By Ellaha Rasa
The Al-Mahdi township in the west of Herat city was silent. Some panicked. Taliban forces had hung the bloodied bodies of two men from their feet at a crossroads. The people of the township in Jabriel neighborhood of Herat flocked to the scene. The throng was such that, as the locals say in Farsi, “there was no place to throw a needle”. A crowd was gathering for the latest episode of “Taliban crime theater”.
The two men were killed after bring accused of robbery on Wednesday 22 February. The Taliban strung them up at Al-Mahdi’s Farhang intersection, leaving the corpses on display for hours. Hundreds commuted through the crossroads in that time, most stare, some try to touch. In a short video uploaded to social media, you can see children approaching the bodies and touching the blood still cloying on the clothes and skin.
It’s a scene that some say they cannot erase from their minds. Others say it enters their psyche and dreams.
Suhaila*, 43, was returning from the center of Herat city with her husband when she came across the intersection and the dead bodies hanging over it. She had since visited a doctor to treat the impact it had on her mentally.
According to Suhail’s son, Mohammad*, she suddenly went into a seizure at the intersection before she fell to the ground and lost consciousness. Suhaila’s husband, accompanied by other people present, took her to the pharmacy, where she was injected with a serum and she regained consciousness after an hour. But upon waking, she says she remembered the scene, and she fainted again.
Mohammad*, 25, says the family was deeply concerned by Suhail’s turn and she seemed to be in a serious condition. They all stayed awake until the morning, he said.
Suhaila’s doctor diagnosed her mental and emotional condition as “acute” and advised, “Keep her away from stress and worry for a long time and try not to remind her of the bitter memories of the past.”
More than twenty days have passed, and Mohammad says Suhaila still has not fully recovered. He said every now and then she convulses and seems to experience extreme muscle strain and tremors. They believe it the final trigger was the gruesome sight of the dead men hanging upside down, without dignity, for all to see.
It has been two decades, when the Taliban were last in power, since the residents of Herat had witnessed such terrible scenes in the city. Kangaroo courts, arbitrary judgements, and swift executions with public displays of the dead where more common in the second half of the 1990s during Taliban rule.
It was something that the democratic governments had tried to erase. According to Article 956 of the Penal Code approved in 1396 (2017) of the previous Afghan government, a person who deliberately desecrates the body of a dead person or removes the shroud of a dead body will be sentenced to short imprisonment. If the act is done for the purpose of revenge or publicizing the dead, the perpetrator will be sentenced to a maximum of short imprisonment. According to Article 147 of the code, short imprisonment is from three months to one year.
Displaying corpses and crime theater
According to reports, in the past eighteen months of Taliban rule, at least 46 people have been put on public display after being shot dead by the Taliban in four provinces – Herat, Baghlan, Balkh and Samangan.
In Herat in 1400 (March 2021-March 2022) solar year, the corpses of at least 13 people killed by the Taliban forces on charges of kidnapping and robbery were publicly displayed. Others have been photographed after they were killed and their pictures published by the Taliban Herati police.
Four people accused of kidnapping in a conflict in Khwaja Kala area of Herat city were killed, and their bodies were displayed for several hours at the crossroads of Mustafiat, Chawk Gulha and Darwaza-e Malek, one of the most crowded parts of Herat city. On 5 October 2021, the Taliban displayed the bodies of two other people accused of robbery and executed in Uba district, 96 km east of Herat province.
On 12 January 2022, a body of a person accused of kidnapping and executed was displayed in Chawk Golha, and on 16 January, the picture of the body of a person accused of robbery and killed in district nine of the city was released in the newsletter of the Taliban police headquarters.
On 14 February 2022, two bodies of men accused of kidnapping were displayed in the center of Herat city, and a day after, on February 15, the picture of the body of a person accused of robbery and killed in Uba district was published in the police newsletter.
On 21 February 2022, three bodies of men accused of kidnapping were displayed in the center of Herat city. According to reports one of the bodies belonged to Mahboob Shah, a former officer of the Herati police headquarters.
On 1 March 2022, a body accused of robbery was displayed in Shar-e-Naw area in the center of Herat city.
In 1401 (March 2022-March 2023), at least 10 people are known to have been killed and displayed either publicly or their bodies exhibited in photographs by the Taliban forces.
On the 23 April 2022, pictures of two bodies of men accused of robbery were displayed Erich village of Ghorian district, 65 km west of Herat, and published in the newsletter of the Taliban police, and on the 23 April and 17 May, in two different incidents in Uba district, four corpses were put on display at the intersections of the center of Herat city on the charge of theft.
On 31 May 2022, a person accused of robbery was killed and his body was displayed in Chawk-e-Gulha in the center of Herat city, and on 27 July 2022, the body of another person was displayed in Shar-e-Naw, the center of Herat.
Then on 21 and 22 February 2023, the Taliban displayed the bodies of four people in two separate events at Chawk-e-Gulha and Farhang intersections of the city, all accused of robbery.
