‘They Will Kill Me’: Female Afghan Journalist On The Run From The Taliban

• A female Afghan journalist told Fox News she changes her location every day while she is on the run from the Taliban.
• The 24-year-old woman who is concealing her identity to protect herself from the Taliban said she was told she could no longer come to work because she was female, and that the Taliban would have their own journalists, Fox News reported. The Taliban told her to cover her face, but they still didn’t let her in to work.
• Despite rhetoric from the Taliban that the militant group would take a more moderate approach to their rule than in the 1990s when it kept Afghanistan under Sharia law, women are skeptical that there will be any change, the Associated Press reported.

A female Afghan journalist told Fox News she changes her location every day while she is on the run from the Taliban.

The 24-year-old woman who is concealing her identity to protect herself from the Taliban said she was told she could no longer come to work because she was female, and that the Taliban would have their own journalists, Fox News reported. The Taliban told her to cover her face, but they still didn’t let her in to work.

“We don’t need females here,” a Taliban fighter told her. “Go to your home. Don’t come back.”

She then left home with her younger brother for fear that the Taliban would retaliate against female journalists.

“I don’t know what will happen to me, because if they find me, they will kill me,” the journalist said.

She believes she is a target because she was an outspoken critic of the Taliban in her work as a journalist, especially for “what they did to the women, what they did to the innocent people in Afghanistan, what they did to the children in Afghanistan.”

“They burned them, they killed them,” she added.

“They are checking for the people who always talked against them,” she told Fox News. “Every day, I’m changing my address to be sure that they can’t track me.”

The Afghan journalist worries for the safety of friends, family and those hiding her, Fox News reported. She said she might be safe for just a few more days.

“My friends are afraid because they think that they might be targeted because of me,” she told Fox News. “I don’t know who is actually my enemy right now.”

The Taliban hunted for an employee of German state-owned broadcasting company Deutsche Welle, killing the reporter’s relative on Thursday.

“I’m afraid what if they do the same thing for me?” she told Fox News. “What if they kill my family member? What if they killed my friends for finding me?”

Despite rhetoric from the Taliban that the militant group would take a more moderate approach to their rule than in the 1990s when it kept Afghanistan under Sharia law, women are skeptical that there will be any change, the Associated Press reported. The journalist told Fox News that all the Taliban has done for the past 20 years is kill people.

“My message to the world and to America and to people all around the world is the Talibans are not change,” she told Fox News. “They are targeting people, they are killing people.”

Under Sharia law, a strict interpretation of Islam, women are prohibited from going to school or work, Al-Jazeera reported. The journalist interviewed by Fox News was in her final year studying law and aspired to be a judge or international lawyer.

Now she feels she doesn’t have a future or any freedom, the journalist told Fox News. Her fundamental rights to speak, leave home or choose anything she wants have been taken away, she said.

“There is no hope for me, for my generation, for my people, for females, especially for the journalists, who are very afraid,” she told Fox News. “No one will come back for Afghanistan. It feels like the end of the story and the end of Afghanistan for me.”