“The Most Sh*cking Taliban Ex*cutions Ever Recorded! (*ACTUAL FOOTAGE*) “

Kabul in 1996 was exhausted after years of civil war. The Taliban took advantage of the situation and promised to restore order. Many people fell for it, but what they didn’t realize was that the Taliban’s version of order came with a very different kind of justice—one they could never have predicted in any way.

The first person to find that out was a man named Mohammad Najibullah. He had been the president of Afghanistan from 1987 to 1992, leading a communist government that had come to power with support from the Soviet Union. When Soviet support collapsed and Mujahideen fighters moved toward Kabul in April 1992, Najibullah tried to leave the country. The Mujahideen were Islamic guerrilla fighters who had spent years fighting the Soviet-backed government, but Najibullah never made it out. The airport was blocked by troops loyal to a former ally who had turned against him, leaving him trapped in Kabul with nowhere to go.

Najibullah then took shelter inside a United Nations compound in Kabul. The UN gave him informal protection, and he remained inside the building for the next four years because leaving it could have meant being captured or killed.

During those same four years, Afghanistan was torn apart by a brutal civil war between rival Mujahideen groups. Much of Kabul was destroyed as these factions fought each other for control. At the same time, a new armed movement was growing in the south of Afghanistan. They called themselves the Taliban, a word in Pashto and Persian that means “students.” The name referred to the religious schools known as madrasas that many of their fighters and leaders had attended along the Afghanistan–Pakistan border. Their leader was a one-eyed former Mujahideen commander named Mullah Mohammad Omar. The Taliban promised to end the chaos of the civil war by bringing the entire country under their strict interpretation of Islamic law.

By September 1996, the Taliban had fought their way to the outskirts of Kabul. On the evening of September 26th, a small group of Taliban fighters entered the UN compound. Several historical accounts, including journalist Ahmed Rashid’s book Taliban, say the operation was carried out on the orders of Mohammad Rabbani, a senior Taliban commander who would soon become the group’s second-highest leader after Mullah Omar. The fighters captured Najibullah and his brother Shahpur Ahmadzai, who had also been staying inside the compound.

What happened next was not a trial; it was not even a formal execution in the normal sense. According to Rashid’s reporting and several contemporary news reports, both men were beaten and tortured inside or near the compound. Reports from the time said Najibullah was castrated before he was killed. His body and his brother’s were then tied to the back of a vehicle and dragged through the streets of Kabul.

After that, the two bodies were hung from a concrete traffic control post just outside the presidential palace, only a few blocks from the UN compound where Najibullah had spent the previous four years. People who saw the bodies the next morning described them as beaten and swollen, hanging from steel wire nooses. Unlit cigarettes had been placed between their fingers, while Afghan currency had been stuffed into their pockets. These details were meant to send a message that the Taliban wanted Najibullah to be remembered as a corrupt communist and an enemy of Islam even after death. The bodies were left on public display for more than a day.

Two days later, on September 28, 1996, the United Nations 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.”

However, the statement changed nothing on the ground. Mullah Rabbani, who was now leading the newly formed governing council in Kabul, publicly defended the killing, stating:

“Najibullah was a communist and a murderer who had been sentenced to death by the Taliban.”

There had been no court, no defense, and no evidence presented to a judge. The sentence was simply announced after Najibullah was already dead. This was the Taliban’s first major act of violence after taking control of 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 was still outside their control: Mazar-i-Sharif. The city was defended by a collection of anti-Taliban groups known as the Northern Alliance. It included large numbers of ethnic Tajiks, Uzbeks, and Hazaras. The Hazaras are a distinct ethnic group in Afghanistan, and most of them practice Shia Islam. The Taliban, by contrast, were overwhelmingly Sunni Muslim and ethnically Pashtun. Sunni and Shia Muslims share the same basic faith but belong to different branches of Islam with a long history of religious and political differences. In Mazar-i-Sharif, those ethnic and religious differences would become extremely important.

The events that led to the massacre went back to May 1997, when the Taliban first tried to capture Mazar-i-Sharif. A local warlord named Abdul Malik Pahlawan briefly aligned himself with the Taliban before turning against them. He then ambushed Taliban forces inside the city. According to multiple accounts, Pahlawan’s fighters captured and executed between 1,000 and 3,000 Taliban prisoners. Many of the bodies were reportedly dumped into wells outside the city.

