The streets of Kabul were silent in the pre-dawn hours of September 27, 1996, but the silence was shattered by the sound of a vehicle dragging two mutilated bodies through the dirt and rubble of a city already exhausted by years of civil war. The corpses of former Afghan President Mohammad Najibullah and his brother Shahpur Ahmadzai were tied to the back of a truck and paraded through the capital as a grotesque trophy, their broken bodies left to hang from a concrete traffic checkpoint just steps from the presidential palace. This was not a trial, nor was it a formal execution in any recognized legal sense; it was a public spectacle of vengeance that would serve as the Taliban’s brutal introduction to power, and it set a chilling precedent for the two decades of violence that would follow.

Najibullah had been a hunted man long before the Taliban arrived at the gates of the United Nations compound where he had sought refuge. As the head of a Soviet-backed communist government from 1987 to 1992, he had overseen a regime that was deeply unpopular with the mujahideen fighters who had waged a bloody guerrilla war against foreign occupation and the puppet government it supported. When Soviet support collapsed and the mujahideen closed in on Kabul in April 1992, Najibullah attempted to flee, but the airport was seized by forces loyal to a former ally who had turned against him.

With no escape route, he was forced into the UN compound, where he would remain for four years, living under an informal protection that the international community assumed would keep him safe from the chaos outside. But the Taliban, a new militant movement rising from the madrassas of southern Afghanistan, had no respect for international norms or diplomatic immunity. On the night of September 26, 1996, a small group of Taliban fighters breached the compound, seized Najibullah and his brother, and subjected them to a horrific ordeal that included beatings and torture before killing them.

According to journalist Ahmed Rashid’s seminal book “Taliban,” the operation was ordered by Mohammad Rabbani, a senior commander who would later become the movement’s second-highest leader. The bodies were then mutilated, with reports indicating Najibullah had been castrated before his death, and hung from the checkpoint with unlit cigarettes placed between their fingers and Afghan banknotes stuffed into their pockets—a macabre message meant to brand them as corrupt communists and enemies of Islam even in death.

The United Nations Security Council issued a formal statement on September 28, 1996, condemning the violation of its premises and the “brutal execution” of a former head of state, but the words did nothing to change the reality on the ground. Rabbani publicly defended the killings, claiming Najibullah was a communist and a murderer who had been sentenced to death by the Taliban, though no court had convened, no evidence had been presented, and no defense had been offered. The verdict was announced only after the man was already dead.

This first act of major violence under Taliban control was a deliberate signal to the residents of Kabul that the new order would be enforced through terror, and it was a message that would soon be repeated on a far larger scale in the northern city of Mazar-i-Sharif. By 1998, the Taliban had seized control of most of Afghanistan, but Mazar-i-Sharif remained a stronghold of the Northern Alliance, a coalition of factions including significant populations of Tajiks, Uzbeks, and Hazaras. The Hazaras, a distinct ethnic group in Afghanistan, are predominantly Shia Muslims, while the Taliban were mostly Sunni Pashtuns, and the religious and ethnic divisions between them were about to explode into one of the deadliest chapters in the country’s modern history.

The seeds of the Mazar-i-Sharif massacre were planted in May 1997, when the Taliban first attempted to capture the city. A local warlord named Abdul Malik Pahlawan briefly allied with the Taliban before turning against them and ambushing their forces inside the city. According to multiple accounts, Pahlawan’s fighters captured between 1,000 and 3,000 Taliban prisoners and executed them, with many bodies thrown into wells outside the city.

The Taliban leadership did not forget this humiliation, and when they returned on August 8, 1998, they took the city with a ferocity that was documented extensively by Human Rights Watch and other organizations. Within hours of entering the city, Taliban fighters began shooting people in the streets, targeting civilians in markets, at doorways, and inside their homes. Witnesses described a wave of killings in which unarmed men, women, and children were gunned down indiscriminately.

The newly appointed Taliban governor then delivered several radio broadcasts openly threatening the Hazara population and blaming them for the deaths of Taliban prisoners the previous year. Fighters went door-to-door, specifically targeting men and teenage boys from Hazara, Tajik, and Uzbek families. Human Rights Watch documented the detention of large numbers of people and reported credible accounts of women and girls being kidnapped and raped during the occupation of the city.

The exact death toll remains disputed because the Taliban ordered the removal of bodies from the streets, and investigators were unable to properly examine many suspected mass graves for years. Human Rights Watch estimated at least 10,000 people were killed, while a U. S.

State Department human rights report from the same year offered a lower estimate of between 2,000 and 5,000 deaths, most of them Hazara civilians. Whatever the precise number, the massacre was one of the bloodiest episodes in Afghanistan’s modern history, with thousands killed in just a few days.

