The Taliban are expanding their spy networks and social control apparatus by exploiting poverty and deploying threats against ordinary citizens, the findings of this report reveal. According to the report, arbitrary arrests, sweeping interrogations, and cash offers in exchange for information are all part of a coordinated effort to recruit informants from within civilian communities. The findings show that the Taliban use poverty as leverage, fear as a tool, and espionage as the only “offer on the table.” Sources say this process has made fear, distrust, and constant surveillance defining features of daily life in Afghanistan.
This report is based on direct interviews with two sources who say the Taliban pressured them to spy for the group by exploiting their poverty and threatening their security. It also draws on recorded audio. The identities of the sources have been withheld for their protection.
The findings indicate that the Taliban, by preying on the basic needs of citizens, particularly in impoverished neighborhoods of Kabul, have constructed an informal network of local informants, one in which food and minimal protection are traded for information and forced cooperation.
This report tells three stories: three distinct experiences of a single pattern. Poverty as leverage. Fear as a tool. Espionage is the only option. It is a pattern with deep roots in Afghanistan’s recent history, and one that has now returned in a broader and more systematic form, reaching into the everyday lives of ordinary people.
First Account: Arrested from the Workplace, the Start of a Grueling Interrogation
One of the report’s sources is a man from an impoverished neighborhood in Kabul who says Taliban forces took him from his workplace without a warrant or any prior warning. His destination, he says, was one of the security district offices in western Kabul. As soon as he neared the compound, his mobile phone was confiscated, and he was taken to an interrogation room. What awaited him was an hour-long interrogation that left no aspect of his life unexamined, from the number of family members in his household to how he prayed, from his father’s occupation to his social circle and monthly income. “There was nothing in my life they didn’t ask about,” he says. “It was as if they wanted to peel back every layer of my past and present.”
He says that throughout the interrogation, the questions felt targeted and pre-prepared, not random, but part of a deliberate framework designed to extract specific information.
The Mobile Phone as the Primary Suspect
The most critical part of the interrogation focused on his mobile phone. Officers went through every message, call, photo, video, and installed application one by one, demanding an explanation for each number, image, and exchange.
The objective was clear: to identify any connection to individuals who had worked in government institutions during the republic era. After hours of scrutiny, however, “no suspicious material” was found.
That moment marked a turning point. When threats and searches yielded nothing, the tone shifted. What came next was no longer an interrogation.
When Threats Fail, Money Takes Over
Officers showed the source photographs of several YouTubers and asked whether he knew any of them. Then came the main proposal, one that, in his words, “looks soft on the surface, but fear lies beneath it.” “They said if you give us information, we will pay you,” he recounts. “It starts at five thousand Afghani, and if the information is more valuable, we will pay more.”
The demand was precise: information about people who had held government positions during the republic era, including where they lived, what vehicles they drove, whether they owned weapons, and details of their daily routines.
At the end of the session, his phone number was recorded, and he was told that cooperating “would change his life.” The phrase was neither a promise nor a courtesy. It was pressure dressed as opportunity.
After his release, he says, he could not speak for hours. The fear was not only about what had already happened, but about what might still come, and the lingering sense that he was now being watched.
Second Account: Stopped at a Street Checkpoint, an Offer That Cannot Be Refused
The report’s second source is a man who, several months ago, was stopped and body-searched on a busy road in western Kabul by someone who identified himself as a Taliban member.
A simple laborer, he recalls: “I first asked him who he was to be searching me. He showed me his identification card. When I saw it, I understood he was genuinely a Taliban member.”
The questioning began with his occupation and monthly income. Upon learning his earnings, the officer asked with a sarcastic edge: “How do you get by on that?” The source replied: “We manage somehow.” The officer was not satisfied. He had a proposal, and he intended to be heard. The source says he objected before even hearing the details, having encountered a similar approach before. The officer’s response was direct and threatening: “No, your situation is fine. First, listen to what I have to say.”
The proposal was simple but dangerous: report anything “suspicious” around the city in exchange for payment determined “based on the value of the information.” Contact was to be maintained exclusively through that one officer, with no one else and nowhere else involved.
