17-10-2022: The September 30 bombing of the Kaaj Education Centre in the Afghan capital Kabul[1] has triggered a wave of protests worldwide. The attack, which took the lives of at least 43 students and wounded 83 more, pushed the “StopHazaraGenocide” hashtag on Twitter to one million tweets on October 3.[2] Further, days later, another explosion in a predominantly Hazara district in Kabul was reported. The Khaama Press reported that this blast occurred in the Pul-e-Sukhta area near the Shahid Mazari Road,[3] but there were no reports of casualties forthcoming. It is understandable that many in the West would be aghast at what appears to be targeted killings of Hazaras in Afghanistan and may be motivated to speak out against indiscriminate violence perpetrated against young students, many of them female. Yet like much else which is happening in a world beset by dangerous shadows of war following at least 2.5 years of almost universal deceit under the guise of “health”, diabolical intrigue and base subterfuge is also riddled through the “#StopHazaraGenocide” campaign.

ISIS-K running amok

There is little doubt that ISIS-K (Islamic State of Iraq and Syria – Khorasan, or IS-K, or Daesh-K) is responsible for the terror bombings of Hazaras over the last 12 months. Even the US government backed Human Rights Watch (HRW) reports that since the establishment of the Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan (IEA) on August 15, 2021 (when the Taliban assumed control after the withdrawal of US forces) ISIS-K has claimed responsibility for 13 attacks on Hazaras, which has led to the killing and injuring of at least 700 people.[4] In a bid to prevent such atrocities and provide security for the country, since coming to power the Taliban has carried out several operations against ISIS-K in various regions.[5] In fact, ISIS-K had been carrying out attacks on Hazara even before the establishment of the IEA – such as the string of bombings in the Dasht-e-Barchi neighbourhood of Kabul in May of 2021.[6]

So what is going on? Even pro-Western media admits that the aims of ISIS-K are to “undermine Taliban rule”.[7] Who are ISIS-K? It is an open secret that ISIS was created by the US, the UK and other Western governments as part of their horrific regime change war against Syria – which was stopped in its tracks by a combination of determined resistance from the Syrian, Iranian, Hezbollah and Russian militaries. ISIS are mercenaries which may even include British and American forces themselves, dressed in black as a disguise.[8] Even before the US withdrawal from Afghanistan, the Russian government was demanding the US government address allegations that it was supplying weapons to ISIS in Afghanistan via unidentified helicopter flights.[9] In 2018, Russian Special Envoy for Afghanistan Zamir Kabulov claimed that data from the Collective Security Treaty Organisation (CSTO) confirmed that 2500 ISIS fighters had left Syria and Iraq and were bound for Afghanistan.[10] Kabulov stated that the ISIS mercenaries are not there to fight foreign troops, but to destabilise the internal political situation in Central Asia. Tragically, the recent events in Afghanistan appear to corroborate this grim prognosis. There are no prizes for guessing who was likely responsible for the transfer of ISIS fighters to Afghanistan, and their renaming to “ISIS-K”. Washington’s fingerprints are all over this.

Hazara “persecution”
It is disturbing that some innocent Hazara civilians are having their lives taken by orchestrated terrorism in Afghanistan. But are the Hazaras as a whole a universally innocent party? Hardly. While the Western media propagandises about a history of Hazara persecution, there is much more to the story. The Taliban of today are a different outfit to the Taliban which ruled Afghanistan from 1996 to 2001. Yet even at that time, many Hazaras were prominent fighters with the Northern Alliance, which often was engaged in armed clashes against the Taliban.[11] Then when the US invaded and set up the puppet Afghan national army, many Hazaras were the first to sign up,[12] at which point they were sent into battle against the Taliban. Even Hazara women volunteered and entered the Afghan National Army.[13] In other words, Hazaras went from fighting the Taliban before the US invasion, to open collaboration with the US imperialist occupation of their country – where they again took up arms (this time US supplied and organised) against the Taliban. Is it any wonder that the Taliban – who, despite everything, fought for two decades against US occupation – view Hazaras with suspicion?

Hazaras are known politically to be the most liberal and the most pro-Western of all of Afghanistan’s ethnicities. They make up about 10% of Afghanistan’s 41 million people.[14] The Pashtun ethnicity, of which the Taliban are mostly comprised, make up around 42% of the population.[15] Even though most Hazara are Twelver Shia Muslims, there are also Sunni, Ismaili, Christian and even secular Hazara. Hazara culture also seems to have dwindled away. Many Hazaras who move to Afghan cities adopt more of a city culture, and much else of their culture has been either Pashtunised or Persianised.[16]

So while it is technically true that most Hazaras are a Shia minority in a mostly Sunni dominated country, this is NOT the primary reason why they are scarcely trusted by the Taliban. This has much more to do with the fact that Hazaras have taken up arms and fought the Taliban for around 30 years, even when the Taliban was fighting to push the US occupiers out of the country. Moreover, many Hazaras willingly fought with the US military against other Afghans, and politically backed all elements of the “liberal world order”. Yet that is not all. The National Endowment for Democracy (NED), the regime change arm of the CIA funded by the US government, admits to funding the evacuation of many of its “grantees” in Afghanistan in the run up to the US withdrawal in August 2021. Many of these evacuees – collaborators with the US occupation – were parachuted into the US, Canada and other countries.[17] These evacuees, who now form an anti-Taliban and pro-Western diaspora, and many of whom are Hazaras, invariably remain unrepentant apologists for the US Empire.

