15 August will be five years since the Taliban seized Kabul. Even in the months before then the Taliban were threatening Christians – anonymous phone calls and letters saying ‘we know where you live – we’re coming for you’.

Since then, Afghanistan has dropped off the radar of world news. It has been pushed aside by other news such as Putin’s invasion of Ukraine last then six months later, the October 2023 Hamas attack on Israel and the ensuring war in Gaza, the 2026 US/Iran war. All that is understandable, but the danger is that what is happening to Afghan Christians gets forgotten. 

To add to that the Taliban have imposed a news blackout. Many Afghan journalists have fled the country in fear of their lives, international journalists who report negatively are expelled. It’s incredibly dangerous for Afghan Christians to even send Whats app messages.

That’s why today we are launching this report – it’s125 pages long, one the most detailed report on the plight of Christians Afghanistan published by any organisation.

It examines the laws and decrees enacted by the Taliban - and what they mean for Afghan Christians. It examines the ideology of the Taliban – and crucially identifies one key shari’a textbook known as the Hedaya which is central to their thinking and allows us to predict what they are likely to do next. It also assesses reports of persecution published by aid agencies supporting Christians either inside Afghanistan or those who have fled – and concludes that the overwhelming majority of these are credible.

Afghan Christians are now the only significant non-Muslim minority left in Afghanistan. They are also uniquely vulnerable as, unlike Hindus and Sikhs, their existence has never been recognised by any recent Afghan government. Consequently, even though many are second or third generation Christians, the Taliban regard them all as converts from Islam and therefore ‘deserving’ the shari’a penalty for apostasy.

The report clearly shows that Afghan Christians, of whom there are conservatively estimated to be several thousand are already being subjected to what international law defines as ‘crimes against humanity’. This includes those arrested being subjected to multiple forms of torture including beatings, electric shocks, burnings, suffocation, simulated drowning, sexual violence and mock executions.  Some have been extra-judicially killed by the Taliban. There are also reports of the Taliban judicially sentencing people to death for apostasy and blasphemy.

The report also warns that there is a real prospect of genocide – the total and deliberate eradication of the entire Christian community in Afghanistan by the Taliban. Let’s be clear we are not just saying ‘this is terrible – it must be genocide’. The 1948 Genocide Convention requires not just evidence of “killing members of that group” or inflicting on them “conditions of life calculated to bring about their physical destruction” – it also requires evidence that the perpetrator intended to do so.

However, this report from the Lindisfarne Centre for the Study of Christian Persecution does provide clear evidence of this:

1.       The obliteration of other historic religious minorities due to the Taliban’s actions against them. Theis includes the flight of almost the entire Hindu and Sikh population which before the first (1995-2001) period of Taliban rule is estimated to have been around 200-250,000 strong. The last remaining members of Afghanistan historic Jewish community have also fled. Both because of how they were treated during the first period of Taliban rule.

2.     The Hedaya – the main shari’a textbook the Taliban are following requires the execution of any sane adult male who leaves Islam within three days, women are to be subjected to lifelong imprisonment and regularly beaten, while children are to be imprisoned until they come of age when the adult penalty is to be applied.

3.     The Taliban have spent the last five years building up a considerable database on Afghan Christians. They have done this by regularly stopping people at checkpoints, seizing their phones and downloading data. This has caused huge cultural upset in this conservative Islamic society as it lets the Taliban see photos of other men’s wives and daughters. However, the Taliban have justified doing this on the grounds that they are collecting “intelligence” on those they regard as enemies of the regime. Clearly the Taliban are collecting this data for a purpose and at some point intend to act on it.

Despite all of this the Taliban have been mounting a sophisticated media spin operation to convince the west that they are now different and ‘moderate’.  This began even before they seized power five years ago and has even involved writing an op-ed for the New York Times. They have even sought to develop an Afghan tourist industry. The senior leadership of the Taliban desperately want the kudos of being recognised by western nations as a legitimate government. 

There is actually something of a power struggle going on in the Taliban between the bulk of ordinary Taliban who assume that all Afghan Christians should be killed straight away and some of the senior leadership who are prepared to delay this religious cleansing in case it jeopardises them gaining that coveted prize of western diplomatic recognition.

However, if any western government did recognise the Taliban – it would immediately lose even that slight leverage – the hope of future diplomatic recognition – that they currently have over the Taliban. There would then be nothing to stop the Taliban engaging in a large scale killing of Afghan Christians.

The Taliban might of course give assurances that they would not do so – just as they gave assurances in the 2020 Doha Agreement that in exchange for western military withdrawal they would not allow terrorist groups like al-Qaeda to be based in Afghanistan. However, as the Lindisfarne Centre reported in June 2023 less than two years after the Taliban’s return to power, al-Qaeda had returned to Afghanistan and were running suicide bomber training camps.

The report can be downloaded  HERE 

Please pray for Afghan Christians