On Wednesday, December 7, more than a dozen top Taliban officials, including acting deputy Prime Minister, Abdul Ghani Baradar, acting interior minister, Sirajuddin Haqqani, as well as the country’s chief justice, acting foreign minister, and acting education minister, traveled more than 900 kilometers to the southwest of the country to watch public execution at a crowded sports stadium in south-western Farah province.
According to a Taliban spokesman, Zabihullah Mujahid, a man who was convicted of murder has been executed in public – the first confirmed sentence since they seized power in August last year.
Last month, Taliban’s supreme leader, Hibatullah Akhundzada instructed judges to fully enforce Sharia law, including public executions, stoning and floggings, and the amputation of limbs. The Taliban have carried out several public floggings since the decree, but the Wednesday execution in Farah is the first to be accredited as such by the Taliban.
The statement identified the executed man as Taj Mir, son of Ghulam Sarwar from Injil district, Herat province, accused of stabbing another man to death in 2017 and stealing his motorcycle and mobile phone. The victim was identified as Mustafa from neighboring Farah province.
The Taliban security forces are said to have arrested Taj Mir, who the Mustafa family allegedly accused, having claimed that Taj Mir confessed to his crime.
Abdul Rahman, the victim’s father, carried out the execution, who shot the man three times, Mujahid added in the statement.
The case was investigated by three courts and the group’s supreme spiritual leader authorized the punishment decision to be carried out “very carefully,’‘ said Mujahid.
Sharia Law
Public executions, floggings, and stoning of those convicted of crimes in Taliban courts are nothing new.
“To end the mischief in the country, to establish peace and security, to protect life, wealth and honor and to enforce the Sharia, do jihad against the leaders who were devoted to power, and endeavor to make the land of Afghanistan an exemplary state.” In the interview, the late founder of the Taliban, Mullah Omar graduated from a Deobandi seminary in Pakistan, said.
As soon as they were in power, back in the late 1990s, the Taliban started enforcing their version of the bizarre interpretation of Islam that emerged from an extreme and perverse interpretation of Deoband school propagated by Pakistani mullahs (clerics) in Afghan refugee camps.
The first public execution after taking Kabul on September 27, 1996, was former president Najibullah and his brother, who was under UN protection, were tortured to death, dragged their body’s through the streets of Kabul, and hung from a lamppost outside the ARG, the presidential palace in the capital that had been Najibullah’s seat of power for five years.
The Taliban regime has long practiced the principles of Hudud and Qisas; Hudud punishments are set and required under the Taliban’s stringent interpretation of Sharia for individuals who commit crimes against God. Adultery, drinking alcohol, and robbery are examples of such crimes.
Hudud offenses cannot be absolved, and the penalties must be carried out in public. They can range from severe punishments like stoning to death for adultery to public floggings for drinking alcohol.
Qisas is a form of retributive justice, “an eye for an eye” in cases of crimes against man. Under Qisas, a person convicted of murder is publicly executed at the request of the victim’s family.
“The supreme court was instructed to implement this order of Qisas in a public gathering of compatriots,” Mujahid said in a statement, referring to the “eye for an eye” justice in Sharia.
The victim’s mother told RTA Pashto, regime-run media agency, that the family had turned down several requests to forgive the alleged killer.
“We said that if we forgive him and he gets released, he would go out and kill someone else’s son. We wanted his punishment to be death so that it could be a lesson for others like him,” she said.
According to UN human rights experts, executions in public serve no legitimate purpose and only increase the cruel, inhuman, and degrading nature of this punishment.
“Within the 1,400-year tradition of Sharia, punishments such as public executions had historically been rarely implemented because most Islamic jurists interpreted the law differently to the Taliban.” Kaheld Abou El Fadl, a professor of Islamic Law at UCLA and one of the world’s leading authorities on Sharia law, told CNN.
Deobandi School
The roots of the Taliban can be traced to these Deobandi madrassa networks, which flourished across Pakistan and Afghanistan, with help from the Pakistani state and Saudi regime funds, during the Afghan civil war in the 1980s.
As per Ahmad Rashid, the Pakistani journalist, in 1988, there were 8000 registered madrassas and 25,000 unregistered ones, including Darul Uloom Haqqania madrassa founded in Akhora Khatak, Khyber Pakhtunkhwa province of Pakistan, by Mullah Sami ul-Haq (Father of Taliban), one of Pakistan’s largest and oldest seminaries and one of the largest training and recruiting grounds for the Taliban.
“We feel proud that our students in Afghanistan had first broken the Soviet Union and now sent the US packing. It is an honor for the madrassa that its graduates are now ministers and hold high positions in the Taliban government,” Rashidul Haq Sami, the seminary’s vice-chancellor, told the New York Times.
Many of the alumni adopt the name Haqqani as a symbol of pride; After seizing power in August 2021, the Haqqani students make the madrassa feel proud by implementing public execution in Farah province and U-Turn to public executions, floggings, and stoning of individuals convicted of crimes in 1990’s up to 2000.
After two decades, the green grass where hundreds of Afghan football players enjoyed the sports and hoped to represent Afghanistan with dignity on the international platform turns red with the blood of individuals convicted of crimes.
As per the reports in the past two weeks, more than 75 suspected women and men were brutally punished in Kabul, Logar, Farah, Ghor, Paktika, and Nangarhar provinces.
On December 8, 2022, 27 people were lashed in public at a stadium in the Charikar provincial capital of Parwan. The Taliban court official Abdul Rahim Rashid said the men and women were convicted by three courts in each case and were each lashed between 25 and 39 times.
“There were different cases with different types of punishment, which all were approved by the courts and implemented in a public gathering of locals and officials,” Rashid stated.
Thousands of spectators, including children, were brought to the football pitch to witness how the Taliban enforced its version of justice.
Over the sea, Qatar, another Islamic country, Taliban’s political home, and one of the legit brokers of the Taliban 2.0 to Afghans and the world hosted the 22nd FIFA world cup hosting more than 2 million females and males from 32 nations in 8 football stadiums to watch football.
While the Taliban 2.0 altered stadiums to brutal punishments (public executions, floggings, and stoning) site to the imposition of these Islamic punishments, is now widely considered a sign that the Taliban seeks to recreate the cruel rule it forced during the 1996-2001.
International reactions
The Taliban’s decision to carry out the punishment has drawn criticism from human rights organizations and the international community.
U.N. Secretary-General, Antonio Guterres, expressed “deep concern” regarding the public execution, “the death penalty cannot be reconciled with full respect for the right to life,” U.N. associate spokesperson Stephanie Tremblay said.
State Department spokesman Ned Price stated that the U.S. condemned the public execution; “We’re closely watching the Taliban’s treatment of the people of Afghanistan,” he said.
“This indicates to us that the Taliban seek a return to their regressive and abusive practices similar to the 1990s,” he added.
“Their relationship with us, with the international community, depends entirely on their own actions. It depends largely on their actions when it comes to human rights, when it comes to the rights of all Afghans, when it comes to the rights of women, girls, minorities, and other marginalized communities in Afghanistan,” he stated.
Despite these repetitive statements, the international community must hold the Taliban accountable and should identify the leverage they have through political pressure and other means.
Bio:
Mujtaba Haris is an Afghan researcher and writer. He has written extensively about the human rights, humanitarian crisis, security, and development situation in Afghanistan. He has been published in several international media outlets.
