Sijad Baryalai [work] Jun 2026

Some critics from non-Pashtun backgrounds have accused him of Pashtun supremacism, though his defenders point to his frequent tributes to Tajik and Hazara resistance figures.

Following the Taliban’s return to power in August 2021, Sijad Baryalai’s output shifted from poetic abstraction to raw political polemic. He emerged as one of the most vocal critics of the Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan (IEA), not from a Western-funded NGO perspective, but from an indigenously Pashtun lens. sijad baryalai