The Attacks on Kabul's Gurdwaras

A community of centuries

Sikhs and Hindus lived in Afghanistan for hundreds of years, trading along the routes between Punjab and Central Asia and long settled in Kabul, Jalalabad and Ghazni. In the 1970s the Sikh population was roughly 100,000.¹

Four decades of war, the Taliban’s first period in power, and sustained targeted violence reduced it to fewer than seven hundred Sikhs and Hindus in the entire country by 2020.¹

March 2020

On 25 March 2020, gunmen of Islamic State Khorasan Province attacked Gurdwara Har Rai Sahib in Shor Bazar, the old Sikh quarter of Kabul, killing twenty-five people at prayer. Afterwards that gurdwara and the nearby Dharamshala — held by tradition to be the oldest Sikh place of worship in the city — were abandoned.²

That left Gurdwara Karte Parwan as the last functioning gurdwara in Kabul. Families with nowhere else to go were living inside it.

June 2022

On 18 June 2022, Karte Parwan was attacked in turn: explosives, gunfire and grenades, with Islamic State Khorasan Province again claiming responsibility. At least two people were killed and seven injured.^2,3

Most of those able to leave have since gone, largely to India. Those who remain are in the main the ones who cannot afford the journey.¹

Why this belongs in a global chapter

An atlas of the diaspora naturally reads as a story of expansion — Abbotsford, Stockton, Woolgoolga, Novellara: communities arriving, settling and building.

Afghanistan is the counter-case, and it is not ancient history. One of the oldest Sikh communities outside Punjab has been extinguished inside a single lifetime, and the last gurdwaras in its capital have gone from congregations to shelters to targets. Any honest account of where Sikhs are in the world has to include where they are no longer.