According to a report of an expedition to Afghanistan published in London in 1871:[3]The country generally between Caubul (Kabul) and the Oxus appears to be in a very lawless state; slavery is as rife as ever, and extends through Hazara, Badakshan, Wakhan, Sirikul, Kunjūt (Hunza), &c. A slave, if a strong man likely to stand work well, is, in Upper Badakshan, considered to be of the same value as one of the large dogs of the country, or of a horse, being about the equivalent of Rs 80.
In Lower Badakshan, and more distant places, the price of slaves is much enhanced, and payment is made in coin.In response to the Hazara uprising of 1892, the Afghan Emir Abdur Rahman Khan declared a "Jihad" against the Shiites.
According to S. A. Mousavi, "thousands of Hazara men, women, and children were sold as slaves in the markets of Kabul and Qandahar, while numerous towers of human heads were made from the defeated rebels as a warning to others who might challenge the rule of the Amir".
[2] The markets for captives from South Iran were often in Arabia and Afghanistan; "most of the slave girls employed as domestics in the houses of the gentry at Kandahar were brought from the outlying districts of Ghayn".
The British doctor John Alfred Gray a personal physician to Amir Abdul Rehman Khan, described:[12] Recently in Kabul it was very common sight to see a gang of Hazara women with their unveiled faces and their dingy dresses ragged and dirty conducted through the town by a small guard of soldiers with bayonets fixed.
Segments of the Hazara people were still living in slavery and sold in the slave market of Kabul as late as in the early 20th century.
[17] In addition, they also had enslaved harem women known as kaniz (“slave girl”[19]) and surati or surriyat ("mistress"[19]), guarded by the ghulam bacha (eunuchs).
[22] The Swede Aurora Nilsson, who lived in Kabul in 1926–1927, described the occurrence of slavery in Kabul in her memoirs,[23] as well as how a German woman, the widow of an Afridi man named Abdullah Khan, who had fled to the city with her children from her late husband's successor, was sold at public auction and obtained her freedom by being bought by the German diplomatic mission for 7,000 marks.