When a young, female YouTuber in Afghanistan died last year at the hands of the Taliban, a woman in Edmonton ensured the real story came out.
The Taliban claimed 25-year-old Hora Sadat died by suicide in August 2023, but a Zan Times documentary released earlier this month revealed she had been arrested and then tortured to death.
Sadat’s story is one of many that Zan Times, a woman-led Afghanistan news outlet in exile, has uncovered since the Taliban regained power three years ago.
As the media spotlight turns to other conflicts in Ukraine and the Middle East, Zahra Nader is ensuring stories of the brutality, oppression and erasure faced by women and 2SLGBTQ+ people under Taliban rule still get told.
From an apartment in a three-storey walk-up in Edmonton, the Zan Times team publishes stories online in English and Farsi.
Zan in Farsi means woman.
“I happen to be a journalist, so that’s the tool I have to fight back and resist,” Nader, founder and publisher of Zan Times, recently told Radio-Canada.
“It’s important for the world to know that what is happening in Afghanistan is not going to remain in Afghanistan ….It will affect people everywhere.”
With their resurgence in August 2021, the Taliban vowed to uphold women’s rights. But according to experts including Alison Davidian, the head of UN Women Afghanistan, conditions have once again deteriorated.
Millions of girls and women banned from schools, universities, employment and the freedom to go out in public on their own. Childbearing and maternal mortality rates are skyrocketing, Davidian said.
“This week marks three years since the Taliban’s takeover of Afghanistan — three years worth of countless decrees, directives and statements targeting women and girls,” Davidian told reporters when she delivered an annual report on Aug. 14.
She said countries elsewhere are watching to “emulate the Taliban systematic oppression.
“We cannot leave Afghan women to fight alone. If we do, we have no moral ground to fight for women’s rights anywhere else. Their fate determines the fate of women everywhere.”
Prior to the Taliban’s return to power, Nader worked in Afghanistan as a correspondent for the New York Times and other international publications.
Her family fled the Taliban’s previous rule and lived in Iran before she became a PhD student at York University in Toronto when the Taliban took over again.
Recruiting a team of Afghan journalists living inside the country and overseas, she moved to more affordable Edmonton to set up Zan Times.
Perilous work
Finding and earning the trust of sources to bring investigative stories to light from Afghanistan is perilous.
Attempting to stay safe, reporters working in the country don’t use their real names. They are known to those who oversee the Zan Times, but not to each other.
“We know the Taliban is actively looking for our colleagues, for our team, and thinking of ways of how they can stop us,” Nader said. “And they have tried many times to silence us by pressuring our relatives, our families but they have not been successful yet.”
Two months after the Taliban seized power in Afghanistan, women and girls have had their lives disrupted and plans upended after losing the ability to attend school or work.
Human Rights Watch is among the organizations that says the Taliban’s gender persecution and gender apartheid amounts to crimes against humanity, which falls within the jurisdiction of the International Criminal Court.
As pressure mounts for a country to file a complaint with the international court to hold the Taliban accountable, from the safety of Canada, Nader is determined to continue doing her part.
“We have no other choice,” she said. “We have to fight back.”
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