Hazaristan ?

The protests of the Hazara diaspora featured the “Hazaristan” yellow-white-blue flag, alongside the flag of the puppet Afghan US backed Hamid Karzai/Ashraf Ghani government. Dubiously, some Hazaras claim that Afghans have “invaded” their land since the 19^th century,[18] but in practice the Hazara ethnicity is being used to skilled but entirely cynical ends by Western imperialism. For example, the United Kingdom (UK) based “Hazara United Movement” makes the call for all international financial aid to Afghanistan be conditional to a guarantee that all minority groups including Hazaras have “foolproof security”.[19] Yet Hazaras – and others – in Afghanistan do not have security currrently due to the horrific acts of ISIS-K, NOT the Taliban, and therefore, not the government of the IEA. And it is an open secret that ultimately it is Washington which is behind ISIS-K. One can see how the Hazara “cause” is manipulated by the West to inch its way towards calling for “protection” for Hazaristan – and, before we know it – there is yet another spurious separatist movement in a developing country, with deadly geopolitical aims which ultimately benefit Whitehall and the White House.

The real aims of the West’s  #StopHazaraGenocide campaign are thrown into relief once the link to the recent imperialist backed riots[20] in Iran become clear. The self-declared leader of the riots and international protests allegedly for “women’s rights” in Iran, Masih Alinejad, posted a tweet stating that the women of Iran and the women of Afghanistan have a “common enemy” and “we fight together to get rid of our religious dictatorship”.[21] Yet it is relatively common knowledge that Ms Alinejad is an Iranian exile who has lived in the USA for the past decade, and is paid as a full time staffer of Voice of America – Persian. That is, Ms Alinejad is paid by the US government to whip up anti-government protests in Iran. Even aside from that, Ms Alinejad was paid over $628 000 by the US Agency for Global Media to harass veiled women in Iran, spew anti-Iranian propaganda, and demand more Western sanctions against her former country of origin.[22] With friends like these, we can start to get a picture of US government subterfuge of the IEA, via the duplicitous cause of Hazara “rights”.

As ever, where the US State Department operates internationally, invariably we find the handiwork of billionaire anti-socialist regime change specialist George Soros, and his Open Society Foundation (OSF). Afghanistan is no exception. Days before the establishment of the IEA in August 2021, the OSF announced a $10 million Emergency Fund to protect “champions of human rights, women’s rights and journalists….[and] Afghan citizens fleeing the advance of the Taliban.”[23] Needless to say, the only Afghans fleeing the victory of the Taliban are out-and-out traitors who have been collaborating with the imperialist occupation of their country – which includes no small number of Hazaras. In January of this year, the US government funded “NGO” Freedom House launched the “Afghanistan Human Rights Coordination Mechanism”, supposedly to support “civil society” and “democracy advocates” in Afghanistan.[24] We can obtain an idea of what type of “democracy” they have in mind when we discover that Freedom House is itself funded by the US government via the US State Department, the US Agency for International Development (USAID) and other Western governments such as the UK, Canada, the European Union (EU), the Netherlands, Norway and Sweden. If that funding was not sufficient, it is topped up by funding from the OSF (again), and the US based Ford Foundation, the MacArthur Foundation and the Rockefeller Brothers Fund.[25] “Hazaristan” indeed!

Refugee rights?

These days, one can spot elite subversion of what is often genuinely felt concern for refugees and asylum seekers from a mile off. Many of the Hazara diaspora organised #StopHazaraGenocide rallies held in the West on the weekend of October 8/9 were accompanied by demands for the Anglo/European governments to accept more Hazara refugees. Western based Hazara diaspora organisations explicitly call for the governments of the US, EU, Canada, Australia and New Zealand to make sure their “migration and asylum policies take into account the Hazara people’s specific situation”.[26] Of course, it is certainly in the interests of imperialism in this case to accept Hazaras “fleeing” from the Taliban – because understandably collaborators with the 20 year US led military occupation of Afghanistan will become targets due to their epic betrayals. What is more, large Hazara diaspora communities in the West can create political pressure for yet another imperialist intervention into Afghanistan – yet again on false “humanitarian” grounds. For example, some of the Hazara diaspora rallies in Australia in early October drew thousands of exiles, with some waving Hazaristan flags and many holding what appeared to be mass produced #StopHazaraGenocide placards.[27]

While working people should not stand in the way of any government offering refuge and asylum for those seeking a safe place to live, there needs to be a sharp awareness of how the whole refugee question can be used by the ruling classes of the West for their own aims. In the case of the Hazaras currently, their “cause” is being used to manipulate the concern of Western liberals in the most cynical manner possible. ISIS-K is primed to carry out atrocious terrorist bombings in Afghanistan largely against Hazara communities, taking innocent lives. US backed NGOs and Hazara diaspora organisations then organise mass protests against “Hazara genocide” in the West, which then generates political pressure to “save the Hazaras” by – how else? – another US-led invasion. Even though all of these protestors know ISIS-K is responsible, the Taliban are blamed for “not providing security” for Hazaras – along with dubious claims of a historical “genocide” against them.

