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Afghan journalists in exile confront harsh challenges: after escaping Taliban persecution, they now endure poverty, threats of deportation, and years-long waits for humanitarian visas in Pakistan. Many now struggle with mental health crises as Western nations delay promised aid.
Online violence is often only considered a digital safety issue, but the impact of online abuse on journalists’ mental health is significant and has serious consequences for them, their work, and for press freedom. This is particularly true for women and diverse journalists who are disproportionately targeted by online attacks.
Since the Taliban takeover in 2021, detentions, imprisonments, and torture of journalists have surged, creating a “shadow of restriction and oppression” over press freedom in Afghanistan. Recently the Taliban have ordered TV channels in parts of Afghanistan to cease broadcasting images of living beings, after already banning music and female faces on screen.
The Taliban have aggressively targeted media freedom and journalists over the past three years. They have banned photography and filming, mandated pro-Taliban reporting, used violence against journalists and media staff, carried out arrests, imposed severe censorship, threatened to shut down media institutions, and exploited journalists’ vulnerable status.
The Global Directory of Journalist Safety Trainers & Advisors is a searchable database of security professionals with experience and expertise in journalist safety. It has been created to provide the ACOS Alliance community with direct access to safety trainers and advisors around the world, and to help them connect with those who meet specific geographic and thematic safety needs.
In a new documentary four Afghan women – former parliamentarians, a past minister and a journalist — who fled their homeland after the Taliban-takeover of in August 2021, spotlight the ongoing crisis in Afghanistan. “An Unfinished Journey” captures their resilience in exile as they advocate for women’s rights and strive to keep Afghanistan’s plight in global discussions.
In Taliban-controlled Afghanistan, where news reporting has been transformed from a process of awakening and raising awareness—crucial for the development of critical knowledge in society—into a dreary, unbearable exercise in censorship and propaganda, the only hope for citizens lies in social networks and media outlets that reject the Taliban’s order and operate from outside the country.
In this episode of “Survive and Thrive”, Zahra Nader, founder and editor-in-chief of the award-winning Zan Times, talks about journalism as a form of resistance and the struggle to stay afloat reporting on women and LGBTQI+ people in Afghanistan.
Cross-border investigative journalism exposes reporters to unique mental health risks. A new study highlights systemic challenges, including legal threats, remote work stress, and lack of professional support. “Most still rely on individual coping strategies, leaving many systemic challenges to be faced alone,” says writer and researcher Belle de Jong.
Have you ever struggled to find a tool that does exactly what you need? You are not alone. More than 80 percent of open source researchers that participated in two Bellingcat surveys indicated that finding the right tools can be challenging. This is where Bellingcat’s new Online Investigations Toolkit comes in.
Afghanistan under Taliban rule is more than just the “worst” place for women—it’s a catastrophic reality of oppression. Forced marriages, executions, and a brutal denial of basic rights are just the beginning of the horrors Afghan girls and women endure daily.
Taliban laws and restrictions make journalism in Afghanistan increasingly challenging. But media in exile are ensuring that voices of women and others are still being amplified.
The Taliban’s new law on the “Propagation of Virtue and the Prevention of Vice” bans journalists from publishing or broadcasting content the de facto government believes violates Sharia law or insults Muslims. Article 17 describes several restrictions on the media, including a ban on publishing or broadcasting images of living people and animals which the Taliban consider unislamic.
Afghan media in exile remain economically fragile, even though they are a widely followed source of information, according to a report by the think tank for media professionals, The Fix, and the support fund for journalism in exile, JX Fund, created in 2022 by Reporters Without Borders (RSF) and its partners.
Reporters Without Borders (RSF) has launched a new online training course for exiled journalists, in partnership with the National Council for the Training of Journalists (NCTJ). The free e-learning course, which covers areas like UK media law, public affairs, writing styles and an introduction to the UK media industry, will help journalists forced to relocate to continue reporting.
It is estimated that, nearly 2000 journalists have left Afghanistan since the Taliban took power in 2021. Many sought asylum in Europe and North America, while others settled in Afghanistan’s neighbouring countries. Despite severe challenges Afghan reporters in exile remain committed to keeping the flow of independent news from their homeland alive.
When the Taliban took power three years ago, the previously thriving Afghan media landscape collapsed. Many journalists were forced to leave the country and now work remotely. Others have stayed and continue their work despite all dangers. How do editorial teams in exile deal with the challenge of accessing sources on the ground?
Siyar Sirat is a journalist with experience in various media organizations in Afghanistan. He has been living in exile for three years. For Amu TV, he wrote down how the day the Taleban took power in Kabul is haunting him.