges try to flee the Taliban - PBS NewsHour

KABUL, Afghanistan (AP) The Afghan policeman opened fire on us with his AK-47, emptying 26 bullets into the back of the car. Seven slammed into me, and at least as many into my colleague, Associated Press photographer Anja Niedringhaus. She died at my side.

Anja weighed heavy against my shoulder. I tried to look at her but I couldnt move. I looked down; all I could see was what looked like a stump where my left hand had been. I could barely whisper, Please help us.

Our driver raced us to a small local hospital in Khost, siren on. I tried to stay calm, thinking over and over: Dont be afraid. Dont die afraid. Just breathe.

At the hospital, Dr. Abdul Majid Mangal said he would have to operate and tried to reassure me. His words are forever etched in my heart: Please know your life is as important to me as it is to you.

Much later, as I recovered in New York during a process that would turn out to eventually require 18 operations, an Afghan friend called from Kabul. He wanted to apologize for the shooting on behalf of all Afghans.

I said the shooter didnt represent a nation, a people. My mind returned to Dr. Mangal for me, it was him who represented Afghanistan and Afghans.

I have reported on Afghanistan for the AP for the past 35 years, during an extraordinary series of events and regime changes that have rocked the world. Through it all, the kindness and resilience of ordinary Afghans have shone through which is also what has made it so painful to watch the slow erosion of their hope.

I have always been amazed at how Afghans stubbornly hung on to hope against all odds, greeting each of several new regimes with optimism. But by 2018, a Gallup poll showed that the fraction of people in Afghanistan with hope in the future was the lowest ever recorded anywhere.

It didnt have to be this way.

___

I arrived in Afghanistan in 1986, in the middle of the Cold War. It seems a lifetime ago. It is.

Then, the enemy attacking Afghanistan was the communist former Soviet Union, dubbed godless by United States President Ronald Reagan. The defenders were the U.S.-backed religious mujahedeen, defined as those who engage in holy war, championed by Reagan as freedom fighters.

Reagan even welcomed some mujahedeen leaders to the White House. Among his guests was Jalaluddin Haqqani, the father of the current leader of the Haqqani network, who in todays world is a declared terrorist.

At that time, the God versus communism message was strong. The University of Nebraska even crafted an anti-communist curriculum to teach English to the millions of Afghan refugees living in camps in neighboring Pakistan. The university made the alphabet simple: J was for Jihad or holy war against the communists; K was for the Kalashnikov guns used in jihad, and I was for Infidel, which described the communists themselves.

There was even a math program. The questions went something like: If there were 10 communists and you killed five, how many would you have left?

When I covered the mujahedeen, I spent a lot of time and effort on being stronger, walking longer, climbing harder and faster. At one point, I ran out of a dirty mud hut with them and hid under a nearby cluster of trees. Just minutes later, Russian helicopter gunships flew low, strafed the trees and all but destroyed the hut.

The Russians withdrew in 1989 without a win. In 1992, the mujahedeen took power.

Ordinary Afghans hoped fervently that the victory of the mujahedeen would mean the end of war. They also to some degree welcomed a religious ideology that was more in line with their largely conservative country than communism.

But it wasnt long before the mujahedeen turned their guns on each other.

The fighting was brutal, with the mujahedeen pounding the capital, Kabul, from the hills. Thrice the AP lost its equipment to thieving warlords, only to be returned after negotiations with the top warlord. One day I counted as many as 200 incoming and outgoing rockets inside of minutes.

The bloodletting of the mujahedeen-cum government ministers-cum warlords killed upward of 50,000 people. I saw a 5-year-old girl killed by a rocket as she stepped out of her house. Children by the scores lost limbs to booby traps placed by mujahedeen as they departed neighborhoods.

I stayed on the front line with a woman and her two small children in the Macroyan housing complex during the heaviest rocketing. Her husband, a former communist government employee, had fled, and she lived by making and selling bread each day with her children.

She opened her home to me even though she had so little. All night we stayed in the one room without windows. She asked me if I would take her son to Pakistan the next day, but in the end could not bear to see him go.

Only months after my visit, they were killed by warlords who wanted their apartment.

___

Despite the chaos of the time, Afghans still had hope.

In the waning days of the warring mujahedeens rule, I attended a wedding in Kabul where both the wedding party and guests were coiffed and downright glamorous. When asked how she managed to look so good with so little amid the relentless rocketing, one young woman replied brightly, Were not dead yet!

The wedding was delayed twice because of rockets.

The Taliban had by then emerged. They were former mujahedeen and often Islamic clerics who had returned to their villages and their religious schools after 1992. They came together in response to the relentless killing and thieving of their former comrades-in-arms.

