By late September 1996, Kabul had been under siege for months, and the men inside the United Nations compound knew their protection was only as strong as the whim of the fighters gathering at the gates. For four years, Mohammad Najibullah had lived inside that compound, a former president trapped in a city that no longer belonged to him. On the evening of September 26, a small group of Taliban fighters entered the compound. Several historical accounts, including journalist Ahmed Rashid’s book *Taliban*, indicate the operation was carried out on orders from Mohammad Rabbani, a senior Taliban commander who would later become the movement’s second-highest leader after Mullah Omar.

The fighters arrested Najibullah and his brother Shahpur Ahmadzai, who had also been living inside the compound. What happened next was not a trial. It was not even an execution in the traditional sense. Kabul in 1996 was exhausted after years of civil war.

The Taliban had exploited that exhaustion, promising to restore order, and many people had been deceived by that promise. What they did not realize was that the Taliban’s version of order came with a completely different kind of justice, one they could not have anticipated in any way. The first to discover this was a man named Mohammad Najibullah. He had been president of Afghanistan from 1987 to 1992, leading a communist government that had come to power with Soviet support.

When Soviet backing collapsed and mujahideen fighters moved toward Kabul in April 1992, Najibullah tried to leave the country. The mujahideen were Islamic fighters who had waged guerrilla war for years against the Soviet-backed government. But Najibullah could not get out. The airport was shut down by forces loyal to a former ally who had turned against him, leaving him trapped in Kabul with nowhere to go.

He took refuge in a UN compound in the city. The United Nations gave him informal protection, and he stayed inside the building for the next four years because leaving would have meant arrest or death. During those same four years, Afghanistan was torn apart by a brutal civil war between rival mujahideen factions. Much of Kabul was destroyed as these factions fought each other for control.

At the same time, a new armed movement was growing in southern Afghanistan. They called themselves the Taliban, a word meaning “students” in both Pashto and Persian. The name referred to the religious schools, known as madrassas, that many of their fighters and leaders had attended along the Afghan-Pakistani border. Their leader was a one-eyed former mujahideen commander named Mullah Mohammad Omar.

The Taliban promised to end the chaos of civil war by subjecting the entire country to their strict interpretation of Islamic law. Now, inside the UN compound, Najibullah and his brother were beaten and tortured, according to reports from Rashid and numerous news accounts of the time. Reports from that period stated that Najibullah was castrated before being killed. Then the bodies of both men were tied behind a vehicle and dragged through the streets of Kabul.

Afterward, the bodies were hung from a concrete traffic checkpoint just outside the presidential palace. That was only a few buildings away from the UN compound where Najibullah had spent the previous four years. People who saw the bodies the next morning described them as swollen and bearing visible signs of beating, suspended by nooses made of steel wire. Unlit cigarettes were placed between their fingers, and their pockets were stuffed with Afghan currency.

These details were meant to send a message that the Taliban wanted Najibullah remembered as a corrupt communist and an enemy of Islam even after his death. The bodies were left on public display for more than a day. Two days later, on September 28, 1996, the UN Security Council issued a formal statement condemning what it called the violation of UN premises and the brutal execution of a former head of state. But the statement changed nothing on the ground.

Mullah Rabbani, who was leading the newly formed ruling council in Kabul, publicly defended the killing. He described Najibullah as a communist and a murderer who had been sentenced to death by the Taliban. There had been no court, no defense, no evidence presented to a judge. The sentence was simply announced after Najibullah was already dead.

This was the first major act of violence the Taliban committed after taking Kabul, and it sent a clear message to everyone still living in the city. Two years later, that message would be repeated on a much larger scale. By 1998, the Taliban controlled most of Afghanistan. But one major city in the north remained outside their grasp: Mazar-i-Sharif.

The city was protected by a coalition of anti-Taliban factions known as the Northern Alliance. It included large numbers of Tajiks, Uzbeks, and Hazaras. The Hazaras are a distinct ethnic group in Afghanistan, mostly followers of Shia Islam. The Taliban, by contrast, were mostly Sunni Muslims of Pashtun ethnicity.

Sunni and Shia Muslims share the same core faith, but they belong to different branches of Islam with a long history of religious and political disputes. In Mazar-i-Sharif, those ethnic and religious differences would become critically important. The events leading to the massacre date back to May 1997, when the Taliban first tried to capture Mazar-i-Sharif. A local warlord named Abdul Malik Pahlawan briefly allied with the Taliban before turning against them.

He then ambushed Taliban forces inside the city. According to multiple accounts, Pahlawan’s fighters captured between 1,000 and 3,000 Taliban prisoners and executed them. Reports said many of the bodies were thrown into wells outside the city. The Taliban leadership did not forget what had happened.

On August 8, 1998, the Taliban returned and took Mazar-i-Sharif for good. What followed over the next four days, ending around August 11, was extensively documented by Human Rights Watch and other human rights organizations. Within hours of entering the city, Taliban fighters began shooting people in the streets. Witnesses described a wave of killings in which civilians were shot in markets, at entrances, and inside their own homes.

Many of the victims were unarmed and posed no threat to the fighters. Then the new Taliban-appointed governor of Mazar-i-Sharif gave several speeches over local radio. He publicly threatened the Hazara population and blamed them for the killing of Taliban prisoners the previous year. Taliban fighters began searching homes, targeting especially men and teenage boys from Hazara, Tajik, and Uzbek families.

Human Rights Watch documented the detention of large numbers of people. The organization also reported credible accounts of women and girls being abducted and raped during the takeover. The exact death toll is difficult to determine because the Taliban ordered the removal of bodies from the streets, while investigators were unable to properly examine many suspected mass graves for years. Human Rights Watch estimated that at least 10,000 people were killed and said the real number could be much higher.

