Women and girls in Afghanistan are enduring deepening human rights violations and waves of violence. A group of UN experts says the Taliban’s treatment of women and girls may amount to gender persecution, a crime against humanity.
Since the Taliban seized control of Afghanistan in August 2021, the risk of mass atrocities has increased for vulnerable groups, including ethnic and religious minorities. The Hazara community is experiencing increasing and widespread attacks by ISIS-KP and the Taliban alongside a history of persecution, necessitating an immediate response by the US and other governments.
The Taliban’s takeover has increased the risk of mass atrocities in Afghanistan. Here’s how the United States can help prevent them.
While the Taliban takeover threatens civilians across Afghanistan, the country’s women and girls and Hazara populations are at particular risk of mass atrocities. Even prior to the Taliban’s seizing control of the country, the Early Warning Project’s Statistical Risk Assessment ranked Afghanistan second in the world for the risk of a new onset of mass killing of civilians in 2020-21.
The Democratic Republic of Congo, Afghanistan, and Egypt top the list of countries most likely to experience a new mass killing in 2018 or 2019, according to a new forecast released by the Museum's Early Warning Project. The report’s release coincided with the launch of the project’s new website, including interactive data tools, accessible reports, and data files.
For the third year in a row, Sudan and Burma rank among the three countries at greatest risk of experiencing a new episode of state-led mass killing, according to the Early Warning Project’s annual rankings released today.
In a recent post, I noted that 2013 had distinguished itself in a dismal way, by producing more new episodes of mass killing than any other year since the early 1990s. Now let’s talk about why. Each of these mass killings surely involves some unique and specific local processes, and people who study in depth the societies where mass killings are occurring can say much better than I what those are. As someone who believes local politics is always embedded in a global system, however, I don’t think we can fully understand these situations by considering only those idiosyncratic features, either. Sometimes we see “clusters” where they aren’t, but evidence that we live in a global system leads me to think that isn’t what’s happening here.
Find information on historical cases of genocide and other atrocities.