Al Khabeer Al Khabeer
Verification

Taliban say crime in Kabul has dropped 90 per cent. The evidence does not support it.

A widely circulated claim by officials that the capital is nearly crime-free does not withstand scrutiny when measured against hospital data, resident accounts and the Taliban's own arrest records.

Al KhabeerNewsroom · 5 min read
A street in Kabul
A street in Kabul. Al Khabeer

The claim

Senior Taliban officials have repeatedly stated that crime in Kabul has fallen by as much as 90 per cent since their takeover. The figure has appeared in official statements, interviews with state media, and presentations to foreign delegations.

What the evidence shows

Hospital data: Kabul's main hospitals continue to receive patients with injuries from armed robbery, assault and domestic violence at rates that do not reflect a 90 per cent reduction. Emergency, the Italian-run trauma hospital, reported in its latest public data that violent-injury admissions have declined from their wartime peak but remain substantial.

Resident accounts: Interviews conducted by Al Khabeer with residents across six Kabul districts reveal a more complicated picture. While large-scale security incidents — car bombs, complex attacks — have largely stopped, petty crime, armed robbery and extortion by armed individuals (some of whom residents describe as Taliban-affiliated) persist.

Arrest records: The Taliban's own interior ministry has publicised hundreds of arrests for theft, robbery and drug offences in Kabul in recent months. A 90 per cent reduction in crime would make these numbers difficult to explain.

Missing context

The claim rests on a comparison with the final years of the previous government, a period of extreme insecurity driven in large part by the Taliban's own military campaign. Using that period as a baseline inflates the apparent improvement.

There is no independent, systematic crime data collection in Taliban-governed Afghanistan. The 90 per cent figure does not appear to be based on any published methodology, dataset, or defined measurement period.

Verdict

Not supported. While some categories of violence — particularly large-scale terrorist attacks in the capital — have declined, the blanket claim of a 90 per cent drop in crime is not backed by available evidence and relies on a baseline period distorted by the Taliban's own insurgency.