The Taliban leadership did not forget what had happened. On August 8, 1998, the Taliban returned and captured Mazar-i-Sharif for good. What followed over the next four days, ending around August 11th, has been 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, in doorways, and inside their own homes. Many of the victims were unarmed and posed no threat to the fighters.

The Taliban’s newly appointed governor of Mazar-i-Sharif then gave several speeches over local radio, openly threatening the Hazara population and blaming them for the killing of Taliban prisoners the year before. Taliban fighters began searching homes, specifically targeting men and teenage boys from Hazara, Tajik, and Uzbek families. Human Rights Watch documented large numbers of people being detained. The organization also reported credible accounts of women and girls being abducted and raped during the takeover.

The exact death toll is difficult to establish because the Taliban ordered bodies to be removed from the streets, while investigators could not properly examine many of the suspected mass graves for years. Human Rights Watch estimated that at least 10,000 people were killed and noted the real number could have been much higher. A US State Department human rights report from the same year gave a lower estimate of between 2,000 and 5,000 deaths, most of them Hazara civilians. Whatever the exact number, the massacre was one of the deadliest episodes in Afghanistan’s modern history, with thousands of people killed in only 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 country with close ties to Afghanistan’s Hazara population, was furious. In the weeks that followed, Iran moved an estimated 200,000 troops toward its border with Afghanistan. For a time, the two countries appeared close to open war.

The crisis eventually cooled down. The Taliban later admitted that their own fighters had killed the Iranian diplomats, but claimed:

“The killings were carried out by individual fighters without authorization from the leadership.”

Almost no one outside the Taliban accepted that explanation. Mazar-i-Sharif was not an isolated case. That same year, Taliban forces were also accused of killing dozens of civilians near the town of Bamyan and dozens more in a village called Qezelabad. A clear pattern was beginning to emerge: civilians were being targeted because of their ethnic or religious identity, and the violence was being carried out by an organized military force operating under a chain of command. A little more than a year later, the whole world would see on camera what an execution under Taliban rule actually looked like.

On November 16, 1999, a 35-year-old woman named Zarmina was taken to Ghazi Sports Stadium in central Kabul. Around 30,000 people were later estimated to have been watching. Zarmina was a mother of seven children and had spent about three years in prison after being accused of murdering her husband. According to journalist Anton Antonowicz of the British newspaper The Mirror, who investigated her case years later, Zarmina had originally been arrested with her one-year-old twin children, a boy and a girl. For much of her time in prison, she reportedly believed her children might save her because Taliban officials had told her that her execution would be delayed until the twins were old enough to stop breastfeeding.

Eventually, that delay ended. One of the twins had been weaned, meaning they no longer needed to be breastfed, and the Taliban scheduled Zarmina’s execution, announcing it over Taliban radio several days beforehand. According to Antonowicz’s reporting, Zarmina herself did not completely understand what was about to happen; she reportedly believed she was going to receive 100 lashes rather than be killed. On the morning of the execution, she borrowed two extra dresses from other prisoners and wore them underneath 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 an underground Afghan women’s organization called RAWA—the Revolutionary Association of the Women of Afghanistan. Founded in 1977, RAWA 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 beneath her own burqa. The footage shows Zarmina being taken toward the stadium’s old soccer goalposts and forced to kneel. According to a RAWA report written at the time, her own children were in the crowd, crying for their mother.

Just before the execution, Zarmina’s husband’s family reportedly told Taliban officials:

“We have decided to forgive her.”

Under Islamic law, the relatives of a murder victim can, in certain circumstances, pardon the person convicted of the killing and stop an execution. But the Taliban refused to stop it, stating:

“The execution has already been announced publicly to thousands of people and therefore cannot be cancelled.”

A Taliban official then shot Zarmina in the back of the head at close range. The hidden camera captured the moment: the picture shook violently when the gun went off, then dropped toward the ground as a second shot was heard and people across the stadium began screaming.

For almost two years, the footage barely reached anyone outside Afghanistan. RAWA showed it to several Western television networks, but most refused to broadcast it because they considered the footage too disturbing for their audiences. Part of it eventually appeared in a British documentary called Beneath the Veil.

