Statement of the Afghanistan Freedom Front on the Fourth Anniversary of the Fall of the Republic
August 16, 2025
Afghanistan has now entered the fourth year of Taliban’s illegitimate rule, during which our country has been cast into darkness, transformed into a hub for international terrorism, and forced to endure one of the most difficult chapters in its history.
The exclusion of women and girls from work, education, and public life has grown deeper and more widespread with each passing day, amounting to a blatant system of gender apartheid. Systematic discrimination, along with ethnic, linguistic, and religious cleansing, has permeated every aspect of society. Poverty, unemployment, social decay, and the moral corruption of Taliban militias have pushed the foundations of peaceful and humane living in Afghanistan to the edge of collapse. Meanwhile, killings, imprisonment, assassinations, exile, and extortion against the former security and defense forces of the republic continue unabated.
The Afghanistan Freedom Front (AFF) findings show that, in the past year alone, Taliban militias have executed, assassinated, or disappeared 209 former security personnel across 30 provinces. In the same period, 145 others were arrested, imprisoned, and subjected to torture. Since the Taliban’s takeover in the summer of 2021, at least 30 women who served in Afghanistan’s defense and security institutions have been killed by Taliban death squads.
Over the past year, the armed resistance of the AFF’s guerrilla fighters against the Taliban has remained strong. Our forces carried out 88 operations targeting Taliban bases, compounds, checkpoints, and gathering sites across Kabul, Kunduz, Takhar, Baghlan, Balkh, Kapisa, Herat, Faryab, Parwan, Panjshir, Sar-e Pul, Laghman, and Badghis, resulting in 225 Taliban killed and 174 wounded.
Because the Taliban’s so-called ‘Vice and Virtue Police’ continually assault the dignity of women and the honour of men and because their hands are stained with rape, torture, and abuse inside compounds, detention centers, and prisons—the AFF’s leadership council declared them legitimate targets earlier this spring. Since then, 14 of these enforcers have been killed or wounded across three provinces.
The Taliban’s economic networks, together with their regional partners, continue to plunder Afghanistan’s natural resources and mines, diverting the nation’s material and spiritual wealth to entrench their rule. Meanwhile, the population is sinking deeper into economic crisis. International agencies estimate that around 17 million people are unable to meet their basic daily needs. Across cities and villages alike, traders, farmers, laborers, and small shopkeepers are crushed under crippling taxes and relentless extortion. This worsening hardship, combined with the people’s rejection of the Taliban’s usurping medieval emirate, has fueled a migration crisis that now poses a regional and international challenge.
Freedom of expression, independent media, and citizens’ access to information have been reduced to a myth. The Taliban’s curriculum has turned schools and universities into centers of indoctrination and recruitment grounds for terrorism. While girls are banned from education beyond the sixth grade, Taliban madrassas actively promote extremism up to grade 14—spreading radicalism within families and creating conditions for abuse, forced and underage marriages, and other social harms.
In total international isolation, Afghanistan has been reduced to both a prison and torture chamber for its own citizens, while serving as a safe haven for regional and global extremists and terrorists.
On the fourth anniversary of its struggle to restore Afghanistan to its people and their rightful destiny, the AFF while honoring the efforts, protests, and sacrifices of the nation’s courageous and conscious women, reaffirms its commitment to comprehensive resistance aimed at overthrowing the Taliban regime and declares its steadfast solidarity with the national liberation movement.
Over the past year, clear signs of public disillusionment, fatigue, and resistance to Taliban tyranny have emerged, most visibly in the protests of Badakhshan and other provinces. We view these movements as the driving force and intellectual foundation of our nation’s just struggle. In the years ahead, we remain steadfast in our commitment to continue, strengthen, and expand the Afghan people’s rightful resistance against the Taliban’s oppressive emirate, both in scope and in strength.
Afghanistan Freedom Front
