Dark future awaits media in Afghanistan under Taliban rule

Aya Ezz

After the Taliban took control of Afghanistan, journalists and media professionals are greatly concern, especially since the extremist movement has taken complete control of all the media in the country.

There are approximately eight news agencies, 52 television stations, 165 radio stations and 190 publishing houses in Afghanistan, according to a report prepared by Reporters Without Borders, citing data from the Afghan Federation of Media and Journalists.

Foreign Policy magazine stated that the Taliban had committed violations against journalists, and that it had received a series of video clips showing that the movement’s members arrested a number of journalists and took them to unknown places, as well as executing a number of them in the street by firing squad.

According to Deutsche Welle, Taliban members recently killed a DW journalist and wounded another, and the movement searched the homes of three journalists from DW.

Kidnappings and killings

According to DW, the Taliban is believed to have kidnapped Nematullah Hemat from the private television station Gargasht, and it deliberately killed Toofan Omar, head of the private radio station Paktia Ghag.

On August 2, the movement killed translator Amdadullah Hamdard, who was working as a correspondent for the German weekly Die Zeit on a street in the city of Jalalabad in eastern Afghanistan.

A month ago, Pulitzer Prize-winning Indian photo-journalist Danish Siddiqui was shot and killed by the Taliban in Kandahar.

The US-based Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ) had earlier stressed that the Afghan Taliban movement should stop attacking journalists who cover the movement’s seizure of power in Afghanistan and allow them to work freely.

Dark fate

For his part, Mohamed Hussein, a professor of political science at Cairo University, said that the fate of the press under the Taliban will be dark, because the movement does not allow media professionals to practice their work freely, as it will dictate certain agendas and vocabulary to them, while whoever does not agree with its policy will be killed.

In an exclusive statement to the Reference, Hussein stressed that the Taliban does not care that the eyes of the world monitor its violations against media professionals and reporters, and therefore the future of media in Afghanistan is dark.