The massacre also created an international crisis that nearly sparked a full-scale war. During the takeover, Taliban forces stormed the Iranian consulate in Mazar-i-Sharif, killing 11 Iranian civilians, including eight diplomats and one journalist. Iran, a Shia-majority state with close ties to Afghanistan’s Hazara population, was outraged and moved an estimated 200,000 troops to its border with Afghanistan.

For a time, the two countries appeared to be on the brink of open conflict, but the crisis eventually subsided when the Taliban acknowledged that its fighters had killed the Iranian diplomats, though it claimed the killings were carried out by individual fighters without authorization from leadership. Almost no one outside the Taliban accepted this explanation, and the incident further cemented the group’s reputation for indiscriminate brutality. Mazar-i-Sharif was not an isolated case; in the same year, Taliban forces were also accused of killing dozens of civilians near the town of Bamyan and dozens more in a village called Qizilabad.

A clear pattern was emerging: civilians were being targeted based on their ethnic or religious identity, and the violence was being carried out by an organized military force operating under a chain of command. The world was beginning to see the true nature of Taliban rule, but it would take a single, filmed execution to bring the horror into the living rooms of millions around the globe.

On November 16, 1999, a 35-year-old woman named Zarmina was taken to Ghazi Stadium in the heart of Kabul, where an estimated 30,000 people had gathered to watch her die. Zarmina was a mother of seven children who had spent about three years in prison after being convicted of killing her husband. According to journalist Anton Antonowicz of the British newspaper The Mirror, who investigated her case years later, Zarmina was initially arrested with her one-year-old twins, a boy and a girl.

Throughout her imprisonment, she reportedly believed her children might save her life because Taliban officials told her that her execution would be postponed until the twins were old enough to be weaned. That delay eventually ended when one of the twins was weaned, meaning they no longer needed breastfeeding. The Taliban scheduled Zarmina’s execution and announced it over their radio station several days in advance.

According to Antonowicz’s reports, Zarmina was not fully aware of what was about to happen; she reportedly believed she would receive 100 lashes rather than be killed. On the morning of the execution, she borrowed two extra dresses from fellow female prisoners and wore them under her burqa, hoping the extra layers would protect her from the beating she thought she was about to receive. Instead, what happened was secretly recorded by a member of RAWA, the Revolutionary Association of the Women of Afghanistan, a clandestine organization founded in 1977 that had spent years documenting human rights abuses inside the country.

A RAWA member managed to smuggle a small video camera into the stadium by hiding it under her burqa. The footage shows Zarmina being led toward the old football goalpost in the stadium and forced to kneel. According to a RAWA report from the time, her children were among the crowd, crying out for their mother.

Just before the execution was carried out, the family of Zarmina’s husband reportedly told Taliban officials that they had decided to pardon her. Under Islamic law, relatives of a murder victim can, under certain circumstances, pardon the convicted person and stop the execution. But the Taliban refused to halt the killing, saying the execution had already been publicly announced to thousands of people and therefore could not be cancelled.

A Taliban official then shot Zarmina in the back of the head at close range. The hidden camera captured the moment; the image shook violently as the gunshot rang out, then tilted toward the ground as a second shot was heard and people throughout the stadium began screaming.

For nearly two years, the footage barely reached anyone outside Afghanistan. RAWA showed it to several Western television networks, but most refused to broadcast it, deeming it too disturbing for viewers. A portion of it eventually appeared in a British documentary titled “Behind the Veil.”

Everything changed after September 11, 2001. As the world tried to understand the Taliban government that was harboring Osama bin Laden in Afghanistan, the footage of Zarmina’s execution, despite being nearly two years old, began airing repeatedly on CNN and other international networks. For millions who had paid little attention to Afghanistan before, the footage became one of the most powerful images associated with Taliban rule.

Within weeks, the United States invaded Afghanistan, and by December 2001, the Taliban government had collapsed. For nearly two decades afterward, Ghazi Stadium returned to its normal role as a venue for football matches. Then, in August 2021, that changed again.

On August 15, 2021, after 20 years of war in Afghanistan, U. S. and NATO forces were rushing to complete their withdrawal from the country, and as they left, the Taliban retook Kabul with little resistance.

During the first few weeks, Taliban spokesmen tried to show the outside world that the group had changed, promising to respect women’s rights and saying their new government would not repeat the brutality of their first period in power. But that image quickly faded. Within months, girls were banned from attending school beyond the sixth grade, and women were barred from entering gyms, public parks, and public baths.

