Taliban forces entered the Kabul residence of former Afghan President Hamid Karzai on Wednesday morning and prevented a number of visitors and tribal elders from meeting him, according to sources in the Afghan capital who spoke to Nimruz.
The sources said the Taliban personnel arrived at Karzai’s residence without prior coordination and stopped people who had come to meet the former president from entering or seeing him.
Some of those present reportedly protested the decision and demanded permission to meet Karzai. The Taliban forces subsequently dispersed the group.
Reports about the incident also allege that some tribal elders were treated inappropriately during the intervention. Those allegations have not been independently verified and have not been confirmed by the Taliban.
There was no reported attempt to arrest Karzai during the incident. The reason for the Taliban presence at his residence also remains unclear.
The Taliban have not publicly explained why their forces entered the residence or identified the official or authority responsible for ordering the intervention.
The incident comes amid previous reports of restrictions on Karzai’s movements and political contacts. Reports in recent months have said that the former president faced restrictions on travel to Kandahar and on some foreign trips, while access to certain domestic and foreign figures has also reportedly been limited.
Some sources have linked the latest restrictions to Karzai’s recent public positions on Afghanistan’s political developments. Last week, he issued messages marking the anniversaries of the assassinations of Ahmad Shah Massoud and Burhanuddin Rabbani, two prominent figures in Afghanistan’s recent political history.
Karzai remained in Afghanistan after the Taliban returned to power in 2021 and has sought to influence the country’s political situation through dialogue and engagement with the Taliban.
He has also repeatedly called for schools and universities to reopen to girls, making education for Afghan women and girls one of the issues he has continued to raise publicly.
His policy of engagement with the Taliban has itself faced criticism. Some social media users have recently used a reference to a story from Saadi’s Gulistan to criticize what they view as excessive reliance on engagement with the Taliban. Those reactions represent individual political interpretations and do not establish the motive behind Wednesday’s incident.
The key question now is whether the intervention at Karzai’s residence was an isolated measure aimed at preventing a particular meeting or represents a broader tightening of restrictions on the former president’s political and social contacts.
Without an official explanation from the Taliban or Karzai’s office, the reason for the action cannot be established with certainty.
What is currently clear is that people who had gone to Karzai’s residence to meet him were prevented from doing so after Taliban forces intervened.
