When the Taliban took control of Afghanistan, many thought the worst violence had already passed.
But behind hidden cameras, a different kind of terror began, especaily for women.
What was captured on secret and uncensored footage reveals a cruelty so cold that it still shocks the world today.
Afghanistan did not suddenly collapse when the Taliban appeared.
The country had been bleeding for years.
In December 1979, the Soviet Union sent its army into Afghanistan to support a weak communist government.
What followed was a long and brutal war that reached into every home.
Bombs destroyed villages.
Farms were burned.
Roads vanished.
By the time Soviet troops finally left in February 1989, more than one million Afghans were dead, and millions more were wounded or permanently disabled.
The war forced families to flee with nothing.
Around five million people escaped across borders, mainly into Pakistan and Iran.
Many lived for years in crowded refugee camps made of tents and mud huts.
Children grew up without schools.
Parents had no steady work.
An entire generation learned to survive.
Inside Afghanistan, entire villages were wiped off the map.
Many families never found out what happened to missing relatives.
When the Soviets left, people hoped the nightmare was over.
It was not.
In April 1992, the Soviet-backed government collapsed.
Instead of peace, Afghanistan fell into a civil war.
Former allies turned their weapons on each other.
Armed groups fought street by street for power.
Kabul became one of the most dangerous cities on Earth.
Between 1992 and 1996, rockets and artillery slammed into neighborhoods almost every day.
Homes, schools, and hospitals were hit.
More than 50,000 civilians were killed in Kabul alone during those years.
There was no real government and no working courts.
Armed men ruled by force.
Checkpoints popped up everywhere.
People were dragged out of cars and buses.
Homes were searched without warning.
Anyone could be accused of anything.
For women, daily life became terrifying.
Many were kidnapped from the streets.
Others were assaulted or forced into marriage by fighters.
Girls stopped going to school because the roads were too dangerous.
Mothers kept daughters hidden indoors to protect them.
Law disappeared.
Ordinary people felt trapped between armed groups that cared nothing for civilian life.
Many Afghans became exhausted and desperate.
They did not want freedom or politics anymore.
They wanted the shelling to stop.
They wanted someone, anyone, to bring order.
That deep desperation created an opening.
And into that opening stepped the Taliban.
They began quietly in late 1994 in Kandahar, a city badly damaged by years of fighting.
Kandahar had become a symbol of chaos.
Warlords controlled roads.
Truck drivers were robbed daily.
Girls were taken from schools.
Families were powerless to stop it.
Most Taliban fighters were very young.
Many had grown up in refugee camps in Pakistan.
They had known war their entire lives.
Many had lost fathers or brothers.
For many of these young men, the world was simple.
There was right and wrong, obedience and punishment.
The movement was led by Mullah Mohammad Omar.
He was a former fighter against the Soviets and had lost an eye in battle.
He lived quietly and avoided attention.
That mystery added to his power.
His followers believed he was chosen to restore order.
They called him Amir al-Mu’minin, a title meant to show religious authority and obedience.
The Taliban promised safety on the roads, an end to corruption, and justice based on their strict religious rules.
At first, many locals supported them.
They disarmed warlords.
Robberies dropped.
Checkpoints disappeared.
For people tired of fear, this felt like relief.
But this order came with a heavy cost.
On September 27, 1996, the Taliban entered Kabul.
The city was exhausted from years of war and offered little resistance.
Fighters moved in quickly.
That same day, they dragged former president Mohammad Najibullah out of a UN compound where he had been hiding for years.
He was beaten, killed, and his body was hanged in public.
Within days, life for women changed completely.
New orders were announced and enforced immediately.
Women were banned from leaving home without a male relative.
Girls’ schools were shut across the country.
Female teachers lost their jobs overnight.
Women working in offices, aid organizations, hospitals, and media were dismissed on the spot.
Families lost incomes instantly.
A special force was created to enforce these rules.
It was called the Ministry for the Promotion of Virtue and Prevention of Vice.
Its officers patrolled the streets every day.
