talibans
Five years after the collapse of the republic, the movement still presents itself as the uncontested ruler of a pacified country. The war, according to its propaganda, is over. Foreign occupation has ended, resistance has been extinguished and Afghanistan has finally been reunited under the authority of the Islamic Emirate.
Badakhshan is beginning to tell a different story.
On July 17, a previously unknown anti-Taliban organisation calling itself Sepahian-e Mihan, or the Patriotic Soldiers Front, attacked Yaftal-e Payeen, also known as Yaftali Sufla, in the northeastern province. Its fighters reportedly disarmed local Taliban personnel and briefly occupied the district administration building. Even the Taliban acknowledged that armed attackers had temporarily taken control of the district centre, making it the first reported seizure of a district headquarters by an anti-Taliban force since the movement returned to power in 2021.
The occupation lasted only a few hours. Militarily, it was hardly the fall of Kabul. Politically, however, it was considerably more important than its duration suggests.
The Taliban responded by sending its army chief, Fasihuddin Fitrat, himself originally from Badakhshan, to oversee operations. Fitrat declared that the assault had failed and that the attackers had not achieved their objectives. Five days later, however, the commander of Sepahian-e Mihan, Qayum Malang, released an audio message denying Taliban claims that his men had been captured or eliminated.
“I am in full health,” he said. “Do not follow the enemy’s propaganda. We are all safe and well.”
Malang added that his organisation had its own plans and objectives and that its members desired freedom above everything else.
The importance of the message lay not in its rhetoric but in the fact that it had to be issued at all. The attack was not an isolated exchange of fire in a remote valley. It was a declaration of existence.
Sepahian-e Mihan appears to draw support from different sections of society, including residents of Badakhshan angered by the conduct of the Taliban authorities. Its insignia combines the Simurgh of Persian mythology, the Hindu Kush, the sun, lapis lazuli, a sword and the golden star of Bactria. The symbolism is unmistakably regional, Persianate and military. It invokes a Badakhshan rooted in a history and identity far older than the Taliban’s emirate and culturally distant from the movement’s overwhelmingly Pashtun centre of power.
This does not yet make Sepahian-e Mihan a major resistance force. Its numbers, organisation, external support and capacity to sustain operations remain unclear. Afghanistan has produced several anti-Taliban formations since 2021, including the National Resistance Front and the Afghanistan Freedom Front, without any of them seriously threatening the regime’s survival.
But insurgencies do not always begin with armies. Sometimes they begin with a symbol, a district building and a government forced to send its chief of staff into the mountains.
More importantly, the new front has appeared at a moment when Badakhshan is already in turmoil.
The Taliban’s problem in the province is not confined to open enemies. It also involves its own commanders.
Juma Khan Fateh, an influential Tajik Taliban commander from Badakhshan, has become one of the most visible manifestations of the movement’s internal crisis. Fateh and members of his family have been accused of land seizures, extortion and the illegal control of gold mines. Whatever the truth of the individual allegations, his confrontation with the central leadership has exposed a struggle over authority, ethnicity and resources that cannot be reduced to a disciplinary dispute.
During June, reports emerged that Fateh was gathering forces, holding meetings with residents and consolidating his position in the Darwaz region. Some accounts claimed that he commanded thousands of armed loyalists, although such numbers are difficult to verify. What was clear was that Kabul took the threat seriously enough to send senior figures to negotiate with him.
Defence Minister Mullah Yaqoob Mujahid travelled to Badakhshan after an earlier Taliban commission had apparently failed to resolve the confrontation. Officially, the visit concerned security along the Wakhan, Ishkashim and Shughnan border areas. Unofficially, it looked remarkably like an assessment of the forces available for a possible internal war.
In July, Fasihuddin Fitrat and other senior Taliban officials travelled to Nusay to meet Fateh. He was subsequently taken to Faizabad after receiving guarantees from Fitrat and later returned to Darwaz after publicly renewing his allegiance to the emirate.
The choreography resembled reconciliation. The substance looked more like an armed negotiation between a central government and a local warlord it could neither trust nor easily remove.
The Taliban had already dismissed Fateh from his position as deputy governor of Zabul without assigning him another post. Checkpoints were then established in Shekay, Nusay and Maymay, officially to improve security but evidently also to monitor local movement and restrict the operational space of Fateh’s supporters.
By late July, reports indicated that Taliban forces had begun disarming locally recruited fighters in parts of Badakhshan, ordering hundreds of armed men without formal positions in the regime to surrender their weapons. Special forces were also reportedly deployed.
This is the point at which the fiction of Taliban unity begins to collapse.
The movement that captured Afghanistan was never as homogeneous as it pretended to be. It included southern Pashtun clerics, eastern networks linked to the Haqqanis, local commanders from northern ethnic communities, former insurgent entrepreneurs, smugglers, tribal figures and men who joined because the Taliban appeared to be winning.
Victory temporarily concealed those differences. Power is now revealing them.
