Hunted by the Taliban

SERIES: LEFT BEHINDNEWSROOM: WAR WINNERS
Co-published with
October 15, 2025

While the US and others roll back protections for Afghans, new evidence shows the scale of ongoing reprisal killings, belying the Taliban’s claim of an amnesty for former soldiers.

The first investigation to document in detail reprisal killings since 2023, in partnership with the Military Times, Etilaat Roz, Hasht-e Subh (8am Media) and The Independent, we reveal an ongoing pattern of killings and concerning evidence that former soldiers are being systematically hunted by the Taliban.

At least 110 former members of Afghanistan National Defence and Security Forces (ANDSF) have been killed since 2023, according to the new data. Amongst those killed and tortured are members of elite Afghan units who worked in close partnership with US and UK Special Forces.

The deaths demonstrate the hollowness of the Taliban’s professed amnesty for former Afghan forces. After they seized control of Afghanistan in 2021, the Taliban claimed that their enemies had nothing to fear – former soldiers and officials would be protected by a general amnesty. A spate of killings followed.

At first, Western nations tried to bring their former allies to safety, but these routes have been shrinking, with some advocates concerned that the Taliban’s supposed amnesty – which the group reiterated this year – is being used to justify those decisions. Meanwhile a growing climate of fear in Taliban-controlled Afghanistan has made it harder to verify deaths. The United Nations last issued a standalone report on these killings in 2023.

This investigation shows killings have continued unabated since then and well into 2025, even as the Trump administration ended Temporary Protection Status for Afghans in the US and suspended other immigration pathways that were relied upon by the Afghan special forces community.

In the UK, the government announced the closure of two resettlement schemes for Afghans in July with no prior warning. Meanwhile, Afghans with pending and even successful applications remain in danger as they face grindingly slow waits for evacuation. We spoke to former Afghan commandos working with the British who were tortured in recent months while waiting for British visas.

While Taliban officials have acknowledged some ANDSF deaths, they have put these down to “personal enmity or revenge” and have said perpetrators will be punished.

Yet, interviews with torture victims raise concerns of a more systematic effort to hunt allies of international forces. Three former soldiers with elite special forces units say they were tortured for the contact details of former colleagues. An additional source indicated that this practice was so widespread people no longer stayed in touch with each other.

METHODS

Lighthouse Reports was approached by Hasht-e Subh (8am Media) and Etilaat Roz, two Afghan media outlets, to work on a story about ANDSF killings. Both Afghan partners had doggedly covered the killings since the fall of Kabul, with 8am producing a landmark investigation with the New York Times looking at revenge killings in the immediate aftermath.

We assembled a coalition of partners to investigate these deaths and their implications, including the Military Times in the US and The Independent in the UK, who worked to spotlight specific cases impacting international allies as immigration protections were being rolled back in both countries.

We built a database of ANDSF killings that were verified by two independent sources. We began by reviewing the reporting archives of our two Afghan partners and sought additional verification for each death by working with PhD researcher Besmillah Taban who had built his own database of killings. Previously the General Director of the Afghanistan’s Crime Investigation Department (CID), Taban has a strong network of former ANDSF sources who helped corroborate the reporting.

Outside of the wider figures, the team wanted to demonstrate how dangerous the immigration rollbacks in the UK and US were by verifying the deaths of soldiers from units that worked shoulder to shoulder with international special forces. Many have had promised routes to safety stymied by failing immigration systems.

But fear amongst the special operation forces community has significantly grown since we reported on the torture and killings of the British paid and trained Triples unit in early 2024. Verification proved extremely challenging as a result.

Due to these challenges and our verification criteria, our final figures are highly likely an undercount: tens of reported cases were not included in the final number because we were not able to confirm their deaths with two independent sources.

Given the real risks to Afghans who speak to international media, we avoided contacting sources in Afghanistan where alternative verification methods were possible. We relied on a network of Afghan special operation forces in exile, and the community of American special forces advocating for them, to connect us to relevant sources and corroborate details.

STORYLINES

Ali Gul Haideri had been one of Afghanistan’s most elite soldiers. His work with American Special Forces put a target on his back when Kabul fell to the Taliban.

Ali and his young family struggled to get on one of the planes departing Afghanistan as the Taliban took over. Soon after, he was captured and tortured for over a month. When he was released, Ali fled with his wife and child to a neighbouring country. But mass deportations sent them back into the Taliban’s arms one year later. In early 2024, Ali was shot dead in Kabul.

In a letter shared with the reporting team, his wife Hawa spoke of how his loss has affected his two daughters, Hana and Elena. Elena was just a baby when he was killed.

“Hana remembers her father every day and asks why he doesn’t come back to take us out, and how painful are the moments when she asks why the Taliban shot my father,” she wrote.

“Elena is my little girl, but before she could feel the warmth of her father’s hand, she was deprived of him forever.”

Ali’s death is just one of the dozens of tragic cases the investigation team dug into over six months of reporting. Other cases documented by the investigation include a former Afghan special operations forces member who lived in such fear of reprisal that he refused to marry. In 2024, his body was found riddled with bullet holes.

The team also interviewed former soldiers from elite special forces units that had been arrested and tortured.

A former member of the top tier counter terrorism unit known as the Ktah Khas or KKA, described being tortured particularly brutally to gain access to his phone contacts. He recalls being interrogated about one particular colleague. When he was released, that colleague had been killed. We were able to independently verify this death.

Another member of the same unit, who was also arrested and tortured, shared a letter signed by a US army captain that stated his operations led to “outcomes of sizable strategic significance”. It also noted that if he or his family were identified, they would be subject to “substantial risk”.

The family, who are now residing in a neighbouring country, say the document was given to him in case he needed help from the Americans.

“It didn’t help him during the collapse,” they say. “He was one of these group members that they were working shoulder to shoulders with US special forces”

Similar fates have befallen those who worked closely with British forces. One former commando, who served in UK-funded special forces units known as the Triples and was approved for relocation to Britain after years of waiting, was also detained and tortured by the Taliban earlier this year.

His family told The Independent and Lighthouse Reports that they believed he had been targeted because of his work for the British: “They didn’t have any mercy on him. They beat him on his back, and other parts, and took out his nails.”

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