They carried sticks, cables, and whips.
They stopped women at random.
If a burqa was too short, punishment followed.
If shoes made noise, punishment followed.
If a woman spoke loudly or looked nervous, she could be accused of bad behavior and beaten.
There was no warning and no appeal.
Punishment happened where everyone could see.
Streets became places of fear.
Markets became dangerous.
Women learned to walk with their heads down and move quickly, hoping not to be noticed.
Hospitals became places of tragedy.
Many female doctors were banned from working, but women were also forbidden from being treated by male doctors.
Pregnant women were turned away.
Simple infections became deadly.
Childbirth became extremely dangerous.
By 1997, health groups reported that maternal death rates had reached around 1,600 deaths per 100,000 births.
Many women died quietly at home because they were too afraid to seek help.
By 1997, the Taliban were no longer punishing women quietly in back alleys or secret prisons.
They turned public punishment into something meant to be seen by as many people as possible.
For the Taliban, fear was a way of governing.
If people watched others being hurt right out in the open, they were more likely to obey the rules without question.
In towns and cities across Afghanistan, markets and busy streets became places of punishment, but none became more infamous than Ghazi Stadium in Kabul.
Locals still call it the Kabul Sports Stadium, but many remember it as the place where harsh punishments were carried out in front of huge crowds.
The punishments were scheduled on Fridays, the main day of prayer and gathering in Afghanistan.
That meant crowds were already gathering in large numbers after mosque services.
Taliban authorities would announce the punishments over loudspeakers beforehand, telling people to come and watch.
These weren’t small groups.
Reports and witness accounts suggest tens of thousands of people could fill the stadium for one of these events.
Women accused of “crimes” were brought into the stadium in front of everyone.
These so-called crimes included things like adultery, running away from home, or disobeying a male relative.
There were no real trials like in courts that most people know.
Judges or Taliban commanders often made decisions quickly, and there was no room for defense or appeal.
Once convicted, the punishment was carried out in full view of the crowd.
One of the most widely documented cases took place on November 16, 1999.
A woman known as Zarmeena was executed in the middle of Ghazi Stadium in Kabul.
She was accused of killing her husband with a hammer during a dispute.
The Taliban held her in custody for nearly three years before carrying out the sentence.
It was one of the first public executions of a woman under Taliban rule.
On that day, Zarmeena was brought into the stadium in a vehicle.
She wore a blue burqa that covered her from head to toe.
Two female police officers, also in burqas, held her arms as she walked to the center of the field.
A young Taliban fighter with a rifle stood behind her.
When she was made to kneel, the gunman shot her three times in the head.
Many families had brought their children to watch because the Taliban announced the execution ahead of time on the radio.
The execution was filmed secretly by a woman in the crowd who risked her life to do it.
That footage was smuggled out of Afghanistan and shown to the world.
It became one of the most powerful pieces of evidence of how the Taliban used public punishment to control people.
Inside the country, though, people had grown used to such cruelty, not because they supported it, but because refusing to accept it openly often meant punishment for themselves or their families.
Punishments at Ghazi Stadium didn’t stop with Zarmeena’s execution.
They included amputations for alleged theft, floggings for moral offences like “immodesty,” and other executions.
Human Rights Watch and Amnesty International documented repeated cases where women were stopped randomly and beaten in public.
Teenagers were not spared.
Age offered no protection.
Intent did not matter.
Accidents were treated as crimes.
In Herat in 2000, multiple witnesses described a woman in her early thirties being beaten in a crowded bazaar for laughing while speaking to another woman.
She was struck with a cable until she collapsed.
No one intervened.
Under Taliban rules, helping her would have meant being beaten too.
After witnessing public beatings, many women stayed inside their homes for days or weeks.
Some stopped leaving altogether.
Kabul, once full of women working, shopping, and studying, became a city where women largely disappeared from public life.
The Taliban never tried to hide these punishments.
Beatings were meant to be seen.
But cameras were banned.
Photography and video were considered immoral.