Non-Pashtun Taliban commanders were useful while the movement needed local legitimacy and military access in Tajik, Uzbek and other northern communities. Once Kabul had fallen, however, the central leadership began replacing, marginalising or subordinating many of them. Real power remained concentrated among the Kandahari leadership and its trusted networks.
Badakhshan’s commanders are now discovering the difference between fighting for the emirate and owning a share of it.
At the heart of the struggle lies the province’s enormous mineral wealth.
Badakhshan contains gold, silver, aluminium, limestone and some of the world’s most famous deposits of lapis lazuli. It is also one of Afghanistan’s poorest and least accessible regions. For the Taliban leadership, the mines represent revenue, patronage and an economic lifeline. For local communities, they represent employment, survival and one of the few resources that might conceivably compensate for decades of abandonment.
The collision between these interests has become increasingly violent.
In January, deadly clashes involving local residents, mining operators and Taliban forces highlighted growing anger over contracts, land ownership and the failure of extraction projects to benefit nearby communities. Reports have linked much of the expanded gold sector to politically connected businesses and foreign, particularly Chinese, involvement.
In May, miners and residents reportedly clashed with Taliban-affiliated forces over control of the Qatqati gold mine in Shekay district after workers were beaten. In July, miners protested outside the provincial mining department, complaining that the continuing closure of mining sites had deprived hundreds of families of income and that Taliban personnel had threatened and assaulted workers.
The response from Kandahar was not to negotiate a fairer distribution of resources. It was to militarise extraction.
In February, Hibatullah Akhundzada reportedly approved the deployment of 1,000 fighters to protect Badakhshan’s gold-mining operations. In July, the Taliban Interior Ministry announced an agreement with the Ministry of Mines and Petroleum to provide security for four major economic projects, including the province’s lapis lazuli mine.
The choice of language is revealing. The fighters are there to “protect” the mines. But protect them from whom?
From Islamic State? From foreign saboteurs? Or from the people who live above them?
What the Taliban calls security increasingly resembles the military occupation of an extractive colony. Armed units guard the mines. Local workers are beaten. Contracts are allocated from above. Regional commanders compete for a share of the revenue. Communities that object are treated as a threat to public order.
The problem is not simply corruption. Corruption implies the distortion of a functioning system. In Badakhshan, predation is becoming the system.
The Taliban desperately needs revenue. International assistance has declined, financial restrictions continue and the emirate remains formally unrecognised by most of the world. Mineral extraction offers money without political reform, elections, taxation by consent or accountability.
Badakhshan therefore matters far beyond the province itself. Its resources are part of the Taliban’s strategy for surviving isolation. Its geography connects Afghanistan with Tajikistan, Pakistan and China through some of the most strategically sensitive terrain in Central and South Asia. The Wakhan Corridor gives the province special importance in any future expansion of Chinese economic or security involvement.
Yet the more valuable Badakhshan becomes to the central regime, the more coercively it is likely to be governed.
That coercion, in turn, creates the constituency from which resistance may grow.
The grievances are already converging: anger among miners, resentment among local communities, ethnic mistrust, disaffected Taliban commanders, armed men facing disarmament and the appearance of a new anti-regime front capable of briefly overrunning a district headquarters.
These actors are not necessarily allies. Juma Khan Fateh is not a liberal democrat, and his dispute with Kandahar should not be mistaken for principled opposition to Taliban rule. Local miners are defending livelihoods, not necessarily joining an insurgency. Sepahian-e Mihan remains opaque and may prove short-lived.
But political explosions are often produced by groups with very different motives discovering that they have the same enemy.
The killing on July 28 of Zabihullah Amiri, the Taliban’s provincial director of information and culture, has added another layer of uncertainty. Gunmen attacked him while he was travelling towards Faizabad. One alleged attacker was killed and another captured, according to the Taliban authorities. No immediate connection to Sepahian-e Mihan was established, but the assassination demonstrated how rapidly the security environment in the province was deteriorating.
Badakhshan is not yet beyond Taliban control. But the regime is being forced to rule it through troop deployments, checkpoints, political removals, negotiations with armed commanders and military protection of mining sites.
That is not the behaviour of a confident government in a pacified province.
It is the behaviour of an occupying power discovering that conquest does not automatically produce obedience.
The Taliban may suppress Sepahian-e Mihan. It may buy Juma Khan Fateh’s loyalty, arrest him or eventually eliminate him. It may seize the mines and force local workers back under its terms. It still possesses overwhelming military superiority and a ruthless security apparatus.
But the lesson of Badakhshan is not that the Taliban is about to fall.
It is that the war did not end in 2021. It changed form.
The old republic has disappeared, the Western armies have left and the Taliban flag flies over every provincial capital. Beneath it, however, lie the same unresolved questions that have repeatedly torn Afghanistan apart: who controls the land, who owns its wealth, whose identity defines the state and how long men with guns will obey rulers who regard them as useful but inferior.
In Badakhshan, those questions are once again being answered with gold, guns and rebellion.
