Afghanistan’s small Christian population is being subjected to persecution amounting to crimes against humanity and faces a credible risk of genocide under Taliban rule, according to a recently published report on the matter.

The study – entitled simply Crimes Against Humanity and Potential Genocide – was produced by the United Kingdom-based Lindisfarne Centre for the Study of Christian Persecution. The Lindisfarne Centre is a religious think tank and support group advocating for oppressed Christians in various countries across the world. Its name alludes to a Dark Age English monastery, which was destroyed by Viking raiders.

The report was published around the fifth anniversary of the Taliban's seizure of Kabul in 2021. It argues that the situation facing Afghanistan's small Christian community has received little international attention, but is a dire humanitarian crisis.

The organisation said Afghanistan had largely disappeared from the international news agenda as other conflicts, including the war in Ukraine, the Israel-Gaza conflict, and the 2026 United States-Iran war, dominated coverage. At the same time, it said the Taliban had imposed severe restrictions on reporting from the country, while many Afghan journalists had fled and international journalists faced expulsion if they reported negatively on the regime.

According to the report, several thousand Christians remain in Afghanistan – possibly around 12 000 – although their precise number is difficult to establish because of the secrecy required for their survival. The Centre noted Christians are particularly vulnerable because successive Afghan governments have not formally recognised them as a religious minority. This lack of status was not unique to the Taliban period, but had been the case under the regime that existed between the Taliban’s ousting in 2001and its return to power twenty years later.

It notes that while Afghanistan has long been a predominantly Muslim country, the periods of Taliban rule have effectively purged its religious minorities. Almost the entire Hindu, Sikh, and Jewish populations have left since the 1990s. The Muslim Shi’a minority is under severe pressure, although at 10% of the population, it has numbers and a certain visibility that shields it (for now) from the worst features of Taliban rule. (Islam is split into two broad strains, Shi’a and Sunni, with the majority of the world’s Muslims as well as those in Afghanistan being Sunni.)

The Taliban, however, regards Afghan Christians as apostates from Islam and therefore subject to punishments mandated by its hard-line interpretation of Islamic law. This applies even where Christians come from families that may have followed Christianity for several generations.

Among the Taliban’s laws and decrees are restrictions on any area of societal behaviour that is not specifically Islamic. The Bible and other non-Islamic texts are prohibited, and even university libraries may not stock books that conflict with official jurisprudence. Anything resembling a non-Islamic symbol is banned, including neckties, which are held to resemble a cross. Music, except for certain religious contexts, is also banned. The religious police are enjoined to prevent Afghans from forming friendships with or providing assistance to “infidels”.

This is compounded by the fact that Islamic law is overlain by an ethnic Pashtun code, Pushtunwali, which can sometimes be even more severe, and sees perceived apostasy as an insult to family honour.

The report documents allegations of severe abuse against Christians detained by the Taliban, including beatings, electric shocks, burning, suffocation, simulated drowning, sexual violence, and mock executions. It also cites reports of extrajudicial killings and claims that Taliban courts have sentenced people to death for apostasy and blasphemy.

Some of the remaining Christians in the country have tried to hide their identity, use coded language about their faith, and even resorted to moving regularly from one home to another to avoid detection.

Conceding the difficulty of finding information on the topic, the Centre assessed reports from aid organisations and international bodies working with human rights issues in Afghanistan (some of them secular) and with Afghan Christians among refugees and concluded that the overwhelming majority of the claims made were credible.

The report's most serious warning concerns the possibility of genocide. It stresses that genocide is a specific legal category under the 1948 Genocide Convention and requires evidence not only of destructive acts but also of an intention to destroy a protected group. Such evidence can be found in the Taliban's treatment of other religious minorities, its interpretation of Islamic law, and the information it has been able to gather about Christians.

Central to the report's argument is the Hedaya, a textbook on Sharia law that is influential within the Taliban's thinking. According to the report, its provisions call for the execution of adult men who leave Islam, while women face imprisonment and corporal punishment.

The Centre also says the Taliban has spent the past five years building databases of potential opponents by stopping people at checkpoints, confiscating mobile phones, and downloading information from them. It argues that this intelligence gathering could eventually be used to identify and target Christians on a much larger scale. This makes the contemporary Taliban a much more threatening organisation to Christians than it was during its first period of rule. At that time, the internet, mobile phones, and digital communications were barely existent in Afghanistan, and so were not a means of harvesting data.

The situation today is vastly different. Even before it seized power in 2021, Taliban operatives were reportedly sending messages to Christian leaders warning that they had been identified and would be targeted.

The Taliban have also resorted to such strategies as house-to-house searches, requiring mosques to identify people who do not attend prayers and offering bounties to those who point out Christians.

The report further challenges the Taliban's efforts to portray itself internationally as a more moderate government seeking diplomatic legitimacy. It does claim, however, that there is a divide within the movement between those who favour immediate action against Christians and senior figures who are concerned that large-scale persecution could undermine the prospect of international recognition.

It recommends that the International Criminal Court should undertake an investigation into crimes against humanity and potential genocide by the Taliban against Christians in Afghanistan. The United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees should accept that any genuine Afghan Christian is eligible for refugee status.

Most significantly, the Centre warns against Western diplomatic recognition of the Taliban. Doing so could remove one of the few remaining sources of Western leverage over the regime. It points to the Taliban's previous assurances under the 2020 Doha Agreement that Afghanistan would not again become a base for terrorist groups, noting that the Centre reported in 2023 that al-Qaeda had subsequently returned.