Five years on from seizing power in Kabul on August 15 2021 and consolidating its hold through the whole of Afghanistan, the Taliban claims to have ended the country’s decades-long war and achieved security.
International troops have withdrawn and the former Islamic Republic of Afghanistan has collapsed. Daily security incidents, such as suicide attacks and roadside bombs that were mostly carried out by the Taliban in their two-decades-long insurgency, have since decreased. Conflict indicators such as those gathered by the Uppsala Conflict Data Program (UCDP) – a widely used metric for assessing whether a country is at war based on conflict-related civilian casualties – suggest that Afghanistan has been at peace since 2022.
