By Laila Yousufy
Until August 15, Salima Muradi was a journalist, working for a radio station in the Afghan capital, Kabul. Her dream was to become, as she called it to Rukhshana Media, “a well known journalist.”
But when the Taliban captured Kabul that mid-August day, her radio station was among the 153 media outlets that were closed by their managers due to the restrictions imposed by the Taliban and the economic crisis. Now, the 25-year-old is struggling to make a living with the tip of a needle, working as an embroiderer, slowly stitching flowers on black cloth.
“The night Kabul fell, my life has turned upside down as if my hopes too, fall with Kabul,” she told Rukhshana Media.
She is not the only woman journalist with no prospect of returning to the profession. On August 31, Reporters Without Borders warned that “women journalists are in the process of disappearing from the capital.” From 700 women journalists who were working in Kabul in 2020, less than 100 were still employed by the privately-owned radio and TV stations, according to their report.
In October, a Rukhshana Media investigation found that since the Taliban’s lightning takeover of Afghanistan, there are no women journalists in radio or TV working in the western provinces of Herat, Farah, Badghis and Ghor.
A woman journalist in the western province of Herat who provided Shakila as her pseudonym, said that no women journalists are allowed to work in the western provinces of Afghanistan. Shakila, who married a journalist colleague on August 10, two days before the province fell to the Taliban, said that the couple are living in hiding. “We wanted to travel for our honeymoon, instead we are forced to hide as the Taliban are searching for us,” she told Rukhshana Media.
In her seven years’ experience, she worked as a news producer, investigative journalist and freelance photographer. “Since the Taliban came, I don’t dare touch my camera and go out,” she said.
Her husband, too, lost his job and now both are jobless, running for their lives. “We have not received our salaries for two months,” Shakila said, adding that her boss told her that the foreign donor stopped supporting the media outlet.
Bahara Omid, a former radio journalist in the northern province of Balkh, too, lost her job when the Taliban returned to power in mid-August. Now, she is weaving carpets for $3 per day to support her family.
“For me, who studied and worked for years, it is hard to wave carpets. It is not my job, I am a journalist,” Omid said.
