Taliban Will Shut Down Media, Afghan Photographer Warns

Amsterdam: The Taliban will pack up Afghanistan’s media and are fooling the West by promising to let journalists operate freely, an award-winning Afghan photographer said after fleeing Kabul over threats by the group.
Massoud Hossaini, who scooped a Pulitzer Prize in 2012 while working for Agence France-Presse and is now freelance, said Afghanistan’s new rulers were already restricting female journalists especially .

The 39-year-old’s dire warning on the longer term of the media in Afghanistan comes as he recovers from a dramatic shake Kabul on the last commercial flight the day the Taliban took power.

“It goes to be really, really bad. they’re trying to kill the media but they’re doing it slowly,” Hossaini, who is currently staying within the Netherlands, told AFP on Friday.

“When Taliban capture someone, first of all they capture someone then kill them, and this is often now happening to media generally .”

After the autumn of Kabul, Taliban officials stressed that the media, including women, could still operate freely and wouldn’t be harassed.

The Taliban even held a proper news conference where the group’s spokesman took questions.

‘Another North Korea’

But Hossaini — whose 2012 picture of a green-clad Afghan girl crying in horror after a suicide attack also won second prize within the spot news category of the planet Press Photo awards — said the Taliban’s promises were a sham.

“The Taliban will completely close the media, and that they also will cut internet completely and doubtless become another North Korea for this region,” Hossaini said at a World Press Photo exhibition in Amsterdam’s Nieuwe Kerk.

“Right now they’re fooling the international community, they’re fooling westerners,” he said, branding the news conference a “gimmick”.

Long a target for militants, Hossaini made his shake Afghanistan after learning that the Taliban “really hated” a recent story that he and a far off journalist had covered about the group completing forced marriages of girls and girls to Taliban gunmen.

After receiving threats on social media, the pair booked tickets out of Kabul, with Hossaini travelling on the morning of Assumption because it became clear the Taliban were closing in.

“When the plane took off because the last commercial plane before Kabul falling, we cried,” he said.

“I saw that a lot of friends, even foreigners were crying, because they felt like me that we cannot return to Kabul again.”

Kabul itself has descended into nightmarish scenes, with the suicide attack outside Kabul airport on Thursday producing “even worse” images than people who won Hossaini the Pulitzer.

“The images from the (Thursday) attack were really really horrible. I never imagined that a lot of people being killed during a small canal, which canal being pooled by the blood of individuals ,” he said.

‘Really want to travel back’

Now in exile, Hossaini said he had heard a litany of complaints from other journalists still in Afghanistan about things for the media under the country’s new Islamist rulers.

Where the “most famous” Afghan TV anchors were until recently women, one well-known female journalist told him “the Taliban don’t even let me get out of my office” and she or he was now trying to go away , he said.

“For sure no woman can enter the road , we see that female journalists accompany the microphone, no it isn’t possible,” said Hossaini.

But perhaps the best damage is that the dispersal of much of the colourful Afghan media world created within the 20 years since the Taliban were ousted within the wake of the 9/11 , 2001 attacks.

“It means they already killed us,” said Hossaini, who himself spent most of the primary twenty years of his life as a refugee in Iran and only returned to Afghanistan after 9/11.

“I actually need to travel back to Afghanistan, my house is there, my memories are there. I fell crazy with Afghanistan by photography, and fell crazy with photography due to Afghanistan, and that i did my best.”