The faithful pray before the thakt, or throne, where the Guru Granth Sahib, the Sikh holy book, resides during prayer hours at the Guru Nanak Darbar of Long Island, a Sikh gurdwara. When the assailants stormed the prayer hall early that morning, he was in the next room at the Gurdwara Har Rai Sahib, where his father was the chief granthi, or ceremonial reader of the Sikh sacred text. Soni, now 27, still has fresh memories of the 2020 gurdwara attack that ultimately drove the family from the country. In October 2021, the report says, the Sikh community shared videos of alleged Taliban members vandalizing and ransacking their gurdwara in the neighborhood of Karte Parwan, which is home to the remaining 100 or fewer Sikhs and Hindus in Kabul. Commission on International Religious Freedom warns of “a rapid decline and near extinction of the already small Afghan Hindu and Sikh communities” in Afghanistan, in addition to persecution of other religious minorities. forces’ withdrawal from Afghanistan approaches, a recent report by the bipartisan U.S. Sikhs have also faced challenges with cremating their dead, which they consider a sacred belief but Islam views as sacrilegious.Īs the Aug. On June 16 of this year, an ISIS gunman attacked a gurdwara, or house of worship, in Kabul, killing one worshipper and wounding seven others.
In July 2018 an ISIS suicide bomber ambushed a convoy of Sikhs and Hindus as they were on their way to meet President Ashraf Ghani in the eastern city of Jalalabad, killing 19. Under the Taliban in the late 1990s, they were asked to identify themselves by wearing yellow armbands or badges, reminiscent of Nazi Germany, and in recent years they have been repeatedly targeted by extremists. Sikhs and Hindus make up only a tiny fraction of the population of Afghanistan, which is almost entirely Muslim.
Guru Nanak Darbar of Long Island, a Sikh gurudwara, in Hicksville, N.Y., on Aug. They are settling in Hicksville, on New York’s Long Island, a community that has come to be a growing refuge for not only Afghan Sikhs but also Hindus, both of them religious minorities that have increasingly suffered discrimination and persecution in their home country.
“There was absolutely no future for our family in that country.”Īfter a two-year struggle to make an exit, including nearly a year under restored rule of the fundamentalist Taliban group, Soni and 12 family members including his mother, siblings, nieces and nephews, arrived in the United States last month. “That’s when we decided we needed to leave Afghanistan,” Soni said.
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