Taliban targets free speech outlets October 14, 2015 by Montago Burgess

“The religious people of Kunduz and entire Afghanistan are of the belief that the Mujahideen of Islamic Emirate are vanguards of the honor of the people. However intelligence and obscenity propagating networks such as Tolo and 1 TV channels want to disrespect, dishonor and present this nation as lewd. They want to harm the honor and prestige of this nation with such open lies which can easily be discerned by all.

The Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan from now onwards does not recognize Tolo and 1 TV channels as media outlets but designates them as military objectives due to their disrespectful and hostile actions towards the Afghan Mujahid nation.

Henceforth no employee, anchor, office, news team and reporter of these TV channels holds any immunity. The Military Commission of Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan orders all its Mujahideen take a decisive stand against these two satanic channels. Hereafter all the reporters and associates of these channels will be deemed enemy personnel, all of their centers, offices and dispatched teams will be considered military objectives which will be directly eliminated. Our demand from those associating with these channels is that they stay away from their offices and reporters and to end all contacts with them. People should stop visiting the main offices and branches of these channels, cease participating in its programs and bar all its reporters from entering their homes. Intellectuals should stop partaking in its news reports and the Muslim nation should generally quit watching and strongly boycott them.

The Military Commission of the Islamic Emirate holds utmost respect for independent and impartial news outlets and exerts efforts to provide a safe atmosphere for their work. However those outlets which are bent on enmity towards our religion and country, spreading poisonous lies instead of news and are overall harmful rather than beneficial for our country and the people then the Mujahideen will also take a decisive stance against them.”

This was an a short summary taken from the Taliban’s website. You can read their full announcement here.

As you can see in the above paragraphs, the Afghanistan Taliban claims to support free journalism in their country. This is extremely ironic because as of right now some journalist are actively fleeing the country because of threats to their lives and family. They view both free journalism and impartial news outlets as a threat to their regime. That is of no surprise considering their whole entire website is a huge echo chamber.

In case you’re wondering, the afghan media has no plans to back down from these threats. While the Afghanistan government condemns these attacks ,they have done very little to stop them. Many of the incidents have been made by pro – government individuals and officials. Often the government would prevent journalist from reporting in certain areas, interrogate them with vicious beatings, or limit the information they can access. The fight for freedom of information continues, but the situation looks rather dire.

Sources:

https://www.hrw.org/news/2015/10/13/dispatches-taliban-unrolls-its-media-hit-list

https://en.rsf.org/afghanistan-security-officials-must-stop-27-08-2015,48264.html

https://www.hrw.org/news/2015/04/27/dispatches-tightening-chokehold-afghanistans-media

https://www.mediasupport.org/areas/asia/afghanistan/

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