Everything changed after September 11, 2001. As the world tried to understand the Taliban government that was sheltering Osama bin Laden in Afghanistan, Zarmina’s execution footage—even though it was already nearly two years old—began appearing repeatedly on CNN and other international television networks. For millions of people who had previously paid little attention to Afghanistan, 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 almost two decades after that, Ghazi Stadium returned to its normal role as a place for soccer matches. Then, in August 2021, that changed again.

On August 15th that year, after twenty years of war in Afghanistan, American and NATO forces were rushing to finish their withdrawal from the country. As they left, the Taliban retook Kabul with almost no 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 stated:

“Our new government will not repeat the brutality of our first period in power.”

But that image quickly fell apart. Within months, girls were banned from attending school beyond the sixth grade, while women were banned from gyms, public parks, and public bathhouses. In November 2022, Taliban Supreme Leader Hibatullah Akhundzada, the group’s highest religious and political authority, ordered judges across Afghanistan to begin fully enforcing Sharia, the Islamic legal system. The order included some of the harshest punishments under the Taliban’s interpretation of Islamic law: public executions, amputations for theft, and public flogging.

The order was followed 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, a man 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 Qisas—an Islamic legal principle of retribution that is sometimes described as “an eye for an eye”—the victim’s own father was given an assault rifle and allowed to carry out the execution himself. He fired three shots.

Hundreds of people 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 just how seriously the Taliban leadership viewed the execution. Afterward, United Nations Secretary-General António Guterres issued a statement declaring:

“The death penalty can 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 a system of public killing that had been largely absent for two decades was operating again.

Six months later, on June 20, 2023, the Taliban Supreme Court confirmed another public execution, this time in the eastern province of Laghman. The man had been convicted of killing five people, and roughly 2,000 spectators reportedly gathered to watch his execution. Around the same period, the United Nations Mission in Afghanistan reported that more than 300 people had been publicly flogged across the country in just six months. The punishments were handed down for offenses including theft, adultery, and drinking alcohol. This showed that corporal punishment—meaning physical punishment carried out by the state—was becoming routine under the Taliban and was not limited to the public executions held in stadiums.

The next escalation came eight months later in February 2024. On February 22nd, 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 Syed Jamal from Wardak province and Gul Khan from Ghazni province. They had been convicted in separate cases of stabbing people to death.

According to Ghazni spokesperson Abu Khaled Sarhadi, relatives of the two victims carried out the executions themselves. Together, they fired 15 bullets—eight into one condemned man and seven into the other. Crowds had gathered outside the stadium hours before the executions began. Religious scholars also reportedly spoke to the victims’ families, urging them:

“Consider forgiveness instead of killing the two men.”

The families refused.

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

Three public executions in the same week prompted the United Nations Human Rights Office to issue an unusually strong statement, calling the killings “appalling” and stating:

“Public executions are a cruel, inhuman, and degrading form of punishment that must stop immediately.”

By then, the UN office had counted five confirmed public executions since the Taliban returned to power in 2021. Within the next two years, that number would triple.

The most recent confirmed case took place on December 2, 2025, in the eastern Afghan city of Khost. The day before the execution, Taliban officials in Khost province announced it publicly. According to Mustaghfar Gurbaz, the spokesperson for the Taliban-appointed governor of Khost, around 80,000 people gathered inside the provincial sports stadium to watch the execution. It was by far the largest crowd 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 Supreme Court, Mangal and several unnamed accomplices had been convicted of entering a family’s home earlier that year and killing 13 members of the family, including 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 the earlier cases, the surviving relatives of the victims were formally given the choice to forgive Mangal under Qisas, the legal principle that allows a victim’s family to pardon a convicted killer and stop the execution. They refused. A relative of the murdered family was given the task of carrying out the shooting.

Before the execution, Richard Bennett, the United Nations Special Rapporteur on human rights in Afghanistan, publicly appealed to the Taliban to stop it, stating:

“Public executions are 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 either the 11th or 12th public execution carried out by the group since it returned to power in 2021, depending on which official Taliban tally is used.

Each event followed a different legal process, and the post-2021 killings carry formal court rulings that the 1990s executions never had. But the underlying method has not changed: a stadium built for sport becomes a venue for state killing, a crowd is summoned to watch, and the event is used to demonstrate that the Taliban alone decides who lives.