One of the Taliban s most powerful tools was execution.
Not hidden executions, but public ones meant to warn others.
It was a calculated display of terror, captured on camera, showing the world the brutal methods the Taliban used to control a nation, and the fear they left behind still lingers today.
The Taliban first appeared in 1994 in Kandahar.
They had just captured the city after months of fighting, and they quickly set up their own system of Islamic courts.
These courts were nothing like independent legal systems with lawyers and fair trials.
Instead, they were small groups of religious judges and Taliban commanders who made decisions on the spot, usually within hours of someone being accused.
There were no formal rules, no appeals, and almost no chance for the accused to defend themselves in any meaningful way.
What mattered was the Taliban s interpretation of Islamic law, and applying it fast to prove control.
The first executions recorded in Kandahar happened in early 1995.
According to reports from human rights groups at the time, two men convicted of murder were executed by relatives of the victims.
The four-member Islamic court in Kandahar that sentenced them was led by a Taliban judge named Maulawi Sayed Mohammed.
These executions were public, often in open spaces where many locals were forced to watch.
The reasons for these early executions were similar to the later years of Taliban rule, but at this point, things were more chaotic.
The Taliban were still trying to expand their control, and Kandahar was both a stronghold and a testing ground for their strict version of Sharia.
Those accused of murder were executed, and at least one of the early cases recorded outside Kandahar involved a former army officer from the old communist regime, who was executed in Shaikhabad in Wardak province after being convicted of killing two men.
That execution was carried out by a relative of the victim with a sword, following the court s ruling.
This early pattern shows how the Taliban mixed traditional tribal customs with their own hardline interpretation of Islamic law.
In Kandahar, murder cases often led to execution carried out by the family of the victim, sometimes called qisas, or retribution.
This meant that if someone was found guilty of killing another person, the victim s family had the legal right under the Taliban s courts to execute the convicted person.
In practice, there were no safeguards that would meet international standards for a fair trial, and these decisions could be quick and arbitrary.
At the same time, there were dozens of punishments being carried out in Taliban-controlled provinces.
Amnesty International and other watchdog groups documented that executions were not limited to Kandahar but were also happening in places like Lashkargah, the capital of Helmand province.
The brutality of the punishments was meant to replace fear of criminals with fear of the Taliban.
Crowds gathered not just because they were curious, but because the Taliban broadcast these events as a show of authority.
Bodies were often left on display for hours after execution to make sure everyone knew what would happen to those who crossed the new rulers.
In September 1996, the Taliban marched into Kabul and changed Afghanistan s future.
After years of civil war between rival factions, the Taliban fighters reached the capital with surprising speed.
They faced little resistance because many of the city s defenders had already abandoned their posts or fled.
This was the moment when the Taliban stopped being just a militia in the south and became the rulers of the entire country.
Almost immediately, the Taliban made it clear that their rule would be strict and final.
One of their first acts in Kabul was the execution of former President Mohammad Najibullah and his brother, General Shahpur Ahmadzai.
Najibullah had been in hiding since 1992 inside the United Nations compound in Kabul.
For four years he had stayed there under UN protection, hoping the world would keep him safe.
But when the Taliban arrived in late September 1996, they dragged him out.
He was shot, and his corpse was hung from a traffic light post near the presidential palace.
This execution was more than revenge.
The Taliban had overthrown the previous government and were announcing that they would impose their interpretation of Islamic law with zero tolerance.
They claimed to offer amnesty to ordinary civilians and low-ranking government officials if they surrendered peacefully, but for leaders of the old order, there would be no mercy.
Once Kabul was under their control, the Taliban took over institutions across the city.
They transformed public spaces into instruments of fear.
One of the most striking symbols of this transformation was Ghazi Stadium.
Before the Taliban, Ghazi Stadium was known as a place for sport, where football and other games brought people together.
After the takeover, it became one of the main places where the Taliban carried out executions.