The US State Department’s human rights report from the same year gave a lower estimate of between 2,000 and 5,000 deaths, mostly Hazara civilians. Whatever the exact number, the massacre was one of the bloodiest chapters in Afghanistan’s modern history, with thousands killed in just a few days. The massacre also created an international crisis. During the takeover, Taliban forces stormed the Iranian consulate in Mazar-i-Sharif.

Eleven Iranian civilians were killed, including eight diplomats and one journalist. Iran, a Shia-majority state with close ties to Afghanistan’s Hazara population, was furious. In the weeks that followed, Iran moved an estimated 200,000 soldiers toward its border with Afghanistan. For a time, the two countries seemed on the brink of open war.

The crisis eventually cooled. The Taliban later admitted that its fighters had killed the Iranian diplomats but claimed the killings were carried out by individual fighters without authorization from leadership. Almost no one outside the Taliban accepted that explanation. 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 Bamiyan, and dozens more in a village called Qezelabad. A clear pattern was emerging. Civilians were being targeted because of their ethnic or religious identity, and the violence was carried out by an organized military force operating under a chain of command. Just over a year later, the whole world would see on camera what executions under Taliban rule looked like.

On November 16, 1999, a 35-year-old woman named Zarmina was taken to Ghazi Stadium in central Kabul. Around 30,000 people were estimated to be watching at the time. Zarmina was a mother of seven children and had spent about three years in prison after being accused of killing her husband. According to journalist Anton Antonovich 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 was said to have believed that 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. Eventually, that postponement ended. One of the twins had been weaned, meaning they no longer needed breastfeeding. The Taliban set a date for Zarmina’s execution and announced it over Taliban radio several days beforehand.

According to Antonovich’s reports, Zarmina did not fully understand what was about to happen. She was said to believe she would receive 100 lashes rather than be killed. On the morning of the execution, she borrowed two extra dresses from other female prisoners and wore them under her burqa. She hoped those 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 a secret Afghan women’s organization called RAWA, the Revolutionary Association of the Women of Afghanistan. RAWA was founded in 1977 and had spent years secretly documenting human rights abuses inside Afghanistan. One of its members managed to bring a small video camera into the stadium by hiding it under her burqa. The footage shows Zarmina being taken toward the old soccer goalpost in the stadium and forced to kneel.

According to a RAWA report from the time, her children were among the crowd, crying for their mother. Just before the execution, 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 it.

They said the execution had already been publicly announced to thousands of people and therefore could not be cancelled. Then a Taliban official shot Zarmina in the back of the head at close range. The hidden camera captured that moment. The image shook violently as the shot rang out.

Then the camera tilted toward the ground as a second shot was heard, and people throughout the stadium began screaming. For nearly two years, the footage reached almost no one outside Afghanistan. RAWA showed it to several Western television networks, but most refused to broadcast it, considering it too disturbing for viewers. A portion eventually appeared in a British documentary called *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, though nearly two years old, began airing repeatedly on CNN and other international television 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.

By December 2001, the Taliban government had collapsed. For nearly two decades afterward, Ghazi Stadium returned to its normal role as a place for soccer matches. Then, in August 2021, that changed again. On August 15 of that year, after 20 years of war in Afghanistan, US and NATO forces were rushing to complete their withdrawal from the country.

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. They promised to respect women’s rights and said their new government would not repeat the brutality of their first period in power. That image faded quickly.

Within months, girls were banned from attending school beyond sixth grade. Women were barred from entering gyms, public parks, and public baths. In November 2022, the Taliban’s supreme leader, Hibatullah Akhundzada, the group’s highest religious and political authority, ordered judges across Afghanistan to begin implementing full Islamic law. The order included some of the harshest punishments under the Taliban’s interpretation of Sharia: 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. He 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 the principle 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. He fired three shots. Hundreds watched, including more than a dozen senior Taliban officials who traveled from Kabul specifically for the event. Among them were the deputy prime minister and the acting interior minister, showing how seriously the Taliban leadership took the execution.

Afterward, 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 operating again. 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 had been convicted of killing five people, and reports said 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. These punishments were issued for crimes including theft, adultery, and alcohol consumption.

This showed that corporal punishment had become routine under Taliban rule and was not limited to the public executions taking place 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 Saed Jamal from Wardak province and Gul Khan from Ghazni province.

They had been convicted in two separate cases of stabbing people to death. According to Ghazni spokesman Abu Khaled Sarhadi, relatives of the victims carried out the executions themselves. Together they fired 15 bullets, eight into one of the condemned men and seven into the other. Crowds had gathered outside the stadium hours before the executions began.

Religious scholars reportedly also spoke with the victims’ families and asked 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. It was snowing heavily during the execution.

The man was identified as Nazar Mohammad from neighboring Faryab province. The brother of his victim was given a rifle and fired five bullets into him in front of a crowd of thousands. The three public executions in the same week pushed the UN Human Rights Office to issue an unusually strong statement. The statement described the killings as appalling and said public executions were 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 took place on December 2, 2025, in the city of Khost in eastern Afghanistan. The day before the execution, Taliban officials in Khost province announced it publicly.

According to Mushtaq Farooq Barbaz, spokesman for the Taliban-appointed governor of Khost province, around 80,000 people gathered inside the provincial sports stadium to watch the execution. This was 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.

Among the victims were nine children and their mother. His case went through a trial 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 forgive 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 halt it. He described public executions as inhuman and a violation of international law. That appeal changed nothing.

According to figures released by the Taliban’s own Supreme Court, the Khost execution was the eleventh or twelfth public execution the movement had carried out since returning to power in 2021, depending on which official count is used. Each event followed a different legal path. The killings after 2021 also carry formal judicial sentences that did not exist in the executions of the 1990s. But the basic method has not changed.

A stadium built for sports becomes 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.