This report is published in partnership with Himal Southasian, a regional magazine of politics and culture.
It was a Friday afternoon when the motorcycles arrived.
On 10 April this year, families had gathered near a Shia shrine in Injil district in the western province of Herat, as they often did on Fridays. Some had come to pray. Others had brought food for a picnic. Children were playing. Families were sitting and eating lunch. By all accounts, nothing about the day warned them that the peaceful location they had chosen would become a killing ground.
The Sayed Mohammad Agha shrine in Deh-Mehri village is a 20-minute drive from Herat city, the provincial capital, in the midst of beautiful farmland. It has been an important site for the Shia community who visit to offer prayers but also for recreation. Shiites form a significant number of the worshippers and many families gather there after weekly prayers.
A lone village elder tends to the place and there are no guards as no trouble is expected from families who come there for contemplative prayer and quiet recreation. On that day, around 30 to 40 families had already gathered, with others on the way.
Around 2 pm, two motorcycles entered the area. Four armed men were riding them. At least one of them had a Kalashnikov, while others carried handguns. Their faces were covered. They wore ordinary Afghan clothes, the kind that did not immediately distinguish them from local men or Taliban members. Some thought they might be officials from the Ministry for the Promotion of Virtue and Prevention of Vice, set up shortly after the Taliban took power in 2021, who had already been monitoring and policing public spaces, parks and family gatherings in Herat. But there was little time to make sense of the purpose of their arrival.
The four men moved quickly. They segregated the families, ordering men to gather separately near the shrine, away from the women and children. They searched them and took away their phones and money.
Then they called the caretaker of the shrine, Sultan Ahmad Akbari. He came with his two sons. When he introduced himself, the man with the Kalashnikov shot him and his two sons. They were killed on the spot. Men who had been grouped together near the wall, ran for their lives.
The gunmen opened fire on everyone.
The shooting was not directed at one person or one family. The spray of bullets moved across the shrine and the surrounding fields. It was not directed only at men. Women and children who had been sitting with their families were also fired on. Some people ran into the women’s section of the shrine, others hid in wheat fields, irrigation ditches or behind walls. Survivors said the firing continued for about 10 minutes. Attempts to reach a spokesperson for the Taliban on the attack were unsuccessful at the time the article was published.
Since returning to power in August 2021, the Taliban have imposed a rule steeped in the Sunni Hanafi-Deobandi interpretation of Islam they adhere to. Shia jurisprudence has no formal protection. In several parts of Afghanistan, Shia communities have reported being pressured to follow Hanafi jurisprudence in schools, courts and religious life. In 2023, the Taliban removed subjects related to Shia Ja’fari jurisprudence from the curriculum of Bamyan University, a predominantly Shia province, and ordered that Hanafi jurisprudence be taught instead.
Ayatollah Waezzada Behsudi, a Shia cleric, told the BBC: “There is intense pressure [on Shias], especially religious pressure, which is truly unbearable. Even if the removal of Ja’fari jurisprudence from the educational curriculum were tolerable, we asked to at least be granted religious freedom so that we may practice our own jurisprudence freely. This is our natural and inherent right, yet even this freedom is denied to us.” Ismaili Shias, a major branch of Shia Islam, have also reported coercion to change their religious affiliation or “return” to the Taliban’s version of Islam.
The massacre in Deh-Mehri must be understood within the broader context of this discrimination. This was an attack on a community that had been discriminated against and attacked repeatedly, and was followed by the repression of the death toll, eyewitness testimony, and images of mourning, with the violence portrayed as a random act. But eye-witnesses say the attack was pre-planned and deliberately executed, with information on the aftermath carefully controlled.
The first discrepancy with the official narrative is in the numbers. Following the massacre locals published a list of 26 casualties, including those killed and the injured, on Facebook.
A freelance journalist confirmed 11 people had been killed, including two women, ranging in age from 17 to 65 years. Among the injured were four women and a 13-year-old girl. The Taliban confirmed the deaths of 11 individuals but said only eight had been injured. The United Nations Assistance Mission in Afghanistan (UNAMA) confirmed 11 had been killed and 11 injured and that the casualties included children and women.
During the burial and prayer ceremony on 14 April, the Taliban subjected mourners and journalists to close surveillance and prevented people from deviating from the official narrative. A journalist from Herat told Zan Times that the Taliban Director of Information and Culture told journalists “Only what we say is publishable and acceptable,” and asked them not to include discussions of “Sunni or Shia” in their reports. Doctors at the Herat Regional Hospital were also threatened. One of them told Zan Times: “On the very first day, the director of this hospital gathered all the doctors and staff and warned them that ‘if statistics were leaked by any of you, your place would be in the intelligence prison’.”
Both the Ministry of Information and Culture and the Herat Regional Hospital did not respond to questions about surveillance and censorship at the time of going to publication.
The Shia and Hazara community have faced historical discrimination and violence for their religious beliefs and identity – a pattern that has continued into current times. The Taliban’s attempt to strip the massacre of its sectarian context is itself part of the story.
DURING THE EARLIER PERIOD of Taliban rule in Afghanistan from 1996 to 2001, the Taliban carried out organised massacres of the Shia Hazara civilian population, including in Bamiyan. Even after the formation of the Islamic Republic of Afghanistan in 2004, the community still faced repeated violent attacks. Bombings were carried out at the sites of religious gatherings, maximising the impact with Islamic State (IS) claiming responsibility for a number of those attacks. After a brief respite during the 2021 Taliban takeover, these attacks have resumed.