The idea might seem shocking now, but for the Taliban, it made sense: a stadium held thousands of people, was easy to secure, and turned a punishment into a public event.
In the first year of their control, thousands of Afghans were forced to attend or witness executions inside stadiums.
Men accused of serious crimes, such as murder, were brought before crowds.
The Taliban s religious judges, called ulama, and commanders declared them guilty and handed down immediate death sentences.
Sometimes multiple men were executed in a single event.
Among all the punishments they enforced, one of the most shocking to Afghans and outsiders alike was stoning to death for people accused of adultery or moral crimes, especially women.
The first widely reported case took place in late August 1996 in Kandahar.
According to accounts from that time, a married couple, a 40-year-old woman named Nurbibi and her 38-year-old stepson and alleged lover Turyalai, were accused of adultery.
The punishment was not decided in a modern courtroom with evidence and lawyers.
Instead, Taliban religious judges and commanders made the decision quickly, and the condemned were brought before large crowds in the courtyard near the Id Gah Mosque.
On a hot afternoon, the woman was placed in a pit dug into the ground, and stones were thrown.
Those watching included adult men and even children, because Taliban rules often meant women were not allowed to speak in public.
After several minutes of stones being thrown, Turyalai was reported dead, and when it became clear Nurbibi was still alive, a Taliban fighter finished the act by dropping a large rock on her head.
This execution was not just one punishment.
According to people who witnessed it and journalists who later wrote about it, it was at least the third stoning for adultery reported in the Kandahar region since the Taliban took control there earlier that year.
The method was cruel and public.
Many of the men who watched or were interviewed afterwards defended these punishments, saying this was what true Islamic law looked like.
Islamic law, in its traditional form, requires multiple witnesses to prove adultery beyond doubt, but under the Taliban s strict system, sentences were handed down quickly, sometimes based on forced confessions or claims made by relatives or neighbors seeking revenge.
This blurred the line between justice and personal vendetta, and made it much easier for accusations, even false ones, to lead to death.
Between 1996 and 1999, several reports from Afghan cities like Kabul, Herat, Kandahar, and other towns described cases where people accused of adultery were sentenced to death by stoning or shooting in public.
Though most documented stoning cases from this era involve accusations of adultery, especially against women, stoning was not the only extreme punishment the Taliban used.
Men were also executed for moral or criminal offences, but women were far more likely to be punished publicly for se*ual crimes, in part because the Taliban restricted women s movement and behavior so tightly they could be accused simply for being with a man outside their family.
The official penal code of Afghanistan at the time, dating back to 1976, did not authorize stoning as a punishment.
But the Taliban s use of stoning was not something grounded in the country s formal legal system.
Another one of the methods they used was amputation as punishment for theft or robbery.
According to U.S.
government reports from 1998 and 1999, Taliban courts routinely handed down sentences where a thief could have a hand or a foot cut off in a public place.
There was no real legal defense for the accused, and trials were extremely short.
In some recorded cases, after one person avoided punishment by bribery, a man arrested on a minor charge was chosen at random to be punished in his place, showing how arbitrary and dangerous the system could be.
Many people who survived the amputations later died from infection or uncontrolled bleeding because there was little medical care.
Alongside amputations, public executions continued.
In rural districts, hangings became more common.
Bodies were sometimes left hanging overnight.
The cruelty of the Taliban did not stop with individual criminals.
In August 1998, the city of Mazar-i-Sharif in northern Afghanistan became the site of one of the worst atrocities of the entire civil war.
Taliban forces captured the city on August 8, 1998, after months of conflict with the anti-Taliban Northern Alliance.
Once the city fell, Taliban fighters swept through neighborhoods looking for men from ethnic and religious minority groups, especially the Hazara, a Shia Muslim community that the Sunni Taliban deeply distrusted.
In the first hours and days after the takeover, Taliban forces shot civilians in the streets of Mazar-i-Sharif without distinguishing between fighters and ordinary people.
