In Kabul’s Olympic Stadium, as an estimated 30,000 people looked on, a terrified woman was escorted across the football field in Afghanistan, armed guards closing in on either side.
Near the goalposts, another woman wearing a blue burqa pushed the 35-year-old down to her knees at the edge of the penalty area, where Taliban fighters had gathered around her.
Moments later, a man believed to be her brother-in-law lifted a Kalashnikov to her head and fired. The crack of the 7.62mm round echoed through the stadium before she collapsed onto the ground.
The appalling scene, secretly filmed by activists hidden among the spectators in 1999, later sent shockwaves across the West and through countries where women’s rights are protected and recognized.
The woman was eventually identified as Zarmina, a mother of seven from northern Kabul who, according to reports, had suffered months of nightly domestic abuse alongside her eldest daughters.
The Taliban accused her of killing her husband, a police officer. Her sentence was brutal: years of torture behind bars before she was publicly executed in front of her own community.
Members of the Revolutionary Association of the Women of Afghanistan, known as RAWA, risked their lives to smuggle the disturbing footage out of the tightly controlled country, hoping to expose the suffering of Afghan women under Taliban rule.
Almost 30 years later, one expert has warned that similar abuses may be happening again, after hardline Islamist fundamentalists returned to power in Afghanistan following the United States’ withdrawal in 2021.
A Taliban guard holds a rifle the to the back of Zarmina’s head moments before she was shot dead in a football stadium in Afghanistan
But due to strict censorship and punishments increasingly taking place in private, the world beyond Afghanistan’s borders may not be aware of the full extent of the severity.
And concerningly, reports of abuses endured by women in recent months are comparable to those that surfaced in the late 1990s.
Zarmina was 16 when she married police officer Alauddin Khwazak, who also owned a small general store.
Although he was at first a ‘mild man’, he soon became a ‘monster’ from witnessing the horrors of the war-torn region, becoming ‘mad with jealousy, convinced that Zarmina was seeing other men’, according to their neighbour.
‘It is the story of one woman. But it is also the story of Afghan women under the Taliban, under brutes who turned our country into a zoo and our women into dogs,’ a female Afghan police officer told the Daily Mirror in their piece revealing the condemned woman’s identity in 2002.
After a brutal civil war and the withdrawal of the Soviet Union leaving the country overwhelmed with lawlessness, the Taliban rose to prominence in the early 1990s and took control of the capital, Kabul, in 1996.
It had previously been considered a vibrant metropolis, with cinemas and jazz cafes, where women could attend university and wear Western clothing.
But women in the region were soon subjected to ultraconservative Taliban rules that inflicted horrific punishments for choices many consider quotidian – some had their fingers amputated for wearing nail varnish, others were lashed for donning high heels.
Even a seven-year-old girl is said to have been whipped for wearing white shoes.
Those who were found to have been adulterous were hanged from a crane, and sex workers would be stoned.
Soon, girls were forbidden from education and women’s rights in general were quickly eroded into practically nothing.
And Mr Khwazak, who had become increasingly extreme thanks to his alleged fundamentalist brother, was essentially given near freedom in his officer duties to apply Taliban ideologies to not only his work but his personal life.
The physical abuse against Zarmina is believed to have lasted for months – and even extended to his elder daughters, Najeba, 16, and Shaista, 14.
Zarmina was paraded around the stadium twice in a Toyota pick-up to the braying crowd that included her screaming children
RAWA bravely smuggled the harrowing clip out of a tightly-controlled Afghanistan to try to illuminate the world the horrors that women faced under the barbaric Taliban
But when Zarmina could take no more, she plotted with Najeba to end their suffering, and supposedly poisoned him – either with opium or sleeping pills – that sent Mr Khwazak into a deep slumber.
However, as she stood over him, Zarmina allegedly could not kill him and it was instead Najeba who took a hammer to his head, killing him with one blow.
The pair ran out from the house, screaming they had been attacked by robbers.
While some believed them, Mr Khwazak’s brother was suspicious and called the Taliban who arrested them.
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 that she did it to protect her children.
It was only after three years of imprisonment in the central jail – where she was tortured, fed scraps and only had access to her one-year-old twins, Silsila and Jawad – that she confessed to a female police officer Najeba’s role in Mr Khwazak’s death.
‘But she was a tough one. As she lay on the floor of the cell, she pointed to her twins and said she would fight for life, fight as the mother of these babies,’ the officer reportedly said.
