JX Fund – European Fund for Journalism in Exile

Zahra Nader is the founder and editor-in-chief of Zan Times, an Afghan independent media outlet in exile. She started her career as a journalist in Kabul in 2011 and joined the New York Times bureau in 2016. She has a master’s in communication and culture from York University in Toronto, where she is currently pursuing her Ph.D. in feminist, gender, and women’s studies.

Five years ago, on August 15, 2021, the Taliban retook Kabul, just as Nader was preparing to return to Afghanistan for her research. Those plans dissolved overnight. A year later, working from Canada, she founded Zan Times, a newsroom covering human rights violations in Taliban-controlled Afghanistan. Zan Times empowers Afghan journalists, especially women, to tell the stories of the most vulnerable and hold those in power accountable.

For this interview with JX Fund, Zahra Nader reflects on the gender barriers that shaped her own path into journalism – and how those experiences informed her decision to build Zan Times as a newsroom where Afghan women lead most of the reporting on the ground. She discusses what that approach has made possible: from stories on the ground only women reporters could access to hands-on training for Afghan women journalists.

You’ve said that as a teenager you decided to become “the son your family needed.” How did that early experience shape your instincts as a journalist and did it influence the kinds of stories you felt responsible for telling?

I am the fourth of eight children, with five sisters and two brothers, one older than me and one the youngest of us. When my youngest sister, the sixth daughter, was born, I saw how my relatives pitied my parents for having so many daughters. I understood early on that my gender has a lot to do with what role the society assigns me, how it sees me. I knew that being female in my society meant being powerless by default. Seeing and understanding that, I decided to step into the role a son would have played in my family, in order for us to survive. That shaped how I see the world: it taught me to take personal responsibility for what’s happening to us, and then to actually do something about it rather than wait for someone else to fix it. That attitude has stayed with me ever since. It’s the lens through which I approach both my life and later my work.

What was newsroom culture like for you in the mid-2010s as one of the few Afghan women in Western-facing Afghan journalism? Did you feel you were treated differently from your male colleagues?

For most of my time in Kabul, I worked in Afghan newsrooms, and there were a lot of assumptions made about my gender, about what I could or couldn’t do. In 2015, a male colleague told me I could never be a good journalist because I was a woman. He said I couldn’t stay late in the office, couldn’t travel, and couldn’t cover attacks. Hearing him say those words felt strange because I was never asked to do any of those things. He simply assumed “I couldn’t” and therefore, he never gave me the chance to prove myself otherwise.

Later, when I joined the New York Times, I started to challenge those assumptions. At the NYT, whenever an attack happened, whoever wanted to cover it could volunteer and my hand was always up. I wanted to prove that the assumptions about Afghan women’s abilities had no basis in reality.

Looking back at what that colleague in Kabul had said, I don’t think it was really about what we could actually do; it was about what the men I worked with, mostly, believed we could do. And based on those beliefs, they decided what opportunities to give us or deny us. That’s part of what’s wrong with much of the Afghan media landscape.

You built Zan Times almost entirely with women. Was that a founding principle from the start or did it emerge as a practical response to the environment you were working in?

Zan Times wasn’t entirely women-only from the start. We began as a mixed group, and our core decision-making team still is. Editorially, we’re a group of five: three women and two male colleagues. But most of our journalists on the ground in Afghanistan are women. That was a conscious choice. When we started, our goal was to document the human rights atrocities we knew the Taliban would commit. By documenting their crimes, we wanted to have a record of what happened. We understood that without Afghan women journalists on the ground, we simply could not tell the story of Afghanistan under Taliban rule today. So we made a deliberate decision to create opportunities for women and to give them most of the reporting roles.

Between 2024 and 2025, we ran online training for Afghan women journalists and trained 70 of them. This year we launched the Zan Times Fellowship, a ten-month, paid program offering mentorship and work opportunities for twelve Afghan women journalists. We received 860 applications for those twelve spots, which tells you how much appetite there still is among Afghan women to learn journalism and work with an outlet like ours.

Can you think of an investigation in exile where being a women-led team was the reason the story that might otherwise have remained untold?

A clear example is our investigation into the Taliban’s sexual harassment and rape of women arrested on hijab-related charges. Women detained in Taliban prisons were sexually abused and raped, and one reason we were able to tell these kinds of stories is precisely because we are women journalists: we were able to gain access to the survivors and earn their trust to share what happened to them.

Being women-led also lets us tell a richer, more complex story about Afghanistan more broadly. Most of our journalists aren’t just covering a beat – they’re reporting on something they are living. That’s what makes our journalism deeper and stronger and being in exile lets us keep producing critical investigations that would be impossible to report from inside the country.

Is there an example of the opposite happening – work in exile that became much harder or impossible to report because you were a woman? What are the main issues here?

One clear example: it’s very difficult for us to get comments from Taliban officials, whether inside Afghanistan or by phone, because they simply refuse to speak with women. That limits how much detail we can get from them and often means we cannot get an official comment at all. It’s one of the concrete ways our gender shapes – and restricts – our reporting, even from exile.

In an interview with GIJN, you said: “The challenge of working in Afghanistan for me has been that I am a woman and have always been denied opportunities because of my gender.” How did those challenges change once you were working in exile? Do gender-specific hurdles still shape your reporting, leadership, or access to sources?

Being a woman has shaped me, and, as I said earlier, has also denied me rights and opportunities. Exile has its own challenges, but what I’ve tried to do at the helm of Zan Times is build an environment where journalists can work with respect, dignity, and fair pay. That’s especially important for women, because their circumstances are different – they can’t travel alone, can’t go out or stay out alone, and face restrictions their male colleagues don’t. You know what’s very striking is those assumptions that I talked about earlier, are made true by the Taliban’s decrees and laws.

So, it is very important, for us, as media executives, to understand the realities Afghan women journalists are living with. Without that, we can’t truly support their work or their ambitions. Understanding their specific needs and situations, and building a platform where Afghan women journalists can become the authors of their own stories, has been the focus of my work at Zan Times.

You can read the latest reporting from Zan Times at zantimes.com, or subscribe to their newsletter here.