They continued with systematic house-to-house searches, pulling men and boys out of their homes and executing them in residential areas or transporting them to detention centers where they were later killed.
Reports suggest that at least 2,000 civilians, mostly Hazara men and boys, were summarily executed within days of the city s fall.
The violence did not stop at Mazar s borders.
Thousands of men from Hazara, Uzbek, and Tajik communities were detained and transported to other cities in overcrowded trucks, many of which became death traps because no food, water, or ventilation was provided.
In some cases, dozens or hundreds suffocated or died of heat stroke inside those vehicles, their bodies only discovered when the trucks reached their destinations.
These killings were not the result of individual soldiers acting on their own.
Taliban commanders openly spoke about punishing the Hazara for their resistance to Taliban rule and accused them of killing Taliban fighters during a failed attempt to take the city in 1997.
The newly installed Taliban governor, Mullah Manon Niazi, used speeches delivered at mosques around Mazar to blame the entire community for those earlier deaths and threatened violence if they did not comply or convert.
Outside of the cities, the cruelty continued in scattered but deadly events.
In May 2000, Taliban forces reportedly executed a group of civilian detainees near Robatak pass in Baghlan province, most of them identified as Ismaili Hazara civilians who had been held for months before being killed by gunfire.
Reports suggest as many as 31 bodies were found at the execution site,
showing that even months-old detainees could be summarily executed without explanation.
The temporary downfall of the Taliban started after the attacks on the United States on September 11, 2001.
These attacks, carried out by the al-Qaeda terrorist network, were traced back to training camps and safe havens inside Afghanistan, where al-Qaeda had operated under the protection of the Taliban government.
The Taliban leadership refused to hand over al-Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden to U.
S.
authorities, even when pressed to do so.
Instead, they made offers to try him or hand him over for trial in another country under Islamic judicial conditions, proposals that were rejected by the U.
S.
government because they did not meet its demands for direct custody and accountability.
On October 7, 2001, just weeks after 9/11, a U.
S.
-led military coalition launched Operation Enduring Freedom, a campaign to remove the Taliban from power and dismantle al-Qaeda s infrastructure in Afghanistan.
U.
S.
aircraft began bombing Taliban military targets and al-Qaeda camps, while special forces and allied Afghan fighters advanced on the ground.
The military campaign moved quickly.
By mid-November 2001, Northern Alliance forces backed by U.
S.
air power had recaptured Mazar-i-Sharif and were advancing south.
Kabul, the capital, fell with only light resistance, as Taliban fighters withdrew toward their southern strongholds.
A mix of Northern Alliance troops and U.
S.
Special Forces entered the city shortly after, marking the collapse of Taliban control in the heart of the country.
Kandahar, the birthplace of the Taliban movement and their final major stronghold, fell by early December 2001, signaling the end of organized Taliban governance in Afghanistan.
Their leader, Mullah Mohammed Omar, went into hiding rather than surrender.
The U.
S.
-backed Afghan transitional government led by Hamid Karzai began forming even as combat operations continued.
Almost immediately after the Taliban regime collapsed, the public executions and the gruesome punishments that marked its rule largely disappeared from the streets of Kabul and other cities they had controlled.
Ghazi Stadium and other public spaces that once hosted executions were reopened for cultural events, and everyday life in Kabul quietly shifted.
Girls went back to school, and families returned to routines that had been suspended for years.
But the Taliban did not disappear.
They changed how they fought.
Without open command, they shifted to insurgency, guerrilla warfare aimed at weakening the Afghan state and foreign forces supporting it.
Once they went underground, public executions were no longer possible because they no longer controlled major cities as they had in the 1990s.
Instead, they began targeting individuals they saw as enemies.
These were Afghan government workers, police officers, teachers, local officials, translators, and anyone who cooperated with the Afghan government or international forces.
These killings were not part of a legal system with trials and judges.
They were assassinations in the middle of the war.
They happened in villages, on roadsides, and in quiet neighborhoods where the Taliban could operate.