“I had no other choice,” the source says. “If I had refused, there was no telling what would happen to me. I outwardly agreed and took his number.” What disturbed him most, he adds, was not the proposal itself but the absence of any way out. Saying “no” carried risk. Saying “yes” carried risk. And silence was not enough.
Third Account: An Offer at the Workplace, 500 Afghani per Day
The second source also describes the experience of an acquaintance, an account that shows this pattern has moved beyond the streets and into the workplace. According to him, Taliban members went directly to his acquaintance’s place of work. This time, the approach dispensed with the formalities of an interrogation or checkpoint stop. It was framed as an informal “contract”: 500 Afghani per day in exchange for any information that could be provided.
In some respects, this approach is more brazen than the two previous accounts. There is no longer any pretense of an interrogation or a security check. The Taliban show up, place an offer on the table, and wait.
The difference between “five thousand Afghani for a single piece of information” and “500 Afghani per day” is not simply one of amount, but of structure. The second model turns a person into an informal employee, someone who reports on a routine basis and is paid accordingly.
This Is Not the First Time: A Pattern with Precedent
None of what these three accounts describe is new to Afghanistan. During the Taliban’s first period of rule, from 1996 to 2001, informal intelligence networks played a central role in controlling society. That era’s Taliban drew on the same combination: fear, poverty, and a pervasive sense of helplessness.
What distinguishes the current moment in Kabul is geography. The offers are no longer confined to interrogation rooms. They are being made on the streets, inside workplaces, and among ordinary people. The reach has expanded considerably.
Human rights experts have repeatedly warned that social surveillance, the practice of using ordinary citizens as intelligence sources, is among the most effective instruments of social control in authoritarian regimes. It does not merely generate information. It creates an environment in which everyone fears everyone else.
Western Kabul: Where Poverty Becomes a Pressure Point
All three accounts share a common setting: western Kabul, a district that has long contended with structural poverty, widespread unemployment, and a near-total absence of stable livelihoods. In this part of the city, the daily income of many families barely covers necessities.
In that context, an offer of five hundred or five thousand Afghani, even for work that is dangerous and unwanted, can serve as powerful coercion. When choices are scarce, saying “no” to an armed officer is a cost many cannot bear.
This is precisely what sets this pattern apart from more overt methods of control: it relies not on direct force, but on economic desperation as indirect pressure. Poverty does the Taliban’s work for them.
The consequences extend well beyond short-term surveillance. Distrust spreads among neighbors. Social bonds erode. An atmosphere takes hold in which every citizen is at once a potential suspect and a potential informant.
The interrogators’ persistent focus on identifying individuals with ties to the republic era makes clear that, years after the fall of the previous government, those files remain open for the Taliban.
This approach conveys several things. The Taliban remain concerned about dormant networks loyal to the former administration. And as time passes, old intelligence loses relevance, requiring constant updates. Ordinary citizens are the cheapest and most readily available source of that information.
The trend keeps fear alive not only among those who served under the previous system but also extends its pressure to citizens with no political history whatsoever, people whose only “offense” is holding a job, going about their daily lives, and trying to survive.
What this report documents is a system, not an isolated incident. A system that builds an intelligence network from poverty, fear, and coercion, and corrodes society from the inside.
Arbitrary arrest, exhaustive interrogation, direct visits to workplaces: the methods differ, but the goal is the same. To recruit informants from within a society whose choices have been narrowed by poverty.
The line between “cooperation” and “coercion” in these accounts is vanishingly thin. The person who stores a Taliban officer’s number in their phone, not out of conviction but out of fear, is a victim, not a collaborator.
And the price of that coerced choice is not only financial. It is psychological safety, social trust, and sometimes life itself. In a society where fear has seeped into the air, even silence is not a choice. It is merely another form of compulsion.
You can read the Persian version of this report here:
شبکهای از ترس؛ چگونه طالبان فقر را به ابزار جاسوسی بدل میکنند
