By Muzhda Ahmadi
The Taliban has doubled down on its commitment to enforce brutal punishments, including stoning women to death for adultery, with a short documentary titled ‘Retribution’ broadcast across Afghanistan.
The state-owned Radio Television Afghanistan (RTA) aired the 24-minute explainer on Thursday to outline the Taliban’s approach to justice called ‘retribution punishments’, based on the orders of Taliban supreme leader Mullah Hibatullah Akhundzada.
In the documentary, the Taliban’s Supreme Court criminal division directorate chief Mufti Atiqullah Darwish said the group is determined to implement Islamic style retribution and punishment throughout the country.
“We strive to ensure that all divine decrees are implemented. The 20 years of struggle against the American occupation have been for the establishment of an Islamic system and the implementation of Islamic decrees,” he said.
Taliban spokesperson Zabihullah Mujahid said in the documentary these measures will be implemented at any cost.
“It is the duty of the Islamic government to create the conditions for the implementation of all Islamic laws and retribution. People have sacrificed a lot for the establishment of the Islamic Emirate, and at any cost, Islamic punishments, retribution, and laws will be implemented,” he said.
‘Retribution’ featured discussions with religious scholars to emphasize a link between this form of punishment and religious teachings.
And it also included interviews with two Kabul residents who were positive about its implementation to show public support.
The documentary depicts scenes of people gathering during an execution chanting “Allah-o-Akbar”, scenes of hand amputations, the execution rope. These images were mixed in with vision of mosques from Kabul, Herat, Mazar-i-Sharif, and Kandahar, as well as Taliban forces and Taliban flags in the Tapaye Television area in Jalalabad city.
‘We’ve only just begun’: Taliban supreme leader
The documentary aired just days after RTA broadcast the supreme leader declaring the renewed focus on public and painful punishment, pitting it as a move against Western values and criticism.
“Even if it’s said that it violates women’s rights, stone them. Tomorrow we will enforce the punishment for adultery in public – we will stone women,” he said in the audio recording.
“We will enforce Allah’s limits in public.”
He mocked the West’s efforts to curtail the Taliban’s extreme restrictions on women and suggested the Taliban was only getting started with its plan to spread its extreme interpretation of Sharia law.
“All of this goes against your democracy. The fight against you continues in all these cases,” he said.
“We have fought with you for 20 years, and we will continue to fight for another 20 years… [until] we establish Sharia law on Earth.
“The Taliban’s work did not end with the takeover of Kabul, it has only just begun.”
Critics call for more Taliban sanctions
Prominent Afghan voices and activists are calling on the international community to take stronger action against the Taliban after its brazen commitment to these punishments.
Some fear the group is deliberately broadcasting these statements and depictions to normalize a high level of violence.
Former member of parliament Fawzia Koofi said the Taliban has tried to use the violence as a way of controlling society, and called on the international community to pressure them into more humane practices.
“The Taliban are implementing a policy of fear and terror in Afghanistan. What the Taliban are doing, such as public floggings, promotes violence and is not common in other countries,” Ms Koofi said.
Human rights activist Hussain Naemi decried the Taliban methods as barbaric but also criticized the international community’s stance on the “appalling human rights situation” while the Taliban continues to receive financial support from them.
“Determining and implementing such punishments [execution and flogging] with a radical and corrupt mindset lives within their system, which is an oppressive and barbaric act,” he said in an interview with Rukhshana Media.
He called on the United Nations Security Council to refer the issue of gender apartheid and human rights violations by the Taliban in Afghanistan to the International Criminal Court and to bring the main violators of human rights including Taliban leaders to the trial.
Maryam Arwin, the chief of the women’s rights Purple Saturdays Movement, said that any international recognition of the Taliban as a legitimate representative of the Afghan people will not stabilize the country, but will only lead to more fear and terror.
She said there is serious concern about the lack of justice and access to defense lawyers for defendants in Taliban courts, raising significant questions about the fairness of implementing harsh punishments, especially the death penalty.
Other critics responded to Mullah Akhundzada’s comments he is enforcing divine will.
The Afghanistan permanent mission to the UN representative Naseer Ahmad Faiq posted on X that the Taliban’s methods were in fact forbidden under Islam.
“Benefiting from the rights of the people of Afghanistan and determining their fate without their consent, through force and tyranny, is unacceptable and forbidden in Islam,” he posted.
Former National Directorate of Security chief under the previous Afghan government Rahmatullah Nabil posted on X that the Taliban leader’s statements send a “clear and firm” message to the group’s supporters and lobbyists that the Taliban’s position will remain unchanged in “opposition to fundamental human rights”.
The Taliban’s track record of ‘retribution’
These latest Taliban pronouncements are not a change in the group’s approach to punishment, but rather a shift in their confidence to put it on display.
Since the Taliban’s return to power in Afghanistan in August 2021, there have been multiple reports of harsh and swift punishments being carried out across the country, but they are rarely documented or reported under the Taliban’s tight media control.
The group had sought to portray itself as having reformed from the draconian methods used during its first regime in Afghanistan in the 1990s.
During the Doha negotiations in the lead up to 2021, the Taliban’s political delegation had assured the United States of its commitment to human rights.
But as it consolidates power, the group is gradually more open about these methods of control.
Since November 2022, the Taliban has publicized and invited spectators to at least six executions of nine people. These retribution sentences were carried out in Farah, Herat, Laghman, and Ghazni provinces. It has also begun publishing other records of its harsh punishments such as lashings.
Persistent calls from the international community for the Taliban to adhere to international norms on human rights, and concerns around the death penalty in cases that are delivered without a proper trial or defence, have been ignored by the Taliban, who described it as a domestic issue.