Afterwards, bodies were often left in public places or along dirt roads so others would find them and spread fear.
In many cases, notes were left on or near the bodies accusing the victims of spying for the government, being informants, or betraying the Taliban.
These notes were meant to justify the killings and terrorize anyone thinking about working with the authorities.
After that, beheadings and filmed executions started to appear as part of the terror strategy.
One widely reported case was the beheading of a man named Ghulam Nabi in 2007, captured on video.
In that footage, a boy appeared to carry out the killing while others stood around shouting.
Human Rights Watch called this a new low in the conflict because it involved a child and was filmed in full view of others.
Even though this footage happened in a part of Pakistan near the Afghan border, it showed how violent imagery was used by Taliban-linked fighters to spread fear and reduce resistance.
Insurgent killings were not limited to Afghan nationals.
In several parts of the Afghanistan-Pakistan border region, videos appeared showing captured security personnel being shot in groups.
One such video, released in 2011, showed at least 16 Pakistani policemen bound and executed by fighters identified with the Taliban.
In that recording, once the policemen were lined up, the fighters opened fire with rifles and filmed the killings from start to finish.
This was shared widely online and used as a message of strength by insurgent factions.
Inside Afghanistan, independent observers and the United Nations reported that, from 2002 to 2010, insurgent violence included targeted killings that were extrajudicial, outside any legal process.
Many of these assassinations were directed at Afghan government employees, members of the national police, soldiers, and civil servants in areas contested or controlled by the Taliban.
These killings were usually unannounced and happened suddenly; victims were often shot dead or ambushed on travel routes.
Work that people might think of as neutral, like education or humanitarian aid, became dangerous too.
Between 2005 and 2010, the United Nations reported that there were dozens of violent incidents against aid workers.
In 2010 alone, at least 126 major attacks affected aid workers, and dozens of them were killed or wounded while working in parts of the country The most infamous of these incidents was in August 2010 in Badakhshan Province, when ten medical aid workers, six Americans, two Afghans, one Briton, and one German, were killed while returning from an eye care mission.
Taliban spokesmen initially claimed responsibility, saying the team were spies, though local Taliban commanders later denied responsibility and called it murder.
The insurgency blurred the line between military targets and civilians.
People who had nothing to do with combat were targeted because the Taliban believed their work under government programs or international projects made them collaborators or threats.
International agencies documented the assassination of at least 21 students, teachers, and educational staff in the year 2010 alone, often with no trial or explanation beyond an insurgent claim of betrayal.
By 2011, the insurgency had been going on for a decade.
The world had changed.
Mobile phones, cheap digital cameras, and social media meant that violence could be shown instantly to people far away, not just those within walking distance of a killing.
The Taliban and Taliban-linked groups began to use this to their advantage.
Instead of just executing someone and leaving the body, fighters started filming the act itself.
Cameras were pointed at bound captives.
Executioners made sure the victims were visible.
Videos were edited with graphics, titles, and messages, and then shared online or via mobile phones in rural areas.
In these videos, victims were often shown forced to kneel, with insurgent fighters imposing a staged confession or accusation before the killing.
The cameras never looked away.
The videos also circulated on international extremist forums to show supporters that the Taliban was still active and ruthless.
The insurgency came to an end in August 2021 when the Taliban returned to power in Kabul.
As Afghan government forces collapsed and President Ashraf Ghani fled the country, the Taliban entered the capital with little resistance.
They declared a general amnesty for government workers, promising peace and restraint, especially regarding punishments and executions that had defined their earlier rule.
But by late 2021, reports began to emerge across Afghanistan that more than 100 former members of the Afghan National Security Forces were summarily executed or disappeared in several provinces, including Ghazni, Helmand, Kandahar, and Kunduz.
Over the following years, reports confirmed that executions, corporal punishment, and public displays of death had become increasingly common again.
What began as a brief period of quiet after the Taliban s return to power ultimately transformed into a replay of familiar patterns.
