When the Taliban Punished Women in Public! (*ACTUAL FOOTAGE*) JJ

On a Friday morning in February 1998, around 30,000 people filled a sports stadium in Kabul. Street sellers moved through the crowd with nuts, biscuits, and tea. The gates had opened early. Men and boys walked in from every part of the city. There was no match that day. The crowd had been called to watch a young woman named Sohaila receive 100 lashes.

 Her crime, according to the court that sentenced her, was walking in public beside a man who was not related to her. The stadium had been built for sport. Under the Taliban, it became something else. A place where punishment was turned into a public event, announced in advance, timed for the largest possible audience, and aimed at every woman who was not even there.

 This is the story of how that system worked, who it was designed for, and why it came back. The Taliban entered Kabul on September 27th, 1996. Within hours, they took former President Mohammad Najibullah from the United Nations compound, where he had been living under protection for 4 years. He was killed, and his body was hung in public in the middle of the city.

That was the first message. It set the pattern for everything that followed. Punishment was not something that happened behind prison walls. It was something the city was made to look at. In the days after taking the capital, the Taliban created the Ministry for the Promotion of Virtue and the Prevention of Vice.

 Most Afghans called it by a simpler name, the morality police. Its officers patrolled the streets, carried batons and whips, and had the authority to punish on the spot. Kabul’s Ghazi Stadium, the largest gathering space in the city, was handed to the courts. Executions, amputations, and floggings were carried out there in front of crowds.

 Announcements went out on the radio days in advance so that people would come. To understand why so many women ended up in front of these crowds, you have to look at how many ordinary actions had been turned into crimes. Girls over the age of eight were banned from school. Women were removed from almost every government job.

 Women could not leave the house without a mahram, a close male relative such as a husband, father, brother, or son. The burqa became compulsory outside the home. Windows facing the street were ordered painted black so that women inside could not be seen. Each rule created a new category of offender. A widow with no living male relative broke the law every time she went out to look for food.

There were an estimated 30 to 50,000 widows in Kabul at the time. Most of them made widows by 15 years of war. A woman whose shoes made a sound as she walked could be beaten because the Taliban held that a woman should not draw attention to herself in any form. Women were beaten in the street for showing a wrist or an ankle.

Some were beaten for laughing loudly. Punishment did not require a court. Most of it happened on the pavement in front of whoever was standing nearby delivered by a young man with a stick. The stadium was reserved for the cases the regime wanted the whole city to see. Sohaila was an unmarried woman from Kabul.

 She had been arrested after being seen walking with a man who was not her relative. Under the interpretation the Taliban courts applied, that was treated as adultery. The distinction mattered. An unmarried person convicted of adultery was to be flogged 100 times. A married person was to be stoned to death. So, Khaila’s sentence was the whip. On February 27th, 1998, she was brought into Kabul’s sports stadium.

 A [clears throat] speaker read the verdict aloud to more than 20,000 people. The same session included the amputation of the right hands of two men convicted of stealing goods from a Kabul shop. Doctors from the public health ministry, faces covered, carried out the amputations. A Taliban fighter afterwards carried one of the severed hands through the crowd and held it up as a warning.

 So, Khaila was flogged and walked away without visible injury. The Taliban governor of Kabul, Abdul Manan Niazi, told reporters afterwards that the lashing had been administered lightly and that its purpose was to humiliate her in front of the public rather than to injure her. That statement is one of the most useful pieces of evidence we have because it came from the men who ran the system.

The point was never the pain. The point was the audience. Officials told journalists the same day that punishments of this kind were about to become a weekly fixture in the capital. Every element of these events was built around visibility. The date was announced on the radio, the only station allowed to operate.

 The venue was the biggest open space in the city. Attendance was encouraged and in some provinces invitations were sent to religious scholars, tribal elders, and local officials. The verdicts were read aloud so nobody could claim not to know what the offense had been. A flogging inside a prison would punish one woman.

A flogging in a stadium reached everyone who watched, everyone they told, and every woman who heard about it and adjusted how she dressed, where she walked, and who she walked with. That was the design. The person being punished was the instrument. The target was the population. It also had a second effect the Taliban did not plan for.

A public event can be recorded. Zarmina was 35 years old and the mother of seven children. She had been held in Kabul’s women’s prison for around 3 years accused of killing her husband. Reporting later published in Britain based on interviews with people who knew her described a woman who had endured years of beatings, who had no education, who was jailed without a trial, and who was abandoned by her own family.

She was in prison with her infant twins. The Taliban had said she would live until the twins were weaned. Once they were, her execution was scheduled and announced on the radio. Zarmina herself was not told. She believed her sentence was 100 lashes. On the morning of November 16th, 1999, she borrowed two extra dresses from other prisoners and put them on underneath her burka hoping the extra cloth would soften the blows.