By mid-1996, the Taliban were on Kabuls doorstep, with their promise of burqas for women and beards for men. Yet Afghans welcomed them. They hoped the Taliban would at least bring peace.

When asked about the repressive restrictions of the Taliban, one woman who had worked for an international charity said: If I know there is peace and my child will be alive, I will wear the burqa.

Peace did indeed come to Afghanistan, at least of sorts. Afghans could leave their doors unlocked without fear of being robbed. The country was disarmed, and travel anywhere in Afghanistan at any time of the day or night was safe.

But Afghans soon began to see their peace as a prison. The Talibans rule was repressive. Public punishments such as chopping off hands and rules that denied girls school and women work brought global sanctions and isolation. Afghans got poorer.

The Taliban leader at the time was the reclusive Mullah Mohammad Omar, rumored to have removed his own eye after being wounded in a battle against invading Soviet soldiers. As international sanctions crippled Afghanistan, Omar got closer to al-Qaida, until eventually the terrorist group became the Talibans only source of income.

By 2001, al-Qaidas influence was complete. Despite a pledge from Omar to safeguard them, Afghanistans ancient statues of Buddha were destroyed, in an order reportedly from Osama bin Laden himself.

Then came the seismic shock of 9/11.

Many Afghans mourned the American deaths so far away. Few even knew who bin Laden was. But the country was now squarely a target in the eyes of the United States. Amir Shah, APs longtime correspondent, summed up what most Afghans were thinking at the time: America will set Afghanistan on fire.

And it did.

After 9/11, the Taliban threw all foreigners out of Afghanistan, including me. The U.S.-led coalition assault began on Oct. 7, 2001.

By Oct. 23, I was back in Kabul, the only Western journalist to see the last weeks of Taliban rule. The powerful B-52 bombers of the U.S. pounded the hills and even landed in the city.

On Nov. 12 that year, a 2,000-pound bomb landed on a house near the AP office. It threw me across the room and blew out window and door frames. Glass shattered and sprayed everywhere.

By sunrise the next day, the Taliban were gone from Kabul.

___

Afghanistans next set of rulers marched into the city, brought by the powerful military might of the U.S.-led coalition.

The mujahedeen were back.

The U.S. and U.N. returned them to power even though some among them had brought bin Laden from Sudan to Afghanistan in 1996, promising him a safe haven. The hope of Afghans went through the roof, because they believed the powerful U.S. would help them keep the mujahedeen in check.

With more than 40 countries involved in their homeland, they believed peace and prosperity this time was most certainly theirs. Foreigners were welcome everywhere.

Some Afghans worried about the returning mujahedeen, remembering the corruption and fighting when they last were in power. But Americas representative at the time, Zalmay Khalilzad, told me that the mujahedeen had been warned against returning to their old ways.

Yet worrying signs began to emerge. The revenge killings began, and the U.S.-led coalition sometimes participated without knowing the details. The mujahedeen would falsely identify enemies even those who had worked with the U.S. before as belonging to al-Qaida or to the Taliban.

One such mistake happened early in December 2001 when a convoy was on its way to meet the new President Hamid Karzai. The U.S.-led coalition bombed it because they were told the convoy bore fighters from the Taliban and al-Qaida. They turned out to be tribal elders.

Secret prisons emerged. Hundreds of Afghan men disappeared. Families became desperate.

Resentment soared especially among the ethnic Pashtuns, who had been the backbone of the Taliban. One former Taliban member proudly displayed his new Afghan identity card and wanted to start a water project in his village. But corrupt government officials extorted him for his money, and he returned to the Taliban.

A deputy police chief in southern Zabul province told me of 2,000 young Pashtun men, some former Taliban, who wanted to join the new governments Afghan National Army. But they were mocked for their ethnicity, and eventually all but four went to the mountains and joined the Taliban.

In the meantime, corruption seemed to reach epic proportions, with suitcases of money, often from the CIA, handed off to Washingtons Afghan allies. Yet schools were built, roads were reconstructed and a new generation of Afghans, at least in the cities, grew up with freedoms their parents had not known and in many cases looked on with suspicion.

Then came the shooting in 2014 that would change my life.

It began as most days do in Afghanistan: Up before 6 a.m. This day we were waiting for a convoy of Afghan police and military to leave the eastern city of Khost for a remote region to distribute the last of the ballot boxes for Afghanistans 2014 presidential elections.

After 30 minutes navigating past blown-out bridges and craters that pockmarked the road, we arrived at a large police compound. For more than an hour, Anja and I talked with and photographed about a dozen police officials.

