New Situation Update on Taliban weapons controls in Balkh Province, Afghanistan

Located in the north-east of Afghanistan and sharing borders with Uzbekistan and Tajikistan, Balkh province hosts ethnically diverse populations, and power in the province has historically rested with non-Pashtun communities, particularly Tajiks and Uzbeks. While the Taliban has attempted to regulate arms possession and seize stocks of non-Taliban-aligned elements in the province, weapons markets in Balkh, Chamtal, and Kaldar districts, as well as in Mazar-i-Shariff, continue to operate, and former power brokers retain their hidden stocks. Despite this situation, there is little evidence of cross-border trafficking from Balkh to Uzbekistan. 

Selective Approval: Taliban Weapons Controls in Afghanistan’s Balkh Province—a new Situation Update co-authored by the Small Arms Survey and Afghan Peace Watch—examines the latest findings from fieldwork conducted in the province in November 2023, covering the prices of benchmark weapons for sale in arms markets in the province, licensing rules for businesses and other commercial entities, and the Taliban’s selective efforts to clamp down on civilian weapons in northern Afghanistan.

Read: Selective Approval: Taliban Weapons Controls in Afghanistan’s Balkh Province

For more, check out:

• Calculable Losses? Arms Transfers to Afghanistan 2002–21 (January 2024)—a Briefing Paper that analyses the publicly available data on arms exports to Afghanistan, identifies gaps in this data, and provides previously unreleased data obtained from the US government
• Arms Smuggling Dynamics under Taliban Rule (June 2023)—a Situation Update co-authored by the Small Arms Survey and Afghan Peace Watch that reports on 2023 field investigations in the country, and the risks for arms proliferation under the Taliban
• The Small Arms Survey’s Afghanistan project page
• Afghanistan outputs in our Resource Library

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• New HSBA Situation Update on the SPLA-North mobilization in South Kordofan, Sudan
• The Small Arms Survey’s New 5-year Strategy
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