She was driven into Ghazi Stadium in the back of a pickup truck. Accounts put the crowd at up to 30,000. Her own children were among them and a [clears throat] Rawar reporter present that day recorded that they were crying for their mother. Minutes before the sentence was carried out, her husband’s family announced that they forgave her.

 Under the same religious law the Taliban claimed to be applying, that forgiveness could have ended it. The Taliban refused. Their stated reason was that the execution had already been announced to thousands of people. She was made to kneel in front of the goal posts and shot in the head. Somewhere in that crowd was a young member of the Revolutionary Association of the Women of Afghanistan, known as RAWA, with a video camera hidden underneath her burka.

RAWA had been founded in 1977 by Meena Keshwar Kamal, a women’s rights activist who was 20 years old at the time. She was assassinated in 1987. The organization kept working. Through the Taliban years, its members ran classrooms in basements and private homes, and they gathered evidence. The garment the Taliban had made compulsory to keep women out of sight turned out to be very good at hiding a camera.

The footage from November 16 was smuggled out of Afghanistan. It reached British and American broadcasters and was used in the documentary Beneath the Veil, made by the British-Afghan journalist Saira Shah, and broadcast in 2001. For a large part of the outside world, that was the first time Taliban rule was something they had actually seen rather than read about.

For a long time, nobody outside Afghanistan knew the woman’s name. She was a blue shape on a patch of grass. It was a reporter from a British newspaper who established afterwards that her name was Zarmina, that she had seven children, and how she had come to be in that prison. The first Taliban government fell in late 2001 after the September 11 attacks and the American-led operation that followed.

Ghazi Stadium went back to hosting football. Over the next two decades, the picture changed. By 2010, roughly 2.7 million girls were in school. By 2020, that figure was near 3.5 million. Women became judges, police officers, pilots, and mayors. Female life expectancy rose from about 45 years in 2001 to 66 by 2019.

None of it was clean. Corruption drained the reconstruction effort. Enforcement of women’s protection laws outside the cities was weak. A United Nations report in 2016 found that 87% of Afghan women had experienced at least one form of gender-based violence. Women who became public figures were assassinated one by one.

Safia Amajan in Kandahar in 2006, Sitara Achakzai in 2009, and many teachers, journalists, and officials whose names never reached the international press. Still, a generation of girls grew up who had never lived under Taliban rule, and for whom walking to school was ordinary. Kabul fell again on August 15th, 2021.

Two days after taking the capital, the Taliban spokesman Zabiullah Mujahid told international journalists that the movement had changed, and that women would be able to work and study within the framework of Islamic law. The test of that claim came 15 months later. In November 2022, Taliban supreme leader Hibatullah Akhundzada instructed judges to impose the full range of religious corporal punishments wherever the conditions for them were met.

The instruction covered flogging, stoning, and amputation. Enforcement began within days. On November 11th, 2022, in Talokan in Takhar province, 10 men and nine women were each given 39 lashes over accusations of adultery or theft. Later that month, three women and nine men were lashed in a stadium in Pul-i-Alam, south of Kabul, in front of hundreds of spectators, invitations had been sent to scholars, elders, and local people.

 Photography was banned. On December 8th, 2022, 27 people, women among them, were lashed in a football stadium in Charikar, Parwan province, the day after the first public execution since the Taliban’s return. The pattern of the 1990s was back with one change. The regime now controlled who was allowed to film. Because the Taliban’s own Supreme Court announces many of these punishments, they can be counted.

In June 2024, 63 people were publicly lashed in the central stadium of Sar-e Pul, 14 of them women. The provincial governor, judges, and security officials attended. The listed accusations included adultery and other so-called moral offenses. The United Nations mission in Afghanistan condemned it publicly. In August 2026, the Afghanistan Human Rights and Democracy Organization published the fullest count so far.

Between February 2022 and April 2026, it documented 633 separate incidents of public flogging involving 2,745 people. Of those, 1,761 were men and 422 were women, with the sex of another 562 unrecorded. The charges listed against women in that report tell you what the system is actually for: appearing in public without a male guardian, leaving home, extramarital relations, moral corruption.

The frequency is rising rather than falling. The same report counted 46 public announcements of flogging in 2022 and 30 in 2023, then 178 in 2024, and 262 in 2025. In under 4 months of 2026, another 117. Akhundzada has publicly committed to enforcing stoning for adultery. Two women are at the center of this story.

 One survived a public flogging in 1998 and disappeared from the record. The other was killed in front of her own children in 1999, and the world learned her name 3 years after her death from a camera hidden under the garment that was supposed to make her invisible. Neither punishment was really about them. Both were arranged so that other women would watch or hear and understand what the boundary was.

That is what makes public punishment different from ordinary cruelty. It is not an act of anger. It is a policy with a schedule, a venue, an invitation list, and a press release. It is running today in stadiums across Afghanistan, and the count is going up.