The Taliban’s return to power has not merely revived an archaic penal code; it has reinstated terror as a governing technique. Public execution, staged with deliberation and ritualised violence, has once again become a central instrument through which the regime asserts authority, enforces obedience, and broadcasts ideological absolutism.

On December 2, the Taliban’s Supreme Court announced that a man identified as Mangal was publicly executed at a stadium in Khost city on the direct orders of Supreme Leader Hibatullah Akhundzada. Charged with premeditated murder, Mangal was killed before an estimated crowd of 80,000 spectators. Disturbingly, reports indicate that the execution was carried out by a 13-year-old boy—an act that collapses any remaining pretence of moral or judicial restraint. The message was unmistakable: justice in Taliban-ruled Afghanistan is performative, uncompromising, and deliberately traumatic.

This was not an aberration. On April 11, 2025, Afghanistan’s Supreme Court announced the public execution of four men in a single day under the Taliban’s Qisas (retributive justice) framework—two in Badghis Province, and one each in Farah and Nimroz. Details were withheld, consistent with the regime’s broader opacity. Two days later, Taliban spokesperson Zabihullah Mujahid released an audio statement quoting Akhundzada: “We must enter Islam completely… Islam is not just limited to a few rituals; it is a comprehensive system of all divine commands.” The statement was not theological reflection; it was a doctrinal justification for violence as governance.

Partial data compiled by the Institute for Conflict Management indicates that at least 12 people have been publicly executed in 10 incidents since the Taliban seized Kabul on August 15, 2021. The first such execution under the new regime took place on December 7, 2021, in Farah Province, where a man accused of a murder committed five years earlier was put to death in public. The frequency may appear limited, but this numerical restraint is deceptive. Each execution is designed as a mass spectacle, amplified through coercive attendance and state-controlled messaging, multiplying its psychological impact far beyond the individual victim.

The legal basis for these practices was made explicit on November 13, 2022, when Akhundzada issued a binding decree ordering judges to fully implement Shari’a punishments, including public executions, flogging, stoning, and amputations. Conveyed by Mujahid, the order mandated the enforcement of hudud (crimes against God) and qisas punishments for offences ranging from murder and theft to adultery, apostasy, and rebellion. The decree eliminated any ambiguity: Taliban courts are not instruments of justice, but mechanisms of religious coercion.

History underscores the continuity of this brutality. During the Taliban’s first regime (1996–2001), public executions were routine. The U.S. Department of State documented the public stoning of a couple convicted of adultery in Kandahar in July 1996. In November that year, residents of Herat were forced to gather in a football stadium to witness a man slowly strangled to death. In October 1997, the corpses of four former Taliban fighters were displayed at intersections in Kabul, hung from beams as warnings. These were not judicial acts; they were demonstrations of dominance.

Even during their insurgency years, the Taliban never abandoned these methods. In August 2010, a man and woman were publicly stoned to death in Kunduz Province following a Taliban court’s verdict. In July 2012, video footage from Parwan Province showed an accused woman shot dead before villagers. As UNAMA documented, between August 2010 and August 2021, Taliban “parallel justice” resulted in at least 213 deaths and 64 injuries across 182 recorded incidents.

Since regaining power, the Taliban have expanded this punitive architecture beyond executions. UNAMA’s 2023 report, Corporal Punishment and the Death Penalty in Afghanistan, records the systematic reinstatement of corporal punishments: floggings, stonings, beatings, forced exposure to freezing water, and forced head shaving. From August 2021 to September 2025, at least 1,528 people were subjected to such punishments—1,217 men, 293 women, and 18 children—for offences ranging from adultery and “running away from home” to theft, homosexuality, alcohol consumption, and drug-related crimes.

These punishments are not about crime control in any conventional sense. They are about visibility, fear, and domination. By staging violence in stadiums and public squares, the Taliban weaponise spectacle to assert a monopoly over violence and suppress dissent. Compulsory attendance ensures collective complicity; the crowd becomes both witness and hostage. The invocation of Shari’a serves as ideological armour, shielding brutality from scrutiny while demanding submission as religious duty.

Public execution under the Taliban is thus not justice—it is governance by terror. It signals ideological inflexibility, enforces social conformity, and hardens territorial control through fear. The regime’s reliance on such methods reveals not confidence, but fragility: a власть sustained not by consent or legitimacy, but by the calculated exhibition of cruelty. In Taliban-ruled Afghanistan, the spectacle of death is not a by-product of rule; it is the rule itself.