Public executions have returned to Afghanistan, after more than twenty years. A man convicted of murder has been executed this Wednesday in the western province of Farah, as announced by the spokesman for the Taliban regime. Hundreds of spectators, including Taliban leaders who had come expressly from Kabul, did not want to miss the macabre spectacle.
The confessed murderer, originally from Herat, was denounced in vain by the family of the victim, Farah, five years ago. Last month, the Taliban's top leader, Hibatulah Ajundzada, urged judges to rigorously apply Sharia law for certain crimes. In this case, the law of retaliation.
The authorities of the Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan, picky about legal issues, ensure that the case had been examined by three different courts before sentencing a certain Tajmir, who murdered a certain Musfata to steal his mobile phone and motorcycle.
It is the first public execution since the Taliban won the war two summers ago. It serves to give goosebumps to those who remember their hanging on soccer fields between 1996 and 2001, as well as their stoning and public flogging, in the image and likeness of Saudi Arabia, the only country that then recognized its dictatorship, along with United Arab Emirates and Pakistan.
Since their capture of Kabul, on August 15, 2021, the Taliban had tried to hide their worst face. In fact, they have been unexpectedly lenient with their enemies during decades of civil war, as well as with officials who collaborated with the government under foreign tutelage. Although the most committed - as well as the double agents - had already left the country by then or did so in the chaotic fifteen days that followed.
However, the Taliban have not disappointed their worst detractors, by keeping public secondary schools closed to adolescents between the ages of 13 and 17, with outlandish arguments. In spite of which, this very week they have reported the celebration of the national secondary exams for girls, who in most cases have had neither classrooms nor textbooks.
Despite the general improvement in security in almost the entire country -for the first time in twenty years there is national tourism in Afghanistan- and the reduction in corruption, attacks like those of yesterday Tuesday, perpetrated by supposedly more Islamic organizations and certainly much Darker forces continue to bloody Afghanistan sporadically, posing no threat to Taliban control.