Taliban forces have written various message on the corpses such as, “This is the punishment for theft and resistance”, “Whoever shoots at the Mujahedeen or steals, take this advice”, “The murderer of the Mujahideen was punished for his actions” and “Whoever steals, he deserves this”.
Rukhshana Media’s attempts to talk to the Taliban police in Herat about these methods have not been successful.
Taliban forces do similar practices in other provinces.
On 18 December 2021, the body of one person was displayed after an armed clash in Pul-e-Khomri, the center of northern Baghlan province.
On May 20 2022, Taliban forces displayed the body of Sohail Ramzi, a commander affiliated to Atta Mohammad Noor, the former governor of Balkh, and on 8 March 2023, the bodies of two people accused of robbery were displayed in Balkh.
In Samangan, Taliban forces displayed two bodies in Samangan on 19 July, accused of being members of ISIS-K.
And on 21 July 2022, Taliban fighters displayed the dead body of a young man they had shot in Andrab, and on 6 March 2023, another body of a man accused of robbery was displayed in Pul-e-Khomri.
The horror scenario in Herat
For Shegufa, 21, in Herat, that day of 21 February, when she was returning home from a relative’s house, she saw the two people hanging in the Khaja Kala area. The Taliban were using the scene to warn people that whoever steals will be killed in the same way and will be hanged at a crossroads for two hours. Shegufa was horrified.
“The [Islamic] punishment for a person accused of robbery is not killing,” she said. “The Taliban are committing an act against the law and against Sharia by punishing people with death. During the republic, when the security forces arrested a thief, they would file a case against him and hand him over to the prosecutor’s office. But now, they simply killed the thief and hand his body over to his family.”
The death scene has unsettled Shegufa. “The bodies of the accused are displayed not only near our house but also in most of the populated areas of Herat. Many women and children are witnessing these events. I hope these things don’t happen again.”
Najiba, 27, also came across the dead bodies in Al-Mahdi township of Jabreil. “When I got close, I was very scared because the two bodies were hanging upside down from the electricity poles with their clothes stained with blood,” she says, adding that the women and children who she saw at the scene all looked terrified. She herself says sometimes when crossing the Farhang intersection, she has to close her eyes still to avoid seeing such a scene again.
Rahima, 24, a resident of Al-Mahdi township was shocked by the behavior of the Taliban. “They are really hard-hearted people. A human being hurts when an animal is injured, but they just kill innocent people…” she said. “Killing a person for the crime of robbery is not a good thing, the Taliban should stop holding these kangaroo courts.”
Nilam, 29 has twice been a witness to a Taliban kangaroo court, one in Kabul and one in Herat. She said that the Taliban foment terror among Afghans by setting up their kangaroo courts in Herat, and that is another reason why many women in the province do not leave their homes.
“When I was walking towards the market, I saw a crowd of people watching the flogging of a person accused of robbery. A Taliban military vehicle was there and several of their fighters were present,” she recounted. “They tied the suspect’s hands so tightly that I thought the person’s hands would break.”
Nilam has also seen a person hanged who had been accused of theft. “Seeing that person’s body has had a very bad effect on me and my sister’s mind,” she said. “It is like a movie that ends with misfortune and disaster. I feel that this is not going to be the end of our miseries.”
Control of society in lawless government
Residents who spoke to Rukhshana Media in Herat speak of their panic and distress at seeing these bodies on display, with women and children seeming to be the most affected.
According to psychologists, these scenes can trigger stress and shock in a way that can lead to mental illnesses, insofar as it has a deep impact on the psyche of individuals.
Batool Haidari, a psychologist and former professor of the university, told Rukhshana Media, “The Taliban can encourage people to comply by governing cities and creating laws. But there is a management vacuum within the Taliban government. They don’t know how to control citizens and instead, by showing the dead bodies, they are trying to force compliance by showing consequences of committing crimes.”
The sole purpose of such actions is to stoke the panic and fear, and it does so effectively. But she warned that it will also erode people’s trust.
“They (Taliban) are using peak violence for their survival and introduce themselves as harsh rulers in the minds of the people (for compliance), but for this same reason they can’t live in harmony with the people,” she added.
She believes the Taliban’s methods will eventually turn the generation they lead into a one full of anger and hatred.
She also warned people to take care of their mental health and to avoid seeing such gruesome scenes if they can. “People should avoid going to these places,” she said. “For example, people should not pass by the place where the body is displayed, or wait till the bodies are removed, and people should not follow the news related to these issues.”
Another psychologist, speaking to Rukhshana Media on the condition that her identity is not revealed, said that from the point of view of psychology, crime is in human nature and different groups of society commit it, but killing people for arbitrary reasons and displaying the corpses will have dangerous negative impact on the psychology of children, because it teaches children to use this method for punishment in the future.
“In these situations, the most vulnerable people from a psychological point of view are children who do not understand the events before the execution and only see that a group of people hanged a young man in public,” she said.
Note: The names of some of the interviewees in this report have been chosen as pseudonyms.
