Between 2016 and 2024, the Islamic State Khorasan Province (ISKP) waged a sustained campaign of violence against Afghanistan’s Hazara-Shia population. Suicide bombers detonated devices at girls’ schools, timed to examination periods. Gunmen entered a maternity ward and, according to Frédéric Bonnot, head of Médecins Sans Frontières programs in Afghanistan, “went through the rooms in the maternity [ward], shooting women in their beds. It was methodical.” Attackers ambushed pilgrims returning from religious commemorations. These were not isolated or unrelated incidents. They formed a systematic, deliberate, and now documented pattern.
In a new report, the Afghanistan Human Rights and Democracy Organization (AHRDO) documents and provides the legal framework for understanding this violence as what it is: crimes under international law. Drawing on interviews with victims, witnesses, and insider informants; analysis from ISKP’s own publications; and established precedent from the International Criminal Court and ad hoc tribunals, the report concludes that evidence supports charges of genocide, crimes against humanity, and war crimes against ISKP perpetrators. The findings fall within the scope of the International Criminal Court prosecutor’s ongoing investigation in Afghanistan, which has identified ISKP crimes as a priority.
The scale is substantial. The United Nations has documented approximately 2,000 civilian deaths attributed to ISKP between 2015 and 2024 — a figure the UN acknowledges is a low estimate given the difficulties of attribution and verification in Afghanistan. In just the first six months of 2021, UN monitors recorded 20 incidents specifically targeting Hazara-Shia civilians, resulting in 500 casualties: 143 killed and 357 injured. The dead include children preparing for university entrance exams, mothers killed minutes from giving birth, athletes massacred at a wrestling club, worshippers at Friday prayers, and pilgrims traveling to religious sites.
The attacks follow a consistent operational pattern that the report characterizes as both widespread and systematic, which is the threshold required to establish crimes against humanity under Article 7 of the Rome Statute. ISKP repeatedly targeted Hazara-Shia neighbourhoods, particularly Dasht-e Barchi in western Kabul, using suicide bombers, vehicle-borne improvised explosive devices, and armed gunmen. The targeting is calibrated for maximum casualties: schools during examination periods, mosques during Friday prayers, public demonstrations, and civilian buses during rush hours.
ISKP’s own media claims reveal a tactical shift after the Taliban seized power in August 2021. According to AHRDO’s analysis of Al-Naba reports, ISKP claimed 21 suicide bombings against Shia targets between 2015 and 2020, but only three between 2021 and 2024. All three post-2021 suicide attacks targeted Shia mosques: in Kunduz and Kandahar in October 2021 and in Baghlan in October 2023, each with significant death tolls. As complex attacks grew costlier due to Taliban pressure, ISKP pivoted to smaller-scale violence. The number of IED attacks against Shia targets surged from 14 in the 2015–2020 period to 54 between 2021 and September 2024, nearly a fourfold increase. Magnetic bombs, known as “sticky bombs,” became the weapon of choice, attached to Hazara and/or Shia passenger vehicles and detonated in public places. The shift of tactics reflects practical operational adaptation, not ideological retreat.
The evidentiary record extends beyond body counts. ISKP has consistently claimed responsibility for such deadly attacks through its media apparatus, and these claims contain material directly relevant to establishing intent. The group’s publications, including Al-Naba, Voice of Khorasan, and statements from its religious committee, deploy derogatory terminology that categorizes Shia Muslims as “rafidah” (rejectors of Islam), “mushrik” (polytheists), and “murtad” (apostates). In a review of 110 incidents reported by Al-Naba in which an attack referenced Shia targets in Afghanistan, more than 90 percent used the term “rafidi mushrik.” This language is not incidental; it seeks to provide theological justification for violence and demonstrates the group’s intent to eliminate those it considers religious deviants.
Consider the documentation surrounding specific attacks. When ISKP claimed responsibility for a September 2024 attack that killed 14 Hazara-Shia pilgrims in Daikundi Province, its Al-Naba newsletter stated that “the attack occurred while this group of Rafidis was heading to receive another group that had just returned from Karbala in Iraq after performing their polytheistic rituals.” Al-Azaim, ISKP’s Pashto-language magazine, published an article celebrating the killings: “The most recent heroic attack against the Afghan Rafidah took place in the joint border area of Ghor and Daikundi provinces … The Islamic State Mujahideen made rivers of Rafidah blood flow.” The article characterized the assault as “a strong and decisive blow.”
