Christians in Afghanistan are at risk of genocide

It’s five years since the Taliban seized control of Kabul.

It followed an agreement between President Trump and the Taliban by which the US would withdraw all of its forces in exchange for the Taliban promising not to let another terrorist organisation like al-Qaeda plan attacks on the USA from there.

The vast majority of Afghan Christians were unable to flee the country and immediately went into hiding, with reports of them moving house to house every few weeks to try to avoid detection. In the months before this, Afghan Christians had been receiving threatening messages saying, “we know where you live, we are coming for you.”

Since then, the Taliban have set up checkpoints on roads, where they scroll through people’s mobile phones, looking for WhatsApp messages, sometimes downloading whole data sets as they seek to build up a database on Christians and other perceived enemies of the regime. Little wonder then that Afghan Christians have switched off their phones, making it extremely difficult to get any information out about what is happening to them.

To keep the light shining for Afghan Christians, the Lindisfarne Centre for the Study of Christian Persecution has produced a detailed research report on what is happening. It looks at the laws the Taliban have introduced, which not only remove all aspects of freedom of religion for Afghan Christians, but actually ban anything which is not specifically Islamic. This includes Afghan cultural festivals and children’s games. 

We also examined reports from agencies supporting persecuted Christians of what was happening to individual Christians in Afghanistan. The combination of the Taliban’s crackdown on journalists and the radio silence from Afghan Christians made most of these accounts almost impossible to verify. However, by examining verified reports of similar forms of persecution such as executions for apostasy and blasphemy, extra-judicial killings, different forms of torture etc, that the UN had been able to verify in relation to other Afghans, we were able to conclude that most of those reports from Christian persecution organisations were credible.

Most of the Taliban’s laws are based on a shari’a textbook called the Hedaya which has been taught in Afghan and Pakistani madrassas for centuries. This requires any sane adult man who leaves Islam, such as by becoming a Christian, to be executed after being given three days to ‘repent’ and return to Islam. Women who convert are to be subjected to lifelong imprisonment with regular beatings until they also ‘repent’. Children are to be imprisoned until they come of age at which point they are subjected to the adult penalty.

This apostasy law has long been on Afghanistan’s statute book and one of the most significant failings of Western backed governments in power between the Taliban’s eviction in 2001 and their return in 2021 was not tackling this issue. However, what is now happening is that the Taliban are arresting people for apostasy and blasphemy and sometimes sentencing them to death. At other times they are not even bothering with a trial and simply killing those they suspect of these crimes.

No one knows precisely how many Afghan Christians there are, although it is clear that they number in the thousands. Their existence has never been recognised by any recent Afghan government so the Taliban regard them all as having converted from Islam and therefore subject to the shari’a penalty for apostasy.

the Taliban are arresting people for apostasy and blasphemy and sometimes sentencing them to death

This means they are now at risk of genocide, defined as: “acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group” (The 1948 Genocide Convention).

Clearly, what is happening to Afghan Christians ticks this box. However, the Genocide Convention also requires evidence of an intention to destroy a significant part of that group. What our report demonstrates is that because the Taliban’s laws are largely based on the Hedaya, which requires the execution of all adult Christian men, there is clear evidence of intent to commit genocide.

We also found that at the moment there appeared to be a power struggle within the Taliban. Most Taliban almost certainly want the immediate killing of all Afghan Christians. However, some senior Taliban appear to want to hold off large-scale killing, in the hope of persuading Western governments to recognise them as the legitimate government of Afghanistan.

 Most Taliban almost certainly want the immediate killing of all Afghan Christians

This is all part of a major media strategy the Taliban have been engaging in for more than a decade to convince the West that they are different. This has included some pretty serious attempts to convince the more liberal parts of the Western media that they have really been misunderstood. The Deputy Leader of the Taliban even wrote an op-ed in the New York Times in February 2020, claiming all they really wanted was peace. It seems to have worked as less than a fortnight later the US government signed the Doha Agreement committing the US to withdraw all its forces.

However, the Taliban cannot be trusted. Despite that agreement promising that the likes of al-Qaeda would not be allowed back in Afghanistan, by mid-2023, less than two years after the Taliban’s return to power, that promise had been broken. Al-Qaeda were back in Afghanistan, advising senior Taliban and even running suicide bomber training camps. While in February last year the Taliban formally announced that the Doha Agreement had in their words “expired”.

The Taliban have spent the last five years building a database on Afghan Christians. Currently, the only thing which seems to be holding the Taliban leadership back from killing thousands of Afghan Christians is that they realise this would blow any chance of them achieving the kudos of being recognised as the legitimate government of Afghanistan by Western nations.

But, if Western governments give in to that and recognise the Taliban, they will instantly lose that leverage – and we could literally see a genocide of Afghan Christians.

The lives of Afghan Christians currently hang by a very slender thread indeed.

The report on Afghan Christians by the Lindisfarne Centre for the Study of Christian Persecution can be accessed here