Afghan Women’s News Agency – The International Federation of Journalists (IFJ), has announced that about two thousand five hundred journalists and media workers have left Afghanistan in the last two years and are now living in exile.
Despite this, a number of women journalists who have remained in Afghanistan say that during the past two years, after the fall of the previous government and the emergence of political developments in the country, journalistic activities have become more difficult and limited for them than before, and the number of women journalists has also decreased to a minimum.
In this report, interviews were conducted with a number of these female journalists who requested that their names not be mentioned, and for this reason, pseudonyms were used for each of them.
One of the major challenges to the work of female journalists in the Taliban regime is gender discrimination between female and male journalists.
Mursal, a woman journalist says that when they go to Public Administrations for access to information, they do not cooperate as required, they do not make the information available to them in full.
“Every time I go to an office to get a report, I am told that I should have a letter from the Taliban, I have to spend half a day in writing, and this makes our job twice as difficult, and we are not allowed to participate in news conferences because we are women, Unfortunately, the number of women journalists is decreasing every day, and this is worrying.”, she said.
Zahra is a woman journalist in Afghanistan who works as a reporter in one of the media outlets with very difficult conditions.
“In the past, journalism had its problems for women, but after the fall of the previous government and the arrival of the Taliban, we faced more serious challenges. For the past two years, I wanted to leave the country, but I did not have the opportunity, I was unemployed for a while, and this unemployment depressed me, as I even thought about suicide. Every day I work with fear. I feel that journalists in Afghanistan are seen as criminals.”, she said.
With the Taliban coming to power in the country and increasing restrictions, working conditions for women journalists have become narrower and their presence in the community has diminished.
Meanwhile, the International Federation of Journalists, quoting the Union of Independent Journalists of Afghanistan, wrote that out of 600 media in Afghanistan, only 213 media outlets have remained active in the last two years and 8,000 jobs in the Afghan media have been lost.