There have been other attacks that bear an eerie similarity to the Deh-Mehri massacre. On 12 September, 2024, four masked IS militants massacred 14 Hazara men from the village of Qorodal in Daikundi Province, Afghanistan, after falsely identifying themselves as Taliban officials. The attackers lined the group up under the pretense of taking photos before opening fire.
The Deh-Mehri attack was the seventh attack on the Shia population in Herat province since the Taliban returned to power. The attacks have included direct shootings, bombings, and targeted assassinations, predominantly occurring in Shia-populated areas such as Jibril, Injil and Guzara districts. Most recently on 18 August, a bomb blast targeted a private school in Dasht-e-Barchi in Kabul city, a predominantly Shia and Hazara neighbourhood. UNAMA confirmed that at least 42 children, aged between 9 and 14 years were injured.
While there were attacks even before the Taliban returned to power, they now come with the implicit understanding that the victims are outside the fold of true believers. The culture of impunity has been strengthened by the actions of the Taliban authorities to restrict, prevent and dismantle the religious practices of the community.
For this report, we have spoken with ten survivors of the attack at the shrine in Deh-Mehri, we have interviewed a surgeon who treated the wounded, and have spoken with a freelance journalist who reported from the hospital and the funeral ceremonies. All of them were terrified and requested that no identifying details about them be mentioned.
The eyewitnesses all described a similar pattern: first the men were separated, then the local elder and his sons were killed, then the attack escalated into indiscriminate shooting.
It was over within minutes. The attackers left as they had come, leaving behind the dead, the wounded and the survivors. Those who had managed to flee returned to a scene of carnage. Survivors would later struggle to describe what they had witnessed. Bodies lay in the courtyard, near the shrine and in the fields. Wounded women and children cried for help. Some people were bleeding from the head, neck, chest, arms and legs. Families searched for husbands, fathers, mothers, children and siblings. The wounded were carried in private cars, rickshaws and whatever vehicles people could find. In the chaos bodies and wounded people were placed on top of one another in vehicles and taken to the Herat regional hospital. ‘’
Though it was a 20-minute drive from the provincial capital with a security check post barely two kilometres away from the shrine, no help arrived.
At the hospital however, security forces were quick to assert their control. As news of the attack spread, intelligence officers monitored the area and restricted access. Journalists were questioned, watched and prevented from interviewing survivors, relatives or medical staff. At the massacre site reporters were prevented from filming, photographing and interviewing witnesses. The Taliban did not respond to questions about restrictions of access.
Though stray references have appeared in the media about IS taking responsibility for the April 10 massacre, there is no credible evidence that corroborates these reports. The Taliban too attempted to attribute the attack to IS though they claim to have eradicated IS from Afghanistan. Since the attack there has been no credible investigation or arrest, nor any steps to safeguard the community.
The governor of Herat, Noor Ahmad Islamjar, who barely visited the site, has previously described Shias as “Rafidi”– a derogatory term used by extremists to cast Shias as rejecters of true Islam in his writings. In Afghanistan’s sectarian context, such language is not abstract theology. It creates a moral hierarchy in which Shias are treated as suspect Muslims, lesser Muslims, or not Muslims at all. Once a community is placed outside the boundaries of legitimate faith, violence against it becomes easier to excuse, ignore or erase. Alongside these ideological statements there is an ongoing effort to erase the practice of Shia religious belief and jurisprudence.
On Ashura or the tenth day of Muharram, which fell on 25 June this year, our journalists gathered reports from six provinces: Kabul, Herat, Balkh, Kunduz, Farah and Jawzjan.
Despite Taliban-imposed restrictions and actions – including the dismantling of saqakhanehs (small spaces built to provide water to travellers and the public as an act of piety) and removing mourning flags – Muharram was observed in Kabul. Armed Taliban forces raided Shia mosques and mourning halls, arresting at least 40 people. Some mourners were detained for two days at the Ministry of Justice for flying flags.
Sources in Mazar-i-Sharif confirmed to Zan Times that Taliban forces clashed with mourners in District 11 of the city during a seventh-day Muharram procession. After three Taliban officers tried to block a delegation of mourners, the crowd beat them, prompting the Taliban to deploy 26 soldiers. Ultimately, local elders were summoned by the Taliban and forced to sign a pledge that mourning ceremonies would no longer spill into the streets.
A journalist from Herat told Zan Times: “This year, people did not set up takyahanehs (mourning halls) anywhere, women still do not dare to go to mosques to commemorate this occasion.”
The attacks on the Shia and the Hazara communities of Afghanistan do not always arrive as bullets. Sometimes they arrive as court rulings, school orders, sermons, administrative instructions or warnings from local officials. But their message is the same: religious difference has no protected place in Taliban-controlled Afghanistan.
Rad Radan* A freelance journalist based in Afghanistan.
Tarana Mohammadi* is the pen name of a Zan Times journalist based in Afghanistan co-reported this article and requested anonymity for security reasons.
Sofia Malek, Nahid Naji, Roya Ahmadi, Goharshad, Horia and Atousa Azar contributed to this report.
