Hungry youth of Panjshir join the Taliban for bread
Recently, the Taliban recruited 600 young men from Panjshir into their Ministries of Interior and Defence. According to Tolonews, an additional 1,500 will soon be recruited to protect the Taliban’s interests in the province. Mohammad Agha Hakim, the Taliban governor for Panjshir, stated that their Ministry of Interior will recruit even more Panjshiri youth to serve their “system,” as they call the Taliban regime.
The faces of the newly recruited youth are etched exhaustion and poverty. One of these new recruits, a man by the name of Rozuddin, told Tolonews that he had been unemployed for at least three years. “Unemployment has its own problems, and I thank the Islamic Emirate for providing job opportunities,” he said. He didn’t smile, and appeared saddened and ashamed.
To get hired by the Taliban, these young men had to pass through multiple employment filters. Many of those youths had different aspirations before the Taliban took power. Now, they’ve adjusted both their mentality and outward appearance for their own survival. One is Nouruddin, who kept his hair and beard untrimmed, wore a Kandahari hat, and wrapped his head in a dark shawl commonly worn by Taliban members from the south.
Ainuddin, another resident of Panjshir, told Tolonews that young people were joining the Taliban due to the poor economy. “It is because of joblessness. If they go to Iran, there are many problems there; people lose their lives. It’s all due to unemployment,” he said. Such comments suggest that, had they other opportunities, these youth would not be carrying Taliban weapons on their shoulders.
They did not say they were excited to serve the Taliban Emirate or happy to have the opportunity to join the ranks of Taliban fighters. Another group of 600 young men had previously been recruited from Panjshir into the Taliban’s Ministries of Defence and Interior. It appears that youths from Panjshir have been recruited in greater numbers than youths from other provinces.
Panjshir: A prison for its residents
The Taliban described their “conquest” of Panjshir as their greatest achievement. They composed poetry and songs, danced, and celebrated. In the initial days after the Taliban gained control, they held festivities and congratulatory gatherings from Panjshir to Rawalpindi. For a long time afterward, they transformed the province into a military base. Even now, Panjshir remains under heavy military surveillance, compared to other parts of Afghanistan. A large segment of Panjshir’s residents have fled, while thousands more have been imprisoned.
In October 2022 — about a year after the Taliban takeover — the Resistance Front announced that the Taliban had imprisoned 5,400 Panjshiri residents. At that time, Mawlawi Hussamuddin Hussam, former head of Afghanistan’s Council of Ulema and a member of the Resistance Front, told 8AM Media, “We have exact figures showing 5,400 political prisoners from Panjshir province alone. The Taliban use hostage-taking to weaken the resistance, commit genocide, extort money, and obtain economic and intelligence advantages.”
The Hasht-e-Subh report detailed shocking accounts of torture and killings of Panjshiri men. Nasir Ahmad, a Panjshir resident previously imprisoned by the Taliban, recounted, “About five months ago, the Taliban arrested my cousin and two other youths from our village. We found my cousin’s body, who had died under torture, a month later. We only recently found belongings — a pair of shoes and a handkerchief — of the other two youths from a water channel. Dogs had eaten their bodies, which the Taliban had abandoned there.”
In October 2024, the Taliban laid the cornerstone for a new prison in Bazarak, the capital of Panjshir. The budget for its construction is 12 million afghani. According to local media reports, this prison will accommodate 1,000 inmates. A 26-year-old Panjshir resident, reacting to the construction of the new prison, told Radio Azadi, “Building another prison in Panjshir is deeply troubling for us. It has a profoundly negative psychological effect. Constructing a prison essentially means that the Taliban intend to imprison even more of our people.”
Panjshiri residents have repeatedly stated that the entire province has become like one large prison. In October 2024, a 29-year-old man told Radio Azadi, “After evening prayers, we cannot even step outside. If they find us outside our homes, they arrest us under various pretexts. Farmers can’t tend their farms, and shepherds can’t lead their herds to mountains or pastures. People are extremely frustrated. Since the Taliban took power, everyone in Afghanistan has suffered, but the people of Panjshir have suffered the most.”
Torture, hunger, and brainwashing
Over the past three years, Taliban prisons have claimed numerous victims from across Afghanistan, especially from Panjshir and the northern provinces. In September 2023, UNAMA reported on how the Taliban torture prisoners, stating, “The Taliban use electric shocks, severe beatings, suffocation, forced ingestion of water, blindfolding, threats, and other forms of torture to extract confessions.”
Wars feed on the hungry and marginalized. In the Russian invasion of Ukraine, thousands of young mercenaries from Russia, Central Asia, the Caucasus, and even the Far East have died on the battlefield. The flames of war in Syria and Iraq have been fed by the flesh and blood of impoverished humans, including thousands of young men from Afghanistan, Pakistan, Iran, and other regions, often in exchange for salaries or residency privileges. Likewise, Afghanistan’s previous government’s army stood on the shoulders of unemployed young men.
For Taliban fighters, too, their primary motives were money and extortion. The Taliban recruited unemployed and desperate men in villages and cities and gave them the power to extort, torture, kill, and collect tithes. Thus, the entirety of Afghanistan burned in a fire whose main fuel was people’s hunger. It was not uncommon for two brothers to find themselves on opposite sides, one fighting for the republic’s army and the other in the ranks of the Taliban.
Since taking over all of Afghanistan, the Taliban have driven the people of Panjshir to such desperation through torture, brainwashing, and enforced deprivation, that hundreds of young men from the province are now signing up to join the Taliban. They guard Taliban prisons where their own brothers and sisters are chained, and patrol Panjshir’s roads and villages, enforcing Taliban-imposed curfews and movement restrictions on shepherds, farmers, and shopkeepers.
This is not only Panjshir’s story. To varying degrees, all regions of Afghanistan share this fate. Most of the young men from Kandahar, Khost, Badakhshan, and Helmand are hungry people who, when forced to choose between dying from poverty and fighting against themselves and their compatriots, reluctantly choose the latter.