‘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 and Shaista, alongside their brother Hawad, 13, were given to Mr Khwazak’s brother, as is custom under the Taliban, and the girls were then sold into sex slavery to a man in Khost, then a Taliban stronghold and al-Qaeda training camp.
The reported delay in Zarmina’s execution – which would have typically taken place much sooner under Taliban culture – was due to haggling over the daughters who were sold for what is now the value of just over £20,000.
Although Zarmina hoped her punishment would be lashing, telling the Taliban that she should be with her children, they decided she would be executed after Mr Khwazak’s brother had invoked a blood law that called for her death.
On November 16, 1999, she was led out of her cell, before which she put on three dresses under her burqa to soften the 100 blows of the whipping that she believed she was about to receive.
Shoved into a Toyota pick-up, Zarmina began praying with the three female officers with her.
The officers knew what was ahead, with one who had spent extensive periods guarding Zarmina having to leave the vehicle before they arrived at the stadium.
The two others quit soon after: one had a nervous breakdown, the other becoming an insomniac, plagued with nightmares of the execution.
Zarmina, while still in the pick-up, was paraded around the stadium twice to the braying crowd that included her screaming children.
Some spectators cried out to spare Zarmina, including Mr Khwazak’s family who had the final say in Islamic culture, according to a RAWA reporter – an organisation the Taliban denounce as Satan Incarnate.
But the Taliban had already announced her execution over the radio and by then there were too many that wanted to see her death to revert the ruling.
A shaky video of Zarmina’s execution was smuggled out of the country. In this grab from the video her body is seen lying on the edge of the football pitch’s penalty area
A crowd of Taliban officials prepare to remove Zarmina’s body after her brutal execution
This is supposedly the first Zarmina heard of her imminent execution and the pleas unnerved the executioner who missed his initial shot.
She tried to flee and struggled against the female officers but was guided back to the penalty spot.
At this point, a hidden video camera began recording.
Apparently, Zarmina called out for someone to take her arms as she could not kneel on her own for her nerves but no one came to her aid.
Mr Khwazak’s brother is believed to have been the one who pulled the trigger within seconds of her collapsing to the ground.
The female escort walked over from where she stood a few metres away, and lifted Zarmina’s rumpled blue burqa to better cover her body.
Zarmina lay unclaimed in Wazir Akbar Khan hospital’s morgue for 20 days, her own mother damning her for the shame she brought to the family, before she was eventually buried in an unmarked grave in north Kabul, Khair Khana, not far from her home.
Activists fear the harrowing story may not be the last of its kind.
Shaharzad Akbar, from Rawadari, an Afghan human rights organisation, warned that similar acts of violence may already have been committed in the region with the new Taliban order.
Ms Akbar, who is currently in exile, said the organisation has documented a pattern of increasing restrictions on women’s rights and freedoms – which are often brutally enforced.
Almost 30 years on, and following two decades of American military intervention and long-term troop presence, women in Afghanistan are once again being subjected to horrific violence that is encouraged by the Taliban.
Ms Akbar said her organisation has already had reports of one woman who was stoned, although more details could not be shared for their safety.
What concerns her further is that these instances of violence are being kept from the public – and the Western – gaze, brutalising Afghanistan’s citizens with little reprisal.
She said: ‘The Taliban have in the past two years moved most of the floggings away from the public eye and they severely restrict any filming and photography of these punishments.
‘Considering the pattern we have documented and the increasing limitations on access to information, there may be severe and inhumane punishments of women and men away from the eyes of the world.
‘The added danger with this period of Taliban’s rule is their increased surveillance capacity that makes it harder to document human rights violations.’
Beyond corporal punishments, women are being subjugated to other draconian rules. Earlier this year, domestic violence in essence was legalised.
The Taliban passed a new law allowing husbands to beat their wives as long as there is no serious bodily harm after an updated penal code essentially categorised women on the same level as a slave.
Women have also been blocked from secondary and university education. Limitations on employment have also been introduced, and they have been forbidden from speaking in public. And the Taliban legalised child marriage with the consent of a male relative.
Although no executions are known to be women, the United Nations Assistance Mission in Afghanistan documented 12 judicially sanctioned executions since 2021.
But, as Ms Akbar inferred, even if a woman was executed – would the world ever know her story, as they did Zarmina’s?