In a similar way in which Ukrainians are being used as cannon fodder for NATO’s proxy war on Russia, the Hazara are being offered as cannon fodder for Washington’s proxy war on Afghanistan, Iran, China and Russia. Eurasian integration, now proceeding apace, can only further the decline of the West which was so dominant for centuries. Class struggle socialism is ultimately the only way to finally defeat imperialist meddling in Afghanistan. This is not at all impossible, given the fact that Afghanistan was heavily influenced by socialist ideas from 1977 to 1992. The genuine Marxism of V.I. Lenin and L.D. Trotsky must return to this stage, via the construction of vanguard parties leading the masses towards the establishment of a workers’ republic and its consequent extension internationally.

WORKERS  LEAGUE

www.redfireonline.com

E: workersleague@redfireonline.com

[1] www.edition.cnn.com/2022/09/30/asia/kabul-explosion-education-center-intl-hnk/index.html (12-10-2022)

[2] www.khaama.com/twitter-bursts-with-stophazaragenocide-campaign-as-it-reaches-1m-tweets-67453/ (12-10-2022)

[3] www.timesofindia.indiatimes.com/world/south-asia/days-after-kabul-education-centre-blast-explosion-reported-in-another-hazara-populated-area/articleshow/94623053.cms (12-10-2022)

[4] www.hrw.org/news/2022/09/06/afghanistan-isis-group-targets-religious-minorities (12-10-2022)

[5] www.laprensalatina.com/at-least-19-killed-in-attack-on-school-in-kabuls-hazara-neighborhood/ (12-10-2022)

[6] www.aljazeera.com/news/2021/6/13/anger-as-afghanistan-mourns-death-of-car-blast-victims (12-10-2022)

[7] www.trtworld.com/opinion/hazaras-and-the-gaping-hole-of-human-security-in-afghanistan-49745 (12-10-2022)

[8] www.globalresearch.ca/british-sas-special-forces-dressed-up-as-isis-rebels-fighting-assad-in-syria/5466944 (12-10-2022)

[9] www.thedrive.com/the-war-zone/18647/russia-claims-us-coalition-mystery-helicopters-supplying-arms-to-isis-in-afghanistan (12-10-2022)

[10] www.sott.net/article/397457-2500-ISIS-fighters-leave-Syria-and-Iraq-for-Afghanistan-Russia-to-respond (12-10-2022)

[11] www.himalmag.com/the-taliban-and-the-hazaras/ (12-10-2022)

[12] www.openthemagazine.com/feature/hazaras-unloved-marginalised-people-afghanistan/ (12-10-2022)

[13] www.extremism.gwu.edu/risks-facing-hazaras-taliban-ruled-afghanistan (12-10-2022)

[14] www.srv1.worldometers.info/world-population/afghanistan-population/ (12-10-2022)

[15] www.worldatlas.com/articles/ethnic-groups-of-afghanistan.html (12-10-2022)

[16] www.worldatlas.com/articles/who-are-the-hazara-people.html (12-10-2022)

[17] www.ned.org/afghanistan-one-year-later-neds-commitment-to-afghan-partners/ (12-10-2022)

[18] www.kabulpress.org/article240938.html (15-10-2022)

[19] www.hazaraunitedmovement.org/2022/09/ (15-10-2022)

[20] www.redfireonline.com/2022/09/25/iran-western-sabotage-in-the-name-of-womens-rights/ (15-10-2022)

[21] www.atalayar.com/en/content/afghanistan-hazaras-fear-new-genocide-taliban (15-10-2022)

[22] www.english.almayadeen.net/news/politics/dirty-money:-meet-the-us-agent-driving-the-cia-led-riots-in (15-10-2022)

[23] www.opensocietyfoundations.org/newsroom/open-society-announces-a-10-million-emergency-fund-for-afghan-civilians-in-peril (15-10-2022)

[24] www.freedomhouse.org/article/freedom-house-afghan-and-international-ngos-launch-afghanistan-human-rights-coordination (15-10-2022)

[25] www.influencewatch.org/non-profit/freedom-house/ (15-10-2022)

[26] www.hazarainternational.com/2021/06/21/hazara-diaspora-organizations-statement-on-the-condition-of-hazaras-asylum-seekers-in-indonesia-and-greece/ (15-10-2022)

[27] www.facebook.com/racqld/photos/pcb.5490652221042461/5490649594376057 (15-10-2022)

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