In November 2022, the Taliban’s supreme leader, Hibatullah Akhundzada, ordered judges across Afghanistan to begin implementing Sharia law in full, including some of the harshest punishments according to the Taliban’s interpretation of Islamic law: public executions, amputation of limbs for theft, and public flogging.

The order was implemented almost immediately. On December 7, 2022, inside a sports stadium in the western province of Farah, the Taliban carried out their first confirmed public execution since returning to power. The man executed was identified as Tajmir, from Herat province, who had been convicted of stabbing another man, Mustafa, to death five years earlier and stealing his motorcycle and mobile phone.

Under the Taliban’s use of “qisas,” an Islamic legal principle sometimes described as an eye for an eye, the victim’s father was given an assault rifle and allowed to carry out the execution himself, firing three shots. Hundreds watched, including more than a dozen senior Taliban officials who traveled from Kabul specifically for the event, among them the deputy prime minister and acting interior minister, demonstrating how seriously the Taliban leadership took the execution process. UN Secretary-General António Guterres issued a statement saying the death penalty could never be reconciled with respect for the right to life, but the statement had no practical effect.

The Taliban had set a new precedent, and the system of public killing that had been largely absent for two decades was back in operation. Six months later, on June 20, 2023, the Taliban’s Supreme Court confirmed another public execution, this time in the eastern province of Laghman. The man was convicted of killing five people, and reports indicated around 2,000 spectators gathered to watch his execution.

Around the same period, the UN mission in Afghanistan reported that more than 300 people had been publicly flogged across the country within just six months, with punishments issued for crimes including theft, adultery, and drinking alcohol. This showed that corporal punishment had become routine under Taliban rule and was not limited to public executions in stadiums.

The next escalation came eight months later, in February 2024. On February 22, inside a football stadium in Ghazni, a city in southeastern Afghanistan, the Taliban carried out a double execution, killing two men at the same time in front of thousands of spectators. The two men were identified as Sayed Jamal from Wardak province and Gul Khan from Ghazni province, both convicted in separate cases of stabbing people to death.

According to Ghazni’s spokesman Abu Khaled Sarhadi, relatives of the victims carried out the executions themselves, firing a combined 15 shots, eight into one of the condemned men and seven into the other. Crowds gathered outside the stadium hours before the executions began, and religious scholars reportedly spoke with the victims’ families, asking them to consider pardoning the men instead of killing them. The families refused.

Just four days later, on February 26, another execution took place in Sheberghan, the capital of Jowzjan province in northern Afghanistan. Snow was falling heavily as the execution was carried out. The man was identified as Nazar Mohammad from neighboring Faryab province, and the brother of his victim was given a rifle and fired five shots at him in front of a crowd of thousands.

The three public executions in the same week prompted the UN human rights office to issue an unusually strong statement, describing the killings as appalling and saying public executions are a cruel, inhuman, and degrading form of punishment that must stop immediately. By that time, the UN office had counted five confirmed public executions since the Taliban returned to power in 2021. Within the next two years, that number tripled.

The most recent confirmed case occurred on December 2, 2025, in the eastern Afghan city of Khost. The day before the execution, Taliban officials in Khost province publicly announced it. According to Mushtaq Farooq Barbaz, the spokesman for the Taliban-appointed governor of Khost province, around 80,000 people gathered inside the province’s sports stadium to watch the execution, the largest crowd ever recorded at any of these public executions since the Taliban returned to power in 2021.

The man executed was identified as Mangal, a resident of Khost. According to the Taliban’s Supreme Court, Mangal and a number of unnamed accomplices were convicted of breaking into a family’s home earlier that year and killing 13 members of the family, including nine children and their mother. His case passed through a primary court, an appeals court, and finally the Supreme Court before the death sentence received final approval from Hibatullah Akhundzada.

As in previous cases, surviving relatives of the victims were formally given the option to pardon Mangal under “qisas,” the legal principle that allows a victim’s family to pardon a convicted killer and stop the execution. They refused. One of the relatives of the murdered family was tasked with carrying out the execution by firing squad.

Before the execution, Richard Bennett, the UN special rapporteur on Afghanistan, publicly appealed to the Taliban to stop it, describing public executions as inhumane and a violation of international law. The appeal changed nothing. According to figures released by the Taliban’s own Supreme Court, the Khost execution was the eleventh or twelfth public execution carried out by the movement since returning to power in 2021, depending on which official count is used.

Each event followed a different legal path, and the killings after 2021 carry formal judicial rulings that did not exist in the executions of the 1990s. But the basic method has not changed: a stadium built for sport is transformed into a place of state-sponsored killing, a crowd is summoned to watch, and the event is used to demonstrate that the Taliban alone decides who lives and who dies.