For all its reach, power and supposed sophistication, the global media machine has been outflanked by the cynical spin doctors of the Taliban.
As we approach the third anniversary of the fateful day when Talib fighters stormed into Kabul – still one of the darkest moments of Joe Biden’s presidency – this fanatical regime has all but succeeded in silencing the voices of its female population, the most repressed women on earth.
World leaders go along with this medieval oppression. When the United Nations hosted diplomats from 25 countries for talks on Afghanistan in Doha this month, it acceded to Taliban requests to exclude all Afghan women and civil leaders. The debate centred on drugs and the economy.
Zabihullah Mujahid, the head Taliban delegate and its PR chief since the 2021 coup, duly declared the event a success, a view uncritically reported by Xinhua, China’s state news agency.
For most Western media the talks went unnoticed. More recent conflicts, in Ukraine and Gaza, have taken precedence on a frantic news agenda. There have been elections in the UK and France and there is a crisis in the White House.
The Talibs see this. It has made media relations a priority. Western correspondents were initially facilitated to create the facade that this latest iteration of the Taliban is more liberal. Its mullahs created accounts on X (formerly Twitter) to attack the rival Islamic State and to give an illusion of approachability and modernity.
And so a narrative has emerged that the Taliban are not apocalyptic horsemen, and can be worked with. As a consequence, Afghan women have been abandoned, while the regime slowly but deliberately eliminates their basic rights.
During the last six months, the subjugation has increased. Large numbers of women have been arrested and detained after crackdowns on “bad hijab”, the failure to wear a chador that reveals only the eyes.
Minority ethnicities, notably Hazaras, have been targeted. Even the suspicion of sexual abuse in custody can stigmatise an Afghan woman for life.
Girls over 12 are denied education. The Taliban’s ministry for the propagation of virtue and the prevention of vice banned women from Band-e-Amir national park. This month, video evidence emerged of a woman being gang-raped in a Taliban jail after protesting against the regime.
Human Rights Watch defines Afghanistan’s treatment of women as gender persecution, a crime against humanity.
The oppression is particularly profound in the media industry, where women had a foothold during the 17-year Afghan republic but are now almost invisible.
Afghanistan’s female journalists have found a way to resist. Zahra Nader broke down social barriers to work in the Kabul bureau of The New York Times, defying taboos that prevented women from staying late at the office, travelling solo or covering attacks.
Today she runs Zan Times (“Zan” is Farsi for woman), a virtual newsroom of female journalists working inside Afghanistan or from exile. They air the voices of an ignored population.
“This is our way of speaking back to the Taliban,” says Nader. “We want to stand up and tell our own story no matter what.” The site’s on-the-ground reporting of the “bad hijab” crackdown has uncovered abuses of those detained.
One 16-year-old girl took her life after telling her mother she had been “dishonoured”. Zan Times reporters in Afghanistan work under pseudonyms to avoid detection by Taliban spies.
“Our journalists do not know each other and only connect with editors outside of Afghanistan,” says Nader, who is based in Canada.
“If we have to get comment from the Taliban we call from outside the country because we don’t want any direct relationship between the Taliban and our colleagues.”
After the coup, many Afghan media workers, including some working for the BBC or as British government translators, were forced to flee the country. But from abroad many continue to shine a light on their homeland.
Etlilaatroz, which was Kabul’s leading newspaper, functions from America as a website.
Afghanistan International, a London-based TV operation, is Afghanistan’s most-watched international channel, even if the Taliban banned it in public spaces and forbade Afghans from collaborating with it.
Rukhshana Media, also based in London, is another outlet tackling gender inequality that was deep-rooted even before the Taliban. Its global team of female journalists take their name from a woman killed for leaving a forced marriage.
International media must do more to raise the plight of Afghan women. It should work with female Afghan journalists to amplify these stories. “We know the culture and the language and we have access to women’s voices,” says Nader.
“Let us inform the audience of what is happening on the ground in the worst country in the world for women.”