Mohammad Najibullah, the former president of Afghanistan, was dragged from a United Nations compound in Kabul. Taliban soldiers castrated him, tied him to a jeep, and dragged his body through the streets. They then hanged his corpse from a traffic police post outside the Arg Palace. This act announced the Taliban's final victory in the four-year Battle of Kabul and the establishment of the Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan.
The battle was the culmination of a rapid offensive. The Taliban, a movement originating from religious students, had captured Herat just weeks before. They faced the forces of the Islamic State of Afghanistan, a fragile coalition government led by President Burhanuddin Rabbani and his military chief, Ahmad Shah Massoud. As the Taliban advanced, Massoud made a strategic retreat north, preserving his forces. The capital fell with little final resistance. The Taliban's entry was not a conventional military conquest of a defiant city, but the grim consolidation of power over a capital exhausted by years of factional civil war.
The immediate aftermath was a brutal imposition of order. The new regime banned television, music, and photography. It mandated beards for men and the burqa for women, closing schools and workplaces to half the population. The event mattered because it erased the post-Soviet Afghan state and installed a theocracy that would provide sanctuary to al-Qaeda. The international community largely stood by; the United States viewed the Taliban as a potential force for stability and an ally against Iranian influence.
A persistent misunderstanding frames the Taliban's rise as a spontaneous popular uprising. It was, in fact, a military campaign enabled by external support, including from elements within Pakistan's security apparatus. The group's victory did not bring peace but set the stage for two more decades of continuous conflict, reshaping global politics from a central Asian crossroads.