Similar justifications followed the October 2020 attack on the Kawsar-e Danish Educational Center, where a suicide bomber killed 42 students, most aged 15 to 26, and wounded 79 others. An edict from ISKP’s religious committee, distributed through Khurasan Wilayah News, celebrated the attack and cited Islamic sources to justify targeting Shia Muslims. The edict stated, “Whoever changes his religion, kill him,” and concluded that “the killing of an apostate is an obligation.”
The ideological foundation runs deeper still. In Dabiq, the Islamic State’s English-language magazine, the group declared, “[T]he fact that the Rāfidah are apostates necessitates more severity when applying the sword of jihād to their filthy necks … [they] are apostates who must be killed wherever they are to be found, until no Rafidi walks on the face of earth.” A 2016 Al-Naba article put it more bluntly: “Al-Rafidah are pain … There is no medicine for them but the sword.”
This documented combination of acts and intent is precisely what distinguishes genocide and crimes against humanity from other forms of violence under international law. For genocide under Article 6 of the Rome Statute, the prosecution must demonstrate not only that members of a protected group were killed, but that the perpetrators acted with specific intent to destroy the group in whole or in part. The AHRDO analysis argues that ISKP’s ideological foundation, which treats the elimination of Shia Muslims as a prerequisite for establishing a legitimate caliphate, satisfies this intent requirement. The report draws on precedent from the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda, which established that genocidal intent can be inferred from the systematic targeting of victims based on group membership, the scale of atrocities, and the general context of persecution.
The report advances an intersectional analysis of the targeted group. While ISKP’s stated ideology focuses on Shia religious identity, the victims in Afghanistan are overwhelmingly Hazara, an ethnic group whose religious and ethnic identities are deeply intertwined. Approximately 90 percent of Afghanistan’s Shia population belongs to the Hazara ethnicity. ISKP has targeted distinctly Hazara neighbourhoods and, in some communications, has referred to victims using the ethnic identifier alongside religious slurs. In Al-Naba’s report on a 2016 attack in Deh Mazang Square, ISKP stated the attack came “in response to the participation of the polytheist Hazaras with the Rafidi militias” and sought “to purify the land of Khorasan and all Muslim countries from the filth of their polytheism.”
For crimes against humanity, the legal threshold requires demonstrating that acts such as murder and persecution occurred as part of a widespread or systematic attack against a civilian population, pursuant to an organizational policy. The AHRDO report systematically addresses each element. The widespread nature is established through the geographic spread of attacks across multiple provinces, such as Kabul, Daikundi, Herat, Kunduz, Kandahar, and the cumulative casualty figures. The systematic nature is demonstrated through operational consistency, regular targeting patterns, and coordinated with organizational messaging. The organizational policy is documented through ISKP’s explicit statements directing followers to target Shia Muslims and the celebration of attacks through official media channels.
The analysis extends to war crimes under Article 8 of the Rome Statute, applicable because Afghanistan has experienced a non-international armed conflict. The report argues that ISKP’s attacks on civilians and protected objects such as schools, hospitals, and places of worship constitute violations of international humanitarian law.
What distinguishes this report is its focus on supporting legal accountability. AHRDO has compiled witness lists, gathered victim testimony, and analyzed primary source materials from ISKP’s communications infrastructure. This is documentation built to evidentiary standards.
The implications are direct. The AHRDO report provides a roadmap for an investigation by the ICC prosecutor: incidents identified, patterns established, intent analyzed, and evidence mapped to specific charges under the Rome Statute. Whether that investigation advances depends on resources, political will, cooperation from states, and the practical challenges of building cases against non-state actors operating in territory now controlled by the Taliban.
But the documentation exists. The patterns are established. The perpetrators have, in many cases, identified themselves through claims of responsibility. The victims, children at schools, mothers in hospital beds, worshippers at prayer, commuters on buses, are named and counted. The legal framework for accountability is well-developed. What remains is whether international institutions will act on the evidence before them, or whether the Hazara-Shia of Afghanistan will join the long list of populations whose persecution was documented but never prosecuted.
The full report warrants careful attention from policymakers, legal practitioners, and all those working to advance accountability and enforcement of international humanitarian law. The violence it documents is not historical but record attacks through 2024. The perpetrators remain operational. The targeted community remains at risk.
Kazim Ehsan is a human rights advocate working with the Afghanistan Human Rights and Democracy Organization, AHRDO.
