Afghan-Canadian journalist and founding editor-in-chief of Zan Times Zahra Nader.Soraya Photography 1
Zahra Nader is an Afghan-Canadian journalist and the founding editor-in-chief of Zan Times, which covers human rights in Afghanistan with a focus on women and the LGBTQ community. She began her journalism career in Kabul in 2011 before moving to Canada in 2017.
After the fall of the Taliban in 2001, Afghanistan certainly felt freer for women. As a reporter working with local media covering war, terrorism, politics and everyday life after the occupation, I covered honour killings, single women who headed households and the social stigma of being a divorcee or a widow – all of which were rife in those war-torn days.
But even after the Taliban fell, it was still one of the worst places on Earth to be female.
In 2017, while working for The New York Times, my colleague Mujib Mashal and I reported on the humiliating practice of virginity tests carried out by Afghan law-enforcement officials. Back then, few outside Afghanistan were aware that women who were suspected of “moral crimes” had to go through the practice at the national forensic medical facilities, and that the results would be used as “evidence” of women’s unlawful extramarital sexual activities. The story provoked a nationwide debate about women’s rights and the role of the government in subjugating women to violence and injustice.
Working on such stories revealed how commonplace misogyny still was in Afghanistan – how it was entrenched in the country’s justice system, even after the fall of the Taliban.
In August, 2021, as the Taliban was completing its takeover of Afghanistan for the second time, I was far from home, doing a PhD in Canada. I planned to research the political history of women in Afghanistan and set out to explore the effects of formal law on women’s political activism under various regimes. I was so focused on my future as an academic that I believed my past as a journalist was behind me.
That fateful August changed everything. With my family, friends and network based in Afghanistan, I have been consumed by a profound sense of loss, trauma and – most of all – responsibility. I felt my academic dreams and what I was trying to build for myself were no longer important. The only thing that mattered was supporting my people in their time of need.
But what part could I play? I found my answer: as a journalist, I can report the truth. That is what I could do – and what I have been doing ever since.
Of course, being a woman from Afghanistan – and growing up hearing the stories of women who lived under Taliban rule in the 1990s – I had a sense of what was coming. So I made it my mission to focus on covering human rights in Afghanistan, particularly women’s rights and the LGBTQ community – two underrepresented groups that had little power to be heard on their own. I knew I couldn’t do this work alone, so I teamed up with a group of mostly female journalists from Afghanistan, and we founded a media organization we called Zan Times. “Zan” means “woman” in Farsi – our way of resisting the Taliban’s oppression.
As we expected, the Taliban have since waged war on women. We know it’s our responsibility to fight back – but instead of using guns, we use words. It’s our duty to provide a platform for those who have been stripped of their most fundamental rights.
As part of this work, we heard about Afghan women turning up dead on a daily basis. These bodies were often anonymous, and with few details of their life or reasons for their death evident, we started investigating.
In October, 2022, we reported that women were disappearing after protesting against the Taliban in Mazar-e-Sharif, and that their bodies were later found dumped on the streets. Soon, a disturbing pattern emerged: Most of the women who turned up dead or disappeared seemed to have had public roles – that is, they sought to live, work or study outside the confines of their homes, or had spoken out against the regime, including by protesting.
To document the arrests, disappearances and killings, Zan Times collaborated with the Centre for Information Resilience’s Afghan Witness project to create a live portal of the cases we have investigated. So far, we have verified 34 cases of women being arrested and detained, 15 cases of murder and one disappearance.
We are able to document these cases thanks to the local journalists who have dedicated themselves to the often dangerous job of telling these women’s stories. The cases that are too perilous to report on inside the country, we cover from exile.
One example is our recent investigation into last August’s death of Hora Sadat, a female YouTuber who gained a following for her lighthearted videos about social issues. The Taliban claimed she was poisoned either by her friends or committed suicide – and they even produced a 20-minute video documentary to support this theory, with her family interviewed as Taliban members sit around them. We spent almost a year investigating the story, and credible sources told us that Ms. Sadat was killed after she was ordered to visit the Kabul police headquarters. When the news of her death reached social media, the Taliban became the logical suspect in her death.
In late August, the Taliban approved their first written law that explicitly bans women’s faces and voices in public. A sinister result of this law is that female journalists can’t work in audio and visual mediums – and without female journalists, hearing from women in Afghanistan will become increasingly difficult. At Zan Times, we are working to skirt these draconian restrictions and find ways for Afghanistan’s female journalists to continue their work – and while it might not be easy, it isn’t impossible. And bringing attention to the worst women’s rights crisis of our time deserves that kind of effort.