The Taliban suspended the operation of Afghanistan’s only women’s radio station after raiding its premises on Tuesday, deepening the exclusion of women from public life and society since the group took power in 2021.
Kabul-based Radio Begum – a station run by women with content aimed at women’s education – said officers from the Taliban’s information and culture ministry restrained the station’s staff as it searched its premises in the nation’s capital.
Officers “seized computers, hard drives, files and phones from Begum staff, including Begum female journalists, and took into custody two male employees of the organization who do not hold any senior management position,” the station said in a statement on Tuesday.
The ministry later confirmed the station’s suspension, citing several alleged violations of “broadcasting policy and improper use of the station’s license,” including “the unauthorized provision of content and programming to a foreign-based television channel.”
It did not identify the foreign TV channel in question, but said it will determine the station’s future “in due course.”
Reporters Without Borders (RSF), an independent rights group, condemned the suspension and demanded its immediate reversal.
Before Tuesday’s ban, Radio Begum broadcast six hours of lessons a day, along with health, psychology and spiritual programs to women across most of Afghanistan. The station said it provides education to Afghan girls and support to Afghan women, without being “involved in any political activity whatsoever.”
Its sister channels also offer lessons online filmed in studios thousands of miles away in Paris. The televised classes cover a wider array of subjects, providing education in a country where girls are banned from school after sixth grade.
Tightening the grip
The Taliban, a radical Islamist group not recognized by most countries around the world, has been tightening its grip on the media landscape since its takeover more than three years ago.
Initially presenting itself as more moderate than during its previous rule of Afghanistan in the 1990s, it even promised that women would be allowed to continue their education up to university.
But it has since cracked down instead, closing secondary schools for girls; banning women from attending university, working in most sectors and at NGOs, including the United Nations; restricting their travel without a male chaperone; and banning them from public spaces such as parks and gyms.
Last year, the Taliban closed at least 12 media outlets, both public and private, according to RSF, which ranked Afghanistan 178 out of 180 countries in its latest press freedom index.
The Islamist regime also banned the sound of women’s voices in public – including singing, reciting, or reading aloud – under a strict set of “vice and virtue” laws that made it even harder for Radio Begum to reach its female audience.