By Zahra Joya
The influential New York Times newspaper recently published a lengthy profile of Sirajuddin Haqqani, the head of a Taliban faction responsible for some of the most barbaric attacks on Afghan civilians.
Today he is a key figure in the Taliban leadership controlling Afghanistan.
The article portrayed Sirajuddin as a changed man, perhaps even someone to admire, with a brooding photo of him alongside a provocative headline asking whether he’s Afghanistan’s “best hope for change”.
For many Afghans, it was devastating to see.
The Haqqani network is believed to be responsible for some of the bloodiest attacks that indiscriminately killed and injured thousands of civilians during the US-led war.
In 2012, the US officially designated it a terrorist organization, while the FBI’s Most Wanted still offers a $10 million reward for information that can lead to Sirajuddin’s arrest, alongside a less-than-flattering picture of him.
Sirajuddin hasn’t tried to disguise this notorious past. In 2021, he hosted a reception for families of suicide bombers in Kabul, where he allegedly boasted of the Haqqani group’s role in the first suicide attack in Afghanistan in 2003.
I personally have reported on many of these devastating bombings – and I’ve survived two.
My story is not unique. There are thousands of victims and countless survivors who still await justice, among them is Latifa.
Latifa’s husband and the father to their four children was killed along with hundreds of other casualties in a 2017 attack attributed to the Haqqanis. He was a staff driver for the Roshan telecoms office, based across the road from Kabul’s heavily-protected diplomatic enclave.
In an apparent attempt by militants to attack the fortified area, a trunk packed with explosives was detonated near the German embassy. The location was on one of Kabul’s busiest roads at rush hour. The explosion was so enormous is it shook the earth for kilometres. The carnage of mostly Afghan civilians it left behind was almost unbearable.
When I interviewed Latifa soon afterwards, she said all she wanted was one day to see the perpetrators in court. She is only one voice of many.
The return of the Taliban to power has extinguished hopes among Afghans that justice for such crimes will ever be served.
On the day Sirajuddin’s profile was published in the NYT, social media and messaging apps used by Afghans buzzed with anger and disgust.
“We must protest to the editors of the New York Times about this whitewashing,” one commentator said.
“It will mislead public opinion; and it’s quite possible that one day, based on this kind of information, Sirajuddin Haqqani could even receive the Nobel Peace Prize.”
On Facebook, I asked anyone who had lost loved ones to the Haqqani network wanted to share how they felt, and within 24 hours I’d received more than 100 responses from survivors and the bereaved.
Their messages kept me awake until the early hours of the morning.
How could the NYT have gotten it so wrong?
I recalled a reflection from German philosopher Hannah Arendt’s report on the trial of Adolf Eichmann, one of the architects of the Nazi holocaust:
“If everyone always lies to you, the result is not that you will believe those lies; rather, no one will believe anything,” Arendt wrote in Eichmann in Jerusalem.
More than six decades on from that trial, the NYT’s Sirajuddin profile is a reminder of the responsibility of the media to avoid giving a sanitised platform to individuals with a history of glorified violence and bloodshed.
It also shows how easily and willing people are – especially those who are powerful – to ignore history and reopen the wounds of victims.
The Haqqani network is known for its extremist elements that some have blamed for the egregious restrictions on women in Afghanistan today.
Another commenter lamented: “If the former Afghan government and Western countries had used their resources better and managed to capture Haqqani, today Afghanistan would be in a better situation and Afghan women would not be facing the gender apartheid system of the Taliban. The system we had been building for the past 20 years would not have collapsed.”
Contrary to what the NYT would have you believe, for many Afghans, Sirajuddin symbolizes the violent, terror-filled, and entrenched inequality in Afghanistan’s contemporary history. He represents a system that relies almost solely on extreme violence and lies to achieve its goals.
The NYT suggested Sirajuddin is the best hope for change because he is apparently secretly advocating for girls’ right to education.
Yet, he is a key pillar of control in a system where women and girls are denied even the most basic rights? And the ban on all education of girls from Grade 6 persists?
Even if we took his words at face value in terms of supporting women’s education, there’s no denying Sirajuddin embraces an ideology that rejects peaceful coexistence with other ethnic groups, social factions, and religious communities in Afghanistan, and allows multiple laws to dehumanize women – not just the ban on education.
A recent report by Richard Bennett, the UN Special Rapporteur for Human Rights in Afghanistan, confirmed the Taliban has used sexual violence against women activists in Afghan prisons. These prisons are reportedly managed by those affiliated with the Haqqani network.
The NYT tacitly wrote the headline about Sirajuddin being a “hope for change” as a question, but it failed to provide a truthful answer.
Treating one of the main architects of Afghan women’s suffering as the possible antidote gave NYT readers a distorted and woefully incomplete narrative.
The article has served to compound the sense of Western privilege around this whole conflict. But above all, it underscored the isolation and indifference many Afghan survivors continue to face by having their tormentor cast as their saviour.
Zahra Joya is the founder and editor-in-chief of Rukhshana Media. She was born and raised in Afghanistan until the Taliban takeover of the country in 2021.