Anyone caught filming risked arrest, severe beating, imprisonment, or execution.
Despite this, some people recorded what was happening, like the woman who recorded Zarmeena’s execution.
The most important footage came from RAWA, the Revolutionary Association of the Women of Afghanistan.
Founded in 1977, RAWA opposed both Soviet occupation and Taliban rule.
During the late 1990s, its members secretly used hidden cameras, often risking their lives.
In 1999, RAWA released a video from Kabul showing a woman being beaten in the street after lifting her burqa to beg for food.
Taliban officers struck her repeatedly with wooden sticks as bystanders stood frozen.
The footage was smuggled out through Pakistan and shown to journalists, human rights groups, and the United Nations.
For many outside Afghanistan, it was the first undeniable proof of what daily Taliban rule looked like for women.
Inside Afghanistan, nothing changed.
Beatings continued.
Public violence remained one of the Taliban’s most effective tools of control.
But on September 11, 2001 Everything changed.
The attacks in the United States shocked the world.
The Taliban had been sheltering Osama bin Laden, the leader of Al-Qaeda, who planned the attacks.
The Taliban refused to hand him over.
This refusal gave the U.
S.
and its allies a reason to act.
On October 7, 2001, American and coalition forces began bombing Taliban targets in Afghanistan.
The strikes hit military bases, training camps, and key cities.
At the same time, Northern Alliance fighters, a group opposed to the Taliban, advanced on Kabul and other strongholds from the north.
By November 13, 2001, the Taliban had fled Kabul.
Their government collapsed completely within a few weeks.
Roads, airports, and government offices were abandoned.
Many Taliban leaders and fighters escaped to remote areas in the mountains or crossed into Pakistan.
The fall of Kabul marked the first time in five years that women could move freely in the capital.
Women stepped outside without hiding their faces.
Girls returned to schools that had been closed since 1996.
Offices, hospitals, and media organizations reopened with female staff returning to work.
The world began to see what life under the Taliban had really been like.
Footage of public punishments, secret beatings, and executions emerged from hidden archives.
The clips revealed that from 1996 to 2001, Afghan women had lived under constant threat of public punishment, with little chance of protection or escape.
International organizations like the United Nations and Amnesty International began using this footage to document Taliban crimes against women and civilians.
Even with these gains, it quickly became clear that the Taliban were not gone forever.
They had retreated, but they were regrouping in rural provinces such as Helmand, Kandahar, and Uruzgan.
Over the next few years, they rebuilt their networks, trained fighters, and quietly enforced strict rules in areas outside government control.
By 2010, they had expanded their control over large rural areas.
They were not a government in Kabul anymore, but in many villages and districts, they acted like one.
They set up courts, called “sharia courts,” where they judged people not through a real legal system, but by their own strict interpretation of Islamic law.
Women were once again targets of punishment in front of crowds.
One of the first moments that caught global attention happened in September 2010 in Takhar province, in northeastern Afghanistan.
A video began circulating quietly online.
It showed a woman being whipped by armed men believed to be Taliban fighters.
She was accused of adultery.
In the video, men counted each lash, one by one, until she reached 100 lashes.
Her cries can be heard in the recording, and other men stood around watching.
This video spread on the internet and shocked many people because it looked like a return to the brutal punishments once common under Taliban rule in the 1990s.
Many human rights groups later referenced this video as proof that Taliban punishments were returning.
Five years later, in 2015, another event brought global attention and horror.
A 19-year-old woman named Rukhshana was killed in a remote village in Ghor province, deep in western Afghanistan.
She had been forced into a marriage at a very young age by her family, a practice common in many parts of Afghanistan where girls are pushed into arranged marriages.
She first ran away with a young man she hoped to marry, but local fighters and family members brought her back.
They forced her into marriage with an older man she did not choose.
She ran away again with her fiancé, whose name was Mohammad Gul, hoping to make a life of her own.
But local Taliban fighters and armed men captured them, separated the couple, and handed Rukhshana over to others who decided her fate.
