In Afghanistan’s harsh, remote mountains, a 22-year-old woman kneels beside a ditch as a so-called “desert court” condemns her to death. Moments later, she is shot in the back with an AK-47.
Her killer was believed to be her hardline militant husband, in an act the Taliban regard as an “honour killing”.
The decision that Najiba had committed adultery was reached in less than an hour. However, it has been suggested that the allegation was invented to safeguard her husband’s reputation. Under the Taliban’s strict interpretation of Sharia law, adultery is treated as a crime punishable by corporal punishment.
Fourteen years after her death, much of Najiba’s story remains unknown. Like countless other women, she risks being gradually erased from Afghanistan’s social fabric.
Yet the horror and humiliation of Najiba’s killing, cheered by rural militants, now appears chillingly prophetic. Afghan women today again face torture and restrictions that reduce them to a slave-like status.
In January, the Taliban reinstated a decree imposing the death penalty for blasphemy and vaguely defined “immoral” or “corrupt” offences. The punishment had been prohibited after the US intervention.
As fears grow that such brutality could return, Michelle Shahid of Equality Now told the Daily Mail that “the death penalty, stoning sentences and public floggings are likely to fall hardest on Afghan women”. Medica Mondiale, meanwhile, described the current situation as “gender apartheid”.
The warning came years earlier. Responding to Najiba’s execution in July 2012, Shajan Yazdanparast, then head of women’s affairs in Parwan Province, said: “We have had a very bad experience of Taliban in the past several years. Everyone is in shock and scared that, God forbid, if the Taliban return, what will happen.”
A 22-year-old woman kneels beside a ditch in Afghanistan’s rugged mountains before being shot in the back with an AK-47 following a so-called “desert court” ruling
They added that women had “suffered socially, psychologically, and they could not study” during Taliban rule.
Indeed, today, the situation for women is much the same as it was under the Taliban in the 90s despite America’s near two decades of intervention, with the recent legalisation of domestic abuse and the banning of girls from secondary education.
Or, arguably, even in 2012, when a US-backed government was still trying to negotiate with the Taliban, who held control in pockets of the country, as was the case for Najiba.
The grainy video that captured Najiba’s execution caused uproar both across the world but also within Afghanistan, as authorities had been trying to improve women’s rights through like reinstating their vote and access to schooling.
But in Qōl-e Hir, the village where Najiba was from in the Shinwari district of the Parwan province, the Taliban still ruled.
Najiba had been found in the house of a local Taliban commander, Mullah Qader-e ‘Lang’ (Qader the Lame), who was reportedly involved in internal clashes.
It is unclear whether she was being held there voluntarily or against her will, however Parwan province governor at the time, Abdul Basir Salangi, claimed she had some kind of sexual relationship with the man – either romantic or abusive.
According to local MP Zakia Sangin, who spoke contemporaneously to Afghanistan Analysts’ Network, Najiba had fled her husband’s house, situated two-and-a-half hours north from the capital, Kabul, some three months before she was found.
At Najiba’s execution, verses from the Qur’an regarding adultery are read to her in front of a crowd of men, some so desperate for a view of the execution they sit atop roofs
Qader-e Lang was killed in June 2012 and comrades of an opposing Taliban member then supposedly stormed his house where they found both Najiba and Qader-e Lang’s pregnant wife.
Najiba was handed back to her family but it was her own husband, Juma Khan, who reportedly took her to the Taliban’s shadow district governor of the time, Mirza Muhammad, to settle the ‘dispute’ of her alleged running away.
Najiba was said to be tortured and then charged with fleeing from her husband, while Qadar-e Lang’s wife was accused of sheltering her – offences that both deserved execution.
As is typical in honour killings, it is usually the affected or the family of the affected, who take the role of executioner.
At Najiba’s execution, verses from the Qur’an regarding adultery are read to her in front of a crowd of men, some so desperate for a view of the execution they sit atop roofs in the village.
‘We cannot forgive her, God tells us to finish her. Juma Khan, her husband, has the right to kill her,’ the man is reported to have said.
Another man – likely her husband – then approached with an AK-47 rifle, shooting twice from a few metres away but missed.
With his third shot, he hit Najiba in the back and she crumpled forward, before firing ten more times to the screams of the jubilant crowd behind him.
‘Within one hour they decided that she was guilty and sentenced her to death. They shot her in front of villagers in her village, Qōl,’ Parwan provincial spokesman Roshna Khalid said after Najiba’s death.
