New Delhi: The Taliban killed 13 ethnic Hazaras, including a 17-year-old girl, after taking control of Afghanistan, an investigation by the Amnesty International revealed.
According to a report by AP, the killings took place in the village of Kahor in Daykundi province in central Afghanistan on August 30, around two weeks after the Taliban took over Afghanistan. Most of the victims — as many as 11 of them — were Afghan soldiers who had surrendered to the Taliban, the report said.
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The other two, incliding a 17-year-old Masuma, were civilians.
The AP report said the soldiers were staying with their families near Dahani Qul village.
On August 30, around 300 Taliban fighters arrived close to the village, and when the soldiers tried to leave the area with their families, the Taliban open fired at the crowd.
“These cold-blooded executions (of the Hazaras) are further proof that the Taliban are committing the same horrific abuses they were notorious for during their previous rule of Afghanistan,” said Agnes Callamard, Amnesty’s secretary-general in the report.
The revelation comes at a time when the Taliban has been assuring the world that the current government will be different from that in the 1990s.
Hazaras are Persian speaking Afghan minority group, said to be of Mongolian and Central Asian descent primarily residing in the Hazarajat area of Afghanistan.
They are the third-largest minority group in the country. While the Taliban and Islamic State are Sunni Muslim groups, the Hazaras are Shiites who have faced persecution even in the 1880s when Pashtun leader Amir Abdul Rahman declared jihad against Shias of the country.