“Shujae had gone into the areas the Taliban had banned him from traveling to. He says this agreement collapsed after fighting broke out between Hazara commander Abdul Hakim Shujae and the Taliban in Uruzgan Province in October. “The Hazaras concluded the most deals,” he said. He says an increase in the number of rural territories controlled by the Taliban has prompted authorities across the country to engage in secret local deals.
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“The understanding was that the Taliban will not be harmed by the Hazaras while members of Hazara militias, too, will refrain from traveling to regions controlled by the Taliban,” Mutmaeen told Radio Free Afghanistan. Nazar Muhammad Mutmaeen, a Kabul-based former Taliban official, says both the Taliban and Hazara community - which is spread over several provinces in central Afghanistan - largely respected an understanding that required them to keep out of each other’s affairs. The Taliban regime is accused of harshly persecuting the beleaguered minority during its stint in power in the 1990s. Hazara leaders, for their part, deny they had engaged in any written or verbal understanding with the insurgents.
The fighting was apparently provoked by the breakdown of a longstanding agreement between the two, according to former Taliban members and Ghazni locals. Hundreds have been killed and thousands displaced by the fighting, which began in late October. For nearly 18 years, Afghanistan’s hard-line Islamist Taliban movement largely refrained from attacking the country’s predominately Shi’ite Hazara minority.īut the Taliban recently began targeting Hazara-inhabited regions in the central provinces of Uruzgan and Ghazni.