‘Please help the other women who are still in Afghanistan’, says this TV Anchor who was barred from work by Taliban

Shabnam Khan Dawran was smuggled out of Afghanistan into the UK.

• Chandrashekar Bhat
• 25 August, 2022

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By: Chandrashekar Bhat

Afghanistan’s famous newsreader, who was forced out of her job by the gun-wielding Taliban, has implored the British government to help women in her home country who are robbed of their freedom.

Now in London – more than 7,500 km away from the television studios in Kabul where she passionately worked – Shabnam Khan Dawran has sought Britain’s intervention to allow Afghan girls and women to study and work again.

In an interview with Times Radio, she expressed gratitude to the UK for giving refuge to her and her two siblings.

“Please help the other women who are still in Afghanistan” who “can’t say anything” or “do anything”, Dawran said.

“They need to go to school, go to university and do (their jobs). Please don’t leave them alone. Stand with them.”

She said the way the US withdrew from Afghanistan leaving the country at the mercy of the Taliban was “shameful”.

“A big country, like America, and they do this,” said the 25-year-old journalist who presented news on the National Radio Television Afghanistan when the country was being taken over by the insurgents last year.

With her sister Meena and teenage brother Hemat, Dawran was smuggled out of Afghanistan into the UK.

She recalled how she was forced out of her work – the Taliban told her to choose between her job and her life.

They told her to be silent to keep her family safe. However, her father, a military pilot, was brutally assaulted.

The new regime initially said it would allow girls to go to school and women to work, but went back on its promise soon.

“We had a peaceful and good life” before the insurgents took over the country, she said, adding it was “duty, work, life together with the family.”

But the return of the Taliban took the country back to the “dark period,” something she could not imagine a few years earlier.

Currently working at the Pashto-language station of the BBC World Service, she continues to defy the Taliban diktat against working and speaking up.