We finished our work just as a light drizzle began. We got into the car and waited to leave for a nearby village. Thats when the shooting happened.

It was two years before I was able to return to work and to Afghanistan.

___

By that point, the disappointment and disenchantment with Americas longest war had already set in. Despite the U.S. spending over $148 billion on development alone over 20 years, the percentage of Afghans barely surviving at the poverty level was increasing yearly.

In 2019, Pakistan began accepting visa applications at its consulate in eastern Afghanistan. People were so desperate to leave that nine died in a stampede.

In 2020, the U.S. and the Taliban signed a deal for troops to withdraw within 18 months. The U.S. and NATO began to evacuate their staff, closing down embassies and offering those who worked for them asylum.

The mass closure of embassies was baffling to me because the Taliban had made no threats, and it sparked panic in Kabul. It was the sudden and secret departure of President Ashraf Ghani that finally brought the Taliban back into the city on Aug. 15, 2021.

Their swift entry came as a surprise, along with the thorough collapse of the neglected Afghan army, beset by deep corruption. The Talibans rapid march toward Kabul fed a rush toward the airport.

For many in the Afghan capital, the only hope left lay in getting out.

Fida Mohammad, a 24-year-old dentist, was desperate to leave for the U.S. so he could earn enough money to repay his fathers debt of $13,000 for his elaborate marriage. He clung to the wheels of the departing US C-17 aircraft on Aug. 16 and died.

Zaki Anwari, a 17-year-old footballer, ran to get on the plane. He dreamed only of football, and believed his dream could not come true in Afghanistan. He was run over by the C-17.

Now the future in Afghanistan is even more uncertain. Scores of people line up outside the banks to try to get their money out. Hospitals are short of medicine. The Taliban hardliners seem to have the upper hand, at least in the short term.

Afghans are left to face the fact that the entire world came to their country in 2001 and spent billions, and still couldnt bring them prosperity or even the beginnings of prosperity. That alone has deeply eroded hope for the future.

I leave Afghanistan with mixed feelings, sad to see how its hope has been destroyed but still deeply moved by its 38 million people. The Afghans I met sincerely loved their country, even if it is now led by elderly men driven by tribal traditions offensive to a world that I am not sure ever really understood Afghanistan.

Most certainly, though, I will be back.

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Hope and despair: Kathy Gannon on 35 years in Afghanistan - The Associated Press - en Espaol

A gathering of thousands of Afghan clerics and elders has ended with a call for international recognition, but silence on the countrys ban on secondary education for girls.

Nearly a year since their surprise military triumph across Afghanistan, not a single country has officially recognised the Taliban as the legitimate government.

Diplomats say the ban on girls education is one of the main reasons the Taliban are still international outcasts. It is resented by many in the movements ranks, who want their own daughters to be educated.

Classes were set to restart in March, until a last-minute reversal, apparently on the orders of hardliners close to the supreme leader of the movement, Mullah Haibatullah Akhundzada.

The all-male group of religious and community leaders spent three days discussing the future of the country, largely united under Taliban rule after decades of civil war. There had been hope they might offer political incentives or cover for the Taliban leadership to reverse course on the ban. But only two out of more than 4,500 participants called for the reopening of secondary schools for girls, Afghanistans Tolo television channel reported.

And in their final communique, the clerics made only passing reference to the need for religious and modern education and to respect the rights of women. It did not clarify if those rights include schooling.

Its hard to get too excited about vague references to education and womens rights at the end of the Talibans big meeting when the Taliban previously made a very clear promise to reopen all schools only to break that promise, said Heather Barr, associate womens rights director at Human Rights Watch. Donors, diplomats and the UN need to act as though this ban is likely permanent Its far past time for the international community to respond to their gender apartheid in ways more tangible than statements of deep concern.

Akhundzada came to Kabul from his base in the southern city of Kandahar to address the gathering. It was his first known trip to the capital since Taliban fighters seized it last August.

He lashed out at foreign demands on the government, as the UN rights chief Michelle Bachelet called for an end to systematic oppression of women in the country. Women are blocked from working in most sectors outside health and education, require a male guardian for long-distance travel and have been ordered to cover their faces in public.

The meeting was closed to media but in an audio recording Akhundzada, a hardliner whose son was a suicide bomber, warned the international community against interfering in Afghanistan.

Thank God, we are now an independent country. [Foreigners] should not give us their orders, it is our system and we have our own decisions, he said, according to the official Bakhtar news agency.

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Meeting of Afghan clerics ends with silence on education for girls - The Guardian