Taliban Are Turning Foreign Terrorists Into “Afghans” Through Tazkiras and Police Recruitment

Afghan ID cards require family proof, village approval and biometric registration. Yet UN monitors say the Taliban are handing them to foreign terrorists anyway.
The Taliban are not merely sheltering foreign militants. They are giving them Afghan identities and placing them inside the state.

The UN Analytical Support and Sanctions Monitoring Team reported that Taliban authorities issued identity documents to members of the East Turkestan Islamic Movement, allowing them to move freely across Afghanistan. It also found that ETIM and Turkistan Islamic Party members joined Taliban police forces in 2025. The UN’s latest report added that Al Qaeda in the Indian Subcontinent’s leadership remains in Kabul and holds Afghan tazkiras.

Figure 1: UN Security Council Report S/2026/651 (Page 18, Para 102), verifying that AQIS leadership residing in Kabul holds official Afghan tazkiras.

A tazkira is not handed out by accident. It requires the original identity document of a paternal relative, family witnesses with valid Afghan documents, local approval from a village malik or city wakil gozar, official certification and complete biometric registration.
This is not a clerical mistake. It is a Taliban system turning foreign extremists into Afghan citizens, giving them freedom of movement, official cover and access to the security forces.

A foreign national satisfies none of these requirements. Yet Arab and Uyghur militants have reportedly obtained Afghan identity cards through a system the Taliban claim to control. That means someone produced a false paternal lineage, recruited witnesses, secured an official attestation, and entered the applicant into a state biometric database. This is not a paperwork error. It is evidence of Taliban complicity, corruption, or both—and a direct failure of the regime’s claim to govern Afghanistan.

Figure 2: UN Security Council Report S/2022/547 (Page 17, Para 77), documenting ETIM/TIP fighters fraudulently obtaining local Afghan identity documents.

Police enrolment demands even more: formal vetting, an official appointment, and registration on the Interior Ministry payroll. Yet the Taliban’s security apparatus continues to absorb foreign militants while claiming it has severed ties with terrorist groups—a propaganda line contradicted by the evidence.

Figure 3: UN Security Council Report S/2025/796 (Page 19, Para 100), documenting 18 Afghan passports and $200-$300 monthly salaries issued to foreign fighters.

TABLE

The stakes are visible in a single name. Abdul Haq al-Turkistani, the overall leader of ETIM and the Turkistan Islamic Party, has been under UN sanctions as QDi.268 since April 2009. The Security Council’s own narrative summary records that he joined Al-Qaeda’s Shura Council by 2005 and directed operatives to obtain explosives for attacks on Chinese targets, including cities hosting the 2008 Olympic Games. UN monitors place him in Kabul, still commanding his organisation’s Syrian faction of between 800 and 3,000 fighters. The Taliban’s repeated denials cannot erase that record: under its rule, sanctioned foreign militants remain embedded in Afghanistan’s security environment while the regime demands international recognition.

The practice was exposed long before the UN documented it. Rahmatullah Nabil, who led Afghanistan’s National Directorate of Security from 2010 to 2015, told the Herat Security Dialogue that thousands of foreign militants had settled across Afghanistan by obtaining identity cards and changing their names. He attributed the scheme to the Taliban’s deep ideological ties with foreign extremists, according to Hasht-e Subh. Nabil named no individuals and produced no documents, so his account is testimony rather than proof. But it came from the former head of the agency that would have known.

A further claim has since entered circulation. Pakistan's state news agency, the Associated Press of Pakistan, reported in August that it had seen a letter from the Taliban's General Intelligence Directorate ordering the deployment of 70 Uyghur fighters to Badakhshan, with instructions that the movement be kept secret.

There is precedent for Taliban records reaching the public. In February 2025, hackers published material from 21 Taliban ministries and agencies on TalibLeaks. The Taliban’s Ministry of Communications admitted the breach while trying to downplay it, claiming the documents came from individual computers rather than a central database. The leaked material included travel restrictions on more than 8,000 former government employees. Al Khabeer has found no public examination of the files for civil registration or Interior Ministry personnel records. That gap should be closed.

Taliban spokesman Zabihullah Mujahid has dismissed the Monitoring Team’s findings as propaganda. But the evidence points in the opposite direction. The documents, biometric records and testimonies described in the report indicate that Taliban authorities have been sheltering foreign militants, issuing them Afghan identity cards and, in some cases, incorporating them into state security structures. This is not a matter of competing narratives; it is a documented pattern of protection, registration and recruitment.

Figure 4: UN Security Council Report S/2022/419 (Page 20, Para 81), documenting the Haqqani-led Ministry of Interior granting citizenship and identity documents to foreign militants.

Al Khabeer has sent requests for comment to the Ministry of Interior and the office of the spokesman. No response had been received at the time of publication.

Former civil registration staff who wish to speak may contact Al Khabeer confidentially. Through Al khabeer gmail: [[email protected]](mailto:[email protected])