A video later emerged showing her being stoned to death by a group of men in a hole in the ground.
Men threw stones at her body while a small group of people watched.
Her fiancé was reportedly flogged, but he was not killed.
Local officials described the killing as carried out by “Taliban militants, local religious leaders, and armed warlords,” meaning it was not just one group acting alone but a mix of armed power brokers controlling that area.
The killing took place near Firozkoh, the capital of Ghor province, in a village on the outskirts where government authority was weak.
Local women’s officials condemned the killing, and many activists said it was an extreme example of how women were treated in Taliban-controlled regions.
Human rights groups later pointed out that public stoning is not part of Afghan national law, yet in remote areas where the government had little influence, these punishments still happened.
These specific events in 2010 and 2015 were only glimpses of what was happening more widely.
By the end of the 2010s, these forms of punishment spread quietly across many provinces.
Reports from local news outlets and human rights groups showed public floggings for “moral crimes” like leaving home without a male guardian, associating with men, or running away from forced marriages.
On August 15, 2021, the Taliban walked into Kabul again, and took control of the city without fighting.
The Afghan government, which had been backed by foreign forces for nearly 20 years, quickly collapsed.
President Ashraf Ghani left the country and flew to the United Arab Emirates as the Taliban entered the presidential palace.
There was almost no resistance from Afghan security forces in the city, and life changed overnight for millions of people.
The foreign troops who had been in Afghanistan since 2001 were leaving, and the Taliban filled the vacuum almost instantly.
In the first weeks after the takeover, Taliban leaders spoke to the world and promised something very different from what people feared.
They said they would be more moderate than they were in the 1990s.
They claimed women would have rights, that girls would be allowed to study, and that the strictest punishments would not return.
These words gave a few families hope.
But that hope did not last long.
By September 2021, just weeks after the takeover, the Taliban changed course.
They quietly shut down secondary schools for girls, those above grade six, across nearly all of Afghanistan.
This affected hundreds of thousands of teenage girls who suddenly could not go to school.
Only a handful of provinces briefly reopened some girls schools before the ban spread nationwide.
These closures were not temporary pauses but became ongoing bans that lasted into 2025, leaving millions of girls out of education.
In many homes, education ended at age 12 or younger because there were no classes for older girls anymore.
This made Afghanistan unique in the world as the only country where girls were barred from finishing basic schooling.
By December 2021 and into 2022, the pressure on women increased.
Large numbers of female workers were told not to come back to their jobs.
Universities began limiting women’s participation by making classrooms segregated, then by banning women from certain majors, and finally by closing universities to female students entirely by the end of 2022.
Once restrictions deepened, punishments began appearing in public again, too.
In November 2022, in Takhar province in northern Afghanistan, Taliban courts publicly flogged 19 people, including women and men.
Each person received between 25 and 39 lashes for crimes the Taliban claimed were “moral” violations, such as alleged adultery or running away from home.
In December 2022, punishments continued.
A woman and a man in Farah province were publicly whipped for alleged adultery.
Locals recorded the event, and the video spread quickly online, showing the harsh reality for people accused of breaking Taliban rules.
This was not an isolated event; throughout December, many provinces saw large numbers of men and women flogged in public for alleged moral or criminal offenses.
In March 2023, in Logar province, Taliban courts publicly flogged three women and nine men.
The punishments ranged from 20 to 39 lashes.
Into January 2024, reports came out that at least five women were publicly whipped in Badakhshan province, often for what the Taliban described as “moral crimes.
” In provinces like Samangan and Sar‑e‑Pol, similar punishments were recorded, with Taliban judicial bodies using public lashings to enforce rules about behavior, dress, and movement.
By this time, these punishments were not rare.
Human rights groups and United Nations observers documented hundreds of cases of public flogging, including more than 300 people in mid‑2025 alone across dozens of provinces.
Some of these punishments targeted women simply accused of leaving home without a male guardian or talking to men not related to them.
This return of public punishment showed the world that the Taliban’s promises of moderation were not real.
And this time, the world could see it clearly.
