Taliban
On December 21, 2025, a Taliban fighter identified as Amanullah was killed in Jurm District after a confrontation between fighters aligned with Mawlawi Mahboob Hamed, the Taliban’s Deputy Governor in Ghor, and rival Taliban members over control of a gold mine near Iskan village. This was not an isolated episode. On December 13, armed clashes broke out inside the Badakhshan Provincial Hospital in Fayzabad between Taliban intelligence operatives and Taliban guards, wounding at least three people—an incident notable for taking place at a protected civilian facility.
Earlier, on October 12, 2025, fighting in Yalor village of Yaftal District over another gold mine left at least 10 Taliban fighters dead. The clash pitted Taliban fighters from Helmand against local Badakhshani Taliban—highlighting a recurring ethnic and regional divide. On October 25, yet another Taliban operative, Amauddin Karimi, was arrested in Ragh District amid escalating internal disputes.
According to data compiled by the Institute for Conflict Management, Badakhshan has witnessed at least 10 documented incidents of intra-Taliban violence since December 2021, resulting in 15 Taliban operatives killed, 17 injured, and four arrested by December 23, 2025. The most affected districts include Fayzabad, Kishim, Yaftal, Argo, Khowahan, and Jurm.
Badakhshan is predominantly non-Pashtun, with strong Tajik representation among local Taliban commanders. Following the Taliban’s return to power on August 15, 2021, the leadership—deeply mistrustful of these local commanders—deployed Pashtun Taliban units from southern provinces such as Helmand and Kandahar. By mid-2023, around 300 Taliban special forces operatives had been stationed in Fayzabad. These fighters had received specialized training and had earlier conducted complex operations in Pakistan—a detail that now carries wider regional implications.
Ethnic frictions have repeatedly flared. On May 29, 2025, tensions in Jurm District escalated after an attempt to detain a Tajik Taliban commander failed, forcing senior Taliban leaders, including Army Chief of Staff Fasihuddin Fitrat, to intervene personally to prevent escalation.
Control over mineral wealth—especially gold—has become a central driver of violence. Gold deposits in Raghistan, Yaftal, Fayzabad, Baharak, and Shahr-e-Buzurg districts have turned Taliban governance into a zero-sum contest. In October 2025 alone, clashes erupted between senior Taliban figures Abdul Rahman Ammar, former head of the Badakhshan Mining Department, and Shafiqullah Hafizi, the sitting Head of Mines, underscoring how institutional authority has failed to restrain armed competition.
Compounding these tensions is poppy cultivation. Although the Taliban imposed a nationwide ban on opium in 2022, Badakhshan continued—and in some areas expanded—poppy farming due to economic desperation and weak enforcement. Central Taliban eradication teams have repeatedly clashed with local Taliban units and villagers who depend on the crop for survival.
In June 2025, local Taliban in Shahr-e-Buzurg were assessed as not fully loyal to the central leadership, openly siding with residents against Kabul’s directives. On June 29, 2025, clashes in Khash District between residents and Taliban eradication teams left four dead and ten injured. Earlier incidents in Argo District saw villagers physically resisting Taliban units sent to destroy poppy fields.
These confrontations are significant not just for their frequency, but for what they reveal: local Taliban commanders advising civilians to arm themselves against the central regime—a direct challenge to the Taliban’s claim of monopoly over violence.
These fractures in Badakhshan intersect uncomfortably with Pakistan’s own escalating troubles with militancy. Many of the Pashtun Taliban fighters deployed to control Badakhshan were trained in, transited through, or previously operated from Pakistan. As the Afghan Taliban struggles to discipline its own ranks, splintered fighters, economic grievances, and armed networks do not remain neatly contained within borders.
Pakistan is already grappling with renewed militant violence, strained relations with the Taliban leadership in Kabul, and blowback from years of strategic patronage. Intra-Taliban conflict—especially in provinces like Badakhshan that border Central Asia and sit astride trafficking and smuggling routes—creates precisely the kind of ungoverned spaces that militant factions exploit. Fighters marginalized in Afghan internal power struggles do not disarm; they relocate, realign, and export instability.
The recurring clashes in Badakhshan expose the structural fragility of the Taliban’s post-2021 order. Ethnic mistrust, competition over minerals, disputes over poppy cultivation, and resistance to top-down control have produced a pattern of continuous, low-intensity violence. The Taliban’s reliance on coercion—against civilians and against its own fighters—reflects the absence of functioning dispute-resolution mechanisms.
For Afghanistan, this means prolonged instability under a regime incapable of governing without guns. For Pakistan, it means that the problems incubated across the Durand Line are no longer under anyone’s control. What is unfolding in Badakhshan is not a local anomaly. It is a warning—of a militant system fracturing inward, even as its consequences continue to spill outward.
