We study an interacting one-dimensional gas of spin-1/2 fermions with two-body losses. The dynamical phase diagram that characterises the approach to the stationary state displays a wide quantum-Zeno region, identified by a peculiar behaviour of the lowest eigenvalues of the associated non-Hermitian Hamiltonian. We characterise the universal dynamics of this Zeno regime using an approximation scheme based on a effective decoupling of charge and spin degrees of freedom, where the latter effectively evolve in a non-Markovian way according to a non-Hermitian Heisenberg Hamiltonian. We present detailed results for the time evolution from initial states with one particle per site with either incoherent and antiferromagnetic spin order, showing how the two non-equilibrium evolutions build up drastically different charge correlations.