Very little detail is recorded regarding the story, as is the case with ‘desert courts’ administered by the Taliban where justice is taken into their own hands and Sharia law is often applied
Mr Salangi similarly said they ‘faked a court to decide about the fate of this woman and in one hour, they executed the woman’ – before going on to suggest she was condemned in order for Mr Khan to save face.
Thankfully, Qader-e Lang’s wife was spared an equally barbaric fate owing to her pregnancy and reports suggested she managed to escape to security forces in Parwan centre and was later housed in a woman’s shelter.
Very little detail is recorded regarding the story, as is the case with ‘desert courts’ administered by the Taliban where justice is taken into their own hands and Sharia law is often applied.
The Taliban at the time denied involvement in the execution – despite having control of the region at the time – criticising media reports blaming them as ‘incorrect and cursed’.
Their ‘Islamic justice’ was different to the ‘tribal justice’ being administered here, they further claimed.
Afghanistan’s government condemned the ‘un-Islamic and inhuman action by those professional killers’ President Hamid Karzai launched a manhunt, however there are no further reports about the case.
The rest of the world was similarly horrified: the then-foreign secretary William Hague said he was ‘shocked and disgusted’, while Nato’s top commander in Afghanistan, US General John Allen said the execution was ‘an atrocity of unspeakable cruelty’.
The execution triggered protests in Afghanistan, with hundreds taking to the streets in Kabul holding white sheets with the words ‘International community: Where is the protection and justice for Afghan women?’ written across it.
Wazhma Frogh, executive director of the Research Institute for Women, Peace and Security, said at the time the execution ‘was nothing new for us’.
She told Al Jazeera: ‘When we first saw the reports, we flashed back to the stoning of a couple in Kunduz last year and the stoning of a woman in 1998.’
‘The truth is though, every day we are under threat. If we stay at home we are under threat. If we go to school we are under threat.’
Fifty-two girls were murdered in the months leading up to Najiba’s execution, 42 of which were honour killings.
The same week that Najiba was killed, a woman and her two children were beheaded, an execution similarly carried out by the alleged husband.
Hanifa Safi, a prominent female official specialising in Women Affairs, was also targeted with a car bomb a few days after Najiba’s death, with the explosion killing Ms Safi and her husband, and injuring 11 others.
Another girl, 15-year-old Tamana, was found dead in Parwan days later, who had allegedly been beaten and killed by her cousin she was forcibly married to for being ‘disobedient’.
With the few institutions set up to protect women now obliterated, the unrestrained violence against women has come full circle.
After the departure of American forces in 2021, Afghanistan descended to a shell of its former self, with the de facto authorities issuing nearly 100 edicts that stripped women of their rights, like prohibiting employment and abolishing a minimum age for marriage.
Ms Shahid said: ‘In five years, the Taliban have dismantled practically every legal protection Afghan women had; the ministries and justice systems that enforced their rights have been abolished, girls are barred from school beyond primary level, women’s voices have been banned in public, and there is no minimum age for marriage.
‘Decree No12, issued this January, makes the death penalty available for blasphemy and for undefined ‘immoral’ or ‘corrupt’ offences; such categories are vague enough for the Taliban’s all-male courts to apply arbitrarily.
‘Women are already disproportionately prosecuted for sexual relations outside marriage and other so-called moral crimes, including when they are fleeing forced marriage or domestic violence, or have been raped, so the death penalty, stoning sentences and public floggings are likely to fall hardest on Afghan women.’
A spokesperson from Medica Mondiale similarly told the Mail: ‘Five years after the Taliban’s return to power, Afghan women and girls continue to face systematic violations of their fundamental rights and increasing exclusion from public life.
‘These are not isolated measures, but part of an increasingly entrenched system of control and oppression. A system that can be described as gender apartheid. The broader justice system has also become more repressive, marked by the return of corporal punishment and public executions.
‘The international community must not normalise this erosion of human rights. Sustained political pressure on the Taliban, alongside support for Afghan women, girls and civil society, remains essential. Solidarity with Afghan women and girls must not waver. Women’s rights are human rights.’
And although public executions like Najiba’s may be happening once again, they are likely being done in private and under strict censorship – and with any chance of public backlash a mere fantasy for many oppressed Afghans.
Shaharzad Akbar, from Rawadari, an Afghan human rights organisation, told the Daily Mail last week ‘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’.
Ms Akbar, whose organisation has already received reports of one woman who was stoned, added: ‘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.’
Once more, women are living in fear that one day they could be cruelly punished for stepping out of the narrow lines of the Taliban’s governance.
‘God forbid, if the Taliban return, what will happen,’ they asked 14 years ago.
Sadly, they may already have found out – and the rest